white rhinos

[Guest guest]

Tuesday, March 26, 2002-The Star

 

White rhino rules again

 

There’s good news for rhinos all over the world of late: in Africa, a major

park is re-introducing the African white rhinos that were poached out of

existence within its boundaries in the 1980s. MATTHEW

GREEN reports a programme full of hope.

 

THE poachers came at night, shot the five rhinos at close range in their

pen, then hacked off their horns. There was only one survivor, an old bull

known as Mukora.

 

Thirteen years later, rhinos are returning to Kenya’s Meru National Park,

leading a procession of animals that sounds like a scene from Noah’s Ark.

 

Meru has started what is described as east Africa’s first big project to

reintroduce animals to an area decimated by poachers, hoping to protect

endangered species and revive a reserve haunted by a violent past.

 

" We’re bringing in everything from elephants to impala,” said senior warden

Mark Jenkins. “We’re not talking about 10 or 20 animals, we’re talking about

hundreds, thousands of animals,” he said in his office in the park’s

headquarters.

 

For Jenkins, who grew up in the park that his father ran before him, the

programme is the chance to exorcise the ghosts of Meru’s darkest days and

tempt back visitors.

 

Five white rhinos were slaughtered in the park in April 1989 in their

supposedly protected enclosure. A French couple were murdered in the

reserve a few months later. Then a British professor vanished. His burnt out

car was discovered eventually, but his body was never found.

Meru has now tightened security, trucked in the first of its new arrivals to

join resident giraffes,hippos and gazelles, and tourist numbers are

increasing.

 

But the threat of poaching has not gone away. Kenyan conservationists say

South African proposals to legalise trade in African white rhino

products threaten to send a new wave of gunmen to inflict fresh horrors on

their charges.

 

Horn of Africa

 

Resting in the shade of an acacia tree, looking more like a rock than a

rhino, the old bull Mukora is a symbol of hope for Kenya’s threatened

species.

 

After the five rhinos were slaughtered, Mukora was moved to Lake Nakuru

National Park, leaving Meru empty of rhinos until the bull returned last

year.

 

“He’s quite a special animal,” said Jenkins, parking his jeep just a few

yards from the lump of grey hide with twin horns. “He’s probably the oldest

rhino in the country.”

 

The 30-year-old white rhino has a fighting streak. His name can be

translated as “naughty one” in Kikuyu (a native language of the region) and

Mukora has killed seven other rhinos in tussles over

territory.

 

Three younger white rhinos were moved to Meru National Park this month from

private ranches in Kenya, while five more are due to follow in July. Radio

transmitters placed in their horns will help rangers track their progress.

 

Wardens will keep the rhinos in an enclosure before gradually releasing them

into the wild, hoping to set up monitoring systems that could be used to

replicate the exercise with the rarer and more temperamental black rhino.

 

By releasing black rhinos into the 950sq km park, conservationists will

provide a new breeding ground and release the pressure on Kenya’s

overcrowded sanctuaries.

 

An estimated 20,000 black rhinos roamed Kenya in 1970, but their numbers

have crashed to about 460, mainly due to poaching. The Kenya Wildlife

Service estimates that Africa’s black rhino numbers have fallen 90% just in

the past two decades.

 

For Sam Ngethe, who has worked at Kenya Wildlife Service since the 1960s

and now is in charge of moving rhinos to Meru, the new scheme

provides new hope for traumatised friends.

 

“It’s amazing, before there was a lot of poaching ... if a rhino could smell

or hear you, they would just charge, nowadays the rhino will just freeze,”

said the warden, demonstrating an eerie whistle he uses

to lure rhinos from the bush.

 

Meru aims to introduce 600 more elephants; the park has already brought in

20 of the world’s 2,000 remaining Grevy’s zebras and there are plans to

release the oryx antelope.

 

Shots in the night

 

Uniformed rangers carrying semi-automatic G-3 rifles are vital to Meru’s

restocking programme. Jenkins has boosted patrols, cleared overgrown trails

and airstrips and bought new radios for his men since he took over in July

1999, reducing the threat to animals like Mukora.

 

Rising slowly to stand on his squat legs as his visitors approach, Mukora

looks like a picture of tranquillity as he peers out into a sea of

corn-coloured grass, the folds of grey skin surrounding his eyes giving him

a permanent squint.

 

 

Visitors who pay US$20 (RM76) a day to enter the park, which is 230km

north-east of Nairobi, can also relax. In the 1980s, tour operators

reported hearing gunshots as tourists huddled round their campfires. Now the

night air is quiet.

 

Security fears cut visitors from 47,000 a year in the mid-70s to just 1,500

in 1997. Numbers rose to 7,000 last year, as tour operators began to regain

confidence.

 

Meru’s palm forests, savannahs and swamps are safer now than for years, but

the threat of poaching is far from over.

 

Four black rhino carcasses were found stripped of their horns in the vast

Tsavo National Park in south-east Kenya in late November – the first time in

eight years that poachers had ventured inside a Kenyan national park to

attack the beasts.

 

Kenyan conservationists are outraged at proposals by South Africa to modify

the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species at a meeting in

Chile in November to establish a legal trade in some white rhino products.

 

South Africa says its rhino population is well-protected and the money from

the trade would be ploughed into conservation.

 

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, which is funding part of the Meru

project, says such a move would create a bigger market for rhino parts and

encourage poaching.

 

The South Africans have dropped a proposal they were earlier considering to

push for legalising trade in rhino horn – prized as dagger handles in Yemen

and medicines in east Asia – but have not ruled out exploring this option in

the future.

 

It’s going to be very, very disastrous for us,” said the fund’s Elizabeth

Wamba. “You never know when we’ll start feeling the ripple effect when that

trade is opened up.” – Reuters

 

 

 

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