Poachers kill three rare black rhino on private conservancy

Nov 8, 2007, 17:06 GMT

Harare/Johannesburg - Poachers have shot dead three black rhinoceros - a species listed as the most highly endangered large mammal on earth - on a private conservancy, its owner said Thursday.

John Travers said poachers armed with AK47 automatic rifles Wednesday night evaded the armed guard surrounding the rhino on Imire game park about 100 kilometres east of Harare and shot dead two females and a male, but left a four-week-old calf unharmed.

Zimbabwe in the 1980s had the largest population in Africa of black rhino, about 7,500, but a wave of poaching all over Africa - driven by demand for the horn in the Far East as a cure for fevers and a sexual stimulant and in Yemen where it was used for dagger handles - decimated the population, including Zimbabwe's.

The horn is composed of tightly compacted hair fibres, and has no other pharmacological properties, according to biologists.

About 1,500 of the surviving population were captured in the Zambezi Valley on Zimbabwe's northern border and taken to apparent safety in national game parks and conservancies in the interior of the country.

About 500 are still left, according to wildlife experts, but they have come under increasing pressure this year.

The animals on Imire were under constant watch by armed guards, 'but this was a slick operation,' Travers said. One of the cows was two weeks away from giving birth to a calf. 'Poaching is pretty rampant now. Incidents like this are going to have a serious effect.'

He said the three animals had had their horns sawn off by wildlife veterinarians about two months ago, a tactic used with some success to deter poachers.

The decision to dehorn them was taken when poachers attacked another conservancy outside Harare and shot dead three white rhino.

'My assumption is that these guys were after the horns but it was dark and they couldn't see that they didn't have horns,' he said.

The three were among the hundreds of black rhino rescued from the Zambezi Valley during 'Operation Stronghold,' a semi-military operation to fight off the poachers, and came to Imire in 1985, where they became the stock for a scientific breeding programme to build up their numbers again.

Travers said there were three others - the progeny of the slaughtered rhino - still on the conservancy.

Police had supplied six armed officers to live with the rhino for the next two weeks and strengthen the defences against a possible return by the poachers' gang, he said.

'It's getting out of hand,' said Johnny Rodriguez, chairman of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, a private wildlife organization.

In a large conservancy in the Mavuradonha area about 200km north of Harare, the rhino population had fallen from 54 to eight in the last year, while conservancies in the central Midlands province had lost 31 in the same period and were down to 21 now.