Notch Your Average Safari: Rhino Conservation

Of everything I have written about, this is the one that stirs the loins of the internet.  So: its own article, rather than a million reviews you have to dig through.

Long story short: you can, if lucky or prepared to pay for it, spend time next to an unconscious rhino.  For a fee.  It makes me sound like a complete pervert (guilty), especially when I tell you that I’ve done it twice.  But there is method in this madness.

My first one was pure luck, over in Singita Pamushana.  I was standing in the wrong place at the right time.  There was a helicopter, there was a truckload of people who knew what they were doing, and a truck too, and there was me — looking like a man who was caught rubbing one out in the company’s boardroom.

Get to Da Choppa

A vet goes up in a helicopter.  The pilot flies low and fast over dense bush looking for one specific animal in several thousand hectares.  The vet then leans out and darts it with an opioid so potent that it’s like a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas cocktail, were it laced with cyanide.  The vet carries the reversal drug for the rhino, and hopefully not to use on himself after men and their ideas get too tempting.

The rhino runs.  Then it wobbles.  Then it goes down.  Then everyone charges in, like it’s 5 pm and cocktail hour.  A blindfold goes on, and something soft goes in the ears a sensory deprivation calms them.  I don’t want to kink-shame anyone, but how did they figure out a blindfolded rhino was docile?

Then the notching itself, which takes about eleven seconds and feels like an anticlimax after all that.  Small V-shaped cuts are made in the edges of the ears.  Each position on each ear corresponds to a number, and the combination gives that animal a unique ID that can be read through binoculars from two hundred metres away.

While that’s happening, everything else is happening too.  Microchips go into the horn and into the body.  A DNA sample is taken, so that when a horn is seized in a shipping container in Bognor Regis, a laboratory can match it to a specific carcass in a specific reserve and a prosecutor can stand up in court and scream “You can’t handle the truth” or whatever they yell.  Blood is drawn; horn is measured; feet are checked.  At some point in the middle of it, you will put your hand on the ribcage of a wild rhinoceros and feel it breathing.

Sometimes the horn is trimmed, either to prevent it from hurting itself or other rhinos during transportation, or because a dehorned rhino is a less interesting rhino to shoot.  Yep, it’s shit, but rhinos are one of the most poached species on the planet, and all for their horn, which is made from keratin (same stuff as your fingernails), and serves no medicinal purpose whatsoever.  Seeing them dehorned is horrible, but it has proven effective at reducing poaching.

It is at least less brutal than it looks.  They leave the base, and there’s no nerve in the horn itself, so the animal feels nothing.  It grows back at about seven centimetres a year.  Which is why the whole miserable business has to be repeated every eighteen months or so.

Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, then the reversal goes into a vein in the ear, and you are told to get behind the vehicle.  Because roughly forty seconds later two tonnes of extremely confused animal stands up, decides it should quit smoking/drinking/sniffing glue/amphetamines, and leaves.

Crate Expectations

If you’re there for a relocation, it’s a longer process.

Once down, the rhino is walked — semi-conscious, doing an appalling drunken shuffle into a crate, topped up with sedative, and loaded onto a truck.  Then it is driven, with a vet monitoring the whole way, to a boma at the other end where it will sit for weeks acclimatising before anyone opens a gate.

Can you imagine the person who went to school, grew up wanting to be somebody, and then it’s their job to experiment with putting blindfolds on rhinos’ faces?  Well, almost as bad as figuring out what to do if you cannot transport them via road.  Occasionally, if the terrain is impossible, they are flown out slung beneath a helicopter by the ankles, upside down.  This looks like cartoon villainy, but a team of researchers measured it and were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for their trouble.  Science is a magnificent bastard.

If this all sounds horrible, it’s a success story.  There are now enough rhinos in the area that they’re killing each other over the space, and rhinos breed fastest when there’s room to spare.  So a group gets moved out, or rather, back, in fact, to ground the poachers emptied decades ago, and which is finally secure enough to hold them again.  The one situation in which “go back to where you came from” is a lovely thing to yell.

Conclusion

Safari does not really need improving.  Conservation experiences like this improve it anyway.  A rhino notching or relocation is one of the most amazing things I’ve been involved with.  And I’ve eaten a Five Guys, so truly know what the peak of the mountain looks like.

If you want to get up and close to nature, there are very few ways of doing it better than this.

I got Zimbabwe for free, by accident.  About time something went my way; my life is unbearably tough, all this luxury travel stuff.  I loved it so much; only a month later, in South Africa, when it was available as a conservation donation, I leapt on it.  Only difference was there was no crate at the end, as they were just monitoring and tagging the rhinos, not sending them on a permanent vacation.

Is it meaningful conservation philanthropy?  Yes.  Is it also just cool as fuck?  Obviously. That’s why you’re going to book it.