Saving the Last Rhinos Read online

  This book is dedicated to the more than one thousand rangers who have given their lives on the front line in the ongoing battle to save endangered wildlife in Africa. Forever remembered.

  On a more personal level, thank you to my wife, my three girls, my parents and my dedicated brother, without whom this book would not have been written.

  Prologue

  The one thing I dared not do was what I felt like doing most. Breaking out in a cold sweat.

  If I had, it would have given the game away.

  In my laptop bag were two packets of shaved rhinoceros horn. Two plastic Ziploc bags, the kind corner-shopkeepers use when they bank a day’s cash takings. Ounce for ounce, the shavings were as valuable as gold, and far more valuable than drugs. If caught, my fate would be similar to a common cocaine smuggler with the likelihood of a lengthy jail sentence and six-figure fine.

  I was at the impressively modern Noi Bai airport, better known as the Hanoi International, in Vietnam’s capital city. I was about to board a plane for Johannesburg, South Africa, after one of the most invigorating and uplifting experiences of my life in conservation, attending the 2015 Operation Game Change festival, WildFest. It was the first to be held in a country regarded as the world’s most notorious wildlife crime clearing house, and the fact that Vietnam was the venue was a significant breakthrough in the battle for the planet.

  The first part of the week, I witnessed animated young people singing, dancing, screening anti-wildlife-crime films and expressing hope for the earth.

  I was filled with optimism.

  Then it all came crashing down. I saw for myself the dark flipside of the coin.

  It was at a village called Nhi Khe, billed in tourist brochures as a quaint street-market centre about 11 miles outside Hanoi, ostensibly dealing in traditional Vietnamese crafts.

  The reality is far more sinister. For a conservationist, this is the most evil square mile in the world; the global trade ‘capital’ of acutely endangered wildlife. It is estimated that 50 per cent of all threatened-species products are sold at Nhi Khe.

  It was there that I bought the highly illegal rhino-horn shavings, which was the reason for my imminent cold-sweat panic as I neared the airport’s X-ray machines.

  A few days previously, four of us had gone to the so-called craft village to verify first-hand if rhino horn was being openly traded on the streets. With me were my conservation colleague and friend Richard Mabanga, Johannesburg photographer Ilan Ossendryver and Jim Ries from the American NGO One More Generation.

  As we walked down the maze of alleyways housing Nhi Khe’s cramped sidewalk shops, looking starkly conspicuous as foreigners, two shady modern-day spivs sped down the street on motorbikes, shouting in Vietnamese and beeping their horns.

  It was obviously a warning and the wooden shutters of the shopfronts started slamming as we approached. Thud-thud-thud … like clappers beating the bushveld with sticks to flush out buck from dense foliage during a hunt. I noticed that not all shops were closing, probably just the nastier ones. Those stocking rhino horn, ivory, pangolin and tiger products under their counters. It was incredible to think that this pokey, narrow street had millions of dollars of contraband for sale. A full rhino horn sells for more than a top-carat diamond.

  We were technically undercover but Richard, Ilan and I must have stuck out like nudists in a cathedral. The last thing we wanted was to be identified as Africans, the home of the animal horn we were seeking, so we concocted a flimsy cover with me and Ilan coming from Europe and Richard a Jamaican. He even had a go at the accent – it was pretty clear that Bob Marley was his inspiration. All the same, it was far more convincing than me trying to speak Queen’s English with my South African twang.

  I acted like a casual tourist, even wearing a cheap ‘I love Vietnam’ T-shirt, nonchalantly inspecting the vast array of goods on display. Much of what I saw broke my heart. While I didn’t spot rhino horn, there was everything else imaginable, including ivory, tiger parts, tortoise shells and pangolin scales sold as carelessly as loaves of bread.

  To boost my tourist credentials, I bought some rosewood souvenirs – the most trafficked and endangered hardwood in the world. Every time I mentioned ‘rhino horn’ to a shopkeeper there was a curt shake of the head.

  Then suddenly we got a bite. At one shop a man caught my eye and beckoned. Four other men were with him. Yes, he said. They had horn.

  We were taken inside and in an instant the mood changed. They started searching us, barking aggressively in broken English. Who were we? What were we doing in Nhi Khe? Why did we want rhino horn?

  I put my hands up, talking quietly while trying to defuse the situation. I said I was suffering from a cold I could not shake and wanted to try a traditional remedy.

  It was the right move. They instantly calmed and stopped shouting.

  One then smiled and put out his hand. I shook it. He leant forward, almost whispering in my ear.

  ‘How much money do you have?’

  We had previously scraped together $500, all of us pooling our resources. This was way off-budget for the conservation charities I work with, as I couldn’t really put ‘rhino-horn purchase’ on an expense account. Rhino charities are not in the habit of buying rhino horn. In fact, the extreme opposite. We were funding this operation ourselves.

  Five hundred dollars is serious money in dong, the local currency, but the dealers were unimpressed. I could sense their expectations deflate like a pricked balloon. The going price for horn was $16,000 a kilogram. One of the men said dismissively that $500 would buy a paltry 32 grams of shavings.

  I nodded, saying I only wanted a small amount for my cold, and handed over the money. In return I got two small Ziploc bags filled with what looked like bone splinters.

  Back in our hotel, I held the packets in my hand. Some magnificent beast died for this pathetic amount, sold to cure a common cold. A towering icon of the animal kingdom, a species that has survived the dinosaurs, ice age, meteor strikes and every other catastrophe except man, had its horn hacked off and been left to bleed out in agony in the bush so some human could stop sneezing. And it doesn’t even work. A rhino horn is not medicine; it is keratin, the same stuff as our fingernails. The indignity of human greed and ignorance is infinite.

  However, I was not convinced this was genuine rhino horn. I saw so many Asian buffalo products on the glass-top shop counters in those cramped Nhi Khe streets that I was certain the packets contained nothing more than shredded bovine bone. I reckoned they knew we were small-time amateurs and had taken us for a ride.

  There was only one way to find out. I needed to get the packets back to South Africa and have the contents tested. If they were rhino shavings, the horn would be from Africa.

  In other words, I had to smuggle the horn home.

  The risks were daunting. If caught, I would be thrown into jail and hit with a crippling fine that I could never pay on my NGO salary. I had a wife and three daughters at home, who would not be thrilled with the idea of their dad locked up in some dingy, far-flung cell.

  However, there was no question in my mind. I knew I had to see this through. If I didn’t, it would be tantamount to making a break in a rugby match with a clear run for the try line and then kicking the ball out of play. The big question was not whether I did it, but how.

  This was trickier than it may sound as even though Vietnam at the time had an unfortunate reputation of turning a blind eye to wildlife smuggling, the country was belatedly starting to clamp down thanks to international pressure. It would be just my luck that one of the first ‘traffickers’ the police caught was a conservationist doing freelance undercover work.

  I had three smuggling options. I could either keep the packet
s on me and take my chances with the walk-through electronic scanners; slip them in my laptop case and pray they weren’t picked up by the X-ray machines; or else pack them in my suitcase going into the aircraft’s hold.

  A packet with some bone-like shavings might possibly – just possibly – not spark too much interest when viewed through an X-ray scanner, but a sniffer dog would go ballistic if it got the scent from a suitcase. I reckoned it would probably be safer to carry the packets in my hand luggage.

  But I was guessing. I had no idea. The bottom line was that any option was just winging it and hoping for the best.

  I was inwardly nervous but somehow outwardly calm as I walked through the electronic scanner. I half expected a police officer to cuff my wrist and haul me away, but to my relief the laptop bag came bumping down the conveyor belt from the X-ray machine without any eyebrows lifted.

  I breathed a little easier once on the plane, and a cold beer from the drinks trolley was just the medicine I needed. Unlike rhino horn, it worked.

  In South Africa I was banking on the fact that few, if any, customs officials would think someone would be crazy enough to smuggle rhino horn into the country of origin. It would be tantamount to sneaking cocaine into Colombia. But had anyone told the sniffer dogs that?

  I thought of what I would say to my wife Angela if caught. It was a waste of time and mental energy, as there would have been nothing I could say. I was returning from a trip to a festival spotlighting wildlife crime, and here I was in the eyes of the law committing exactly that. How could anyone explain that away?

  Looking as cool as possible, I got through the ‘nothing to declare’ queue at O.R. Tambo airport in Johannesburg. Once out of the building, I breathed deeply, savouring the crisp Highveld air of my home country. I had done it. And I was still a free man.

  The next step was to deliver the samples to Dr Cindy Harper, the General Manager at the Onderstepoort Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Pretoria. Cindy is truly one of wildlife’s unsung heroes, working tirelessly to identify the scores of rhino horns being smuggled to the Far East. But I could not compromise her with smuggled shavings, so didn’t tell her where I got the samples from. Instead I filed a request for a DNA test on samples from an ‘unknown location’.

  Two weeks later I got the results. It was not Asian buffalo, as I first suspected. The dealers were not con artists fleecing gullible tourists. This was the real deal; genuine rhino horn. Cindy could not pinpoint exactly where it was from, but the DNA evidence was otherwise conclusive. The shavings came off a southern white rhino from somewhere in South Africa.

  I whistled softly. Not only had I concrete proof that South African horn was being sold openly in Vietnam, I’d shown how easy it was to smuggle it through a sophisticated airport with some of the most modern scanners and X-ray machines available.

  I felt sick to my stomach, yet it was a moment of cold clarity.

  The eco-wars were to become the focus of my life.

  CHAPTER ONE: Goats and Growing Up

  Goats are not the most glamorous of animals.

  They are not cute or cuddly like kittens, they don’t obey commands like dogs, and they are not sleek and beautiful like lions or leopards.

  But I have huge affection for them. Not only are they among the most indomitable of creatures, goats were the start of my love affair with animals and the magnificent wild places of Africa.

  I was born on a 2200-hectare farm called Leeuwenbosch outside Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It was a sheep and cattle ranch which had been owned by the Fowlds family since 1872, and much of the land was still untamed. Aloes stood tall like spires of stately cathedrals, while grasslands and savannah spread lush-green in the valley of the Bushman’s River that snaked through our lands on its way to the sea. On the higher ground, shrub thickets and thorn trees with spikes like daggers dotted the terrain, sprawling up the rocky kopjes – the hillocks – as they had since time immemorial.

  It was a childhood with unimaginable freedoms compared to today. Like many other white boys growing up in southern Africa, my first language was Xhosa and my playmates black kids living on the farm. When I was six or seven, I would often disappear into the bush for several days, and after a night or two my mother would start worrying and ask the workers if they knew where I was.

  The answer was always the same. Yes, I was fine and had just eaten breakfast of umphokoqo – dried, crumbly maize meal sometimes served with sour milk called amasi – at the staff huts. To this day, I would choose umphokoqo, the Xhosa staple diet, over any other breakfast, although it is equally delicious for lunch or dinner.

  Mom would then despatch a search party to bring me home for more food and wash my ears, which were so filthy she could have planted potatoes in them.

  I was the oldest child, born a year before my sister Ros. We had a younger sister, Mary-Nan, who drowned in a reservoir when she was three. My father was away playing cricket at the time, and the anguish that caused my parents was incalculable. A decade was to pass before they had children again; my brother William and, a year later, Jayne. Both Mom and Dad came from rugged pioneer stock and were tough people, but they were always gentle with us. My dad once said to me that parents who are hard on their children have never experienced the loss of one.

  Despite that period of almost bottomless grief, Leeuwenbosch thrived as a farm. There had been tragedies before Mary-Nan, as the unusual appearance of four cypresses outside my parents’ home attests. The trees are the sole alien species in an indigenous landscape. They were planted by my great-grandparents, William and Gertrude Fowlds, in memory of the four children they lost in a row as infants early last century. As my father wrote in his memoirs, ‘One is astounded to think how parents could cope with such a tragedy.’

  Cope they did. The people of the Eastern Cape district of Alexandria are mainly descendants of the resilient British settlers from the 1820s onwards and the impressive Xhosa tribes with whom they clashed during a hundred-year-long border war. There is much blood in our history, much tragedy, much courage and much goodness. I was privileged to grow up there.

  The defining moment of my childhood was when my maternal grandfather, Claude Rippon, took me to a trading post at the Carlisle Bridge on the Great Fish River one weekend. I still have no idea why, as Carlisle Bridge is one of the most barren places in the country. The joke is that when a plague of locusts swarmed, looking for countryside to strip bare, they bypassed Carlisle Bridge figuring they had already been there.

  We passed a yard where goats were sold. I even remember the name of the breeder, Mr Norton. For some reason, I decided there and then that I was going to became a goat farmer. With the dogged persistence of youth, I persuaded my grandfather that I simply could not live without the animals.

  What he made of a seven-year-old wanting to buy semi-wild goats, I have no idea, apart from scratching his head and assuming I was a little unusual. Or, more likely, crazy. But grandfather Claude was the kindest man I have ever known and he bought me five ewes and a ram.

  A few days later I returned home from school and was told that ‘the present’ from my grandfather had arrived. I can’t remember ever being so excited. My life changed on that day.

  The goats were as skittish as wild horses, which came as a surprise to me as I was expecting something tamer, like sheep. I was rudely disabused of that notion as we tried to corral them into a nearby camp. Fortunately, the workers on Leeuwenbosch were experienced stockmen and somehow we coaxed the wild, rangy animals into a grazing enclosure.

  My new life began. Soon I was breeding the animals, and my dad seconded one of his workers called Tolly Masumpa to help me.

  Tolly was a godsend. He had been badly burnt in a veld fire some years ago when he tried to kick a can of paraffin out of the way and the flames flared up his legs. His limbs were covered with pink scar tissue and, as a result, he couldn’t do the hard manual labour that mainstream farm work required. He also co
uldn’t ride any more, which was a problem as this was before the time of off-road motorbikes and most stock herding was done on horseback.

  But Tolly was undefeatable. Being lame was just a minor hassle as far as he was concerned, and we bought him a Scotch cart – a two-wheel cart – at an old farm auction with a drawing horse to help him get around.

  Every day Tolly would ride to the camps in his cart and we would round up the goats if they needed to be herded to new grazing, or for dipping. He even had a compartment in the back of his cart where he put the kids that couldn’t keep up with their mothers.

  Boer goats are extremely hardy creatures, requiring very little maintenance. They only need to be dipped for lice and ticks every week or so. Other than that, they fended for themselves, but I always kept them in camps close to our house where I could be with them. I was so fanatical that my dad eventually told me to stop physically handling them. It worried him that I loved the animals too much.

  The herd was expanding nicely and I persuaded my dad that we needed to increase our stock at an even faster rate. We went to an auction and bought the mangiest black and blue goats we could find. We only paid a pittance for them, but they were pitiful specimens. However, that was my plan; to put decent rams on substandard ewes, which both accelerated the growth of the herd and upgraded bloodlines. Each generation would produce better-quality animals.

  Goats were the focal point of my life. So much so that I was called ‘Goat’ at school, which wasn’t the coolest nickname to have. But it gave me some minor celebrity status as every Wednesday afternoon I got time off to attend auctions and buy and sell animals while other kids were playing rugby or cricket. I even got a write-up in the local newspaper, which in those days was the street-cred equivalent of getting a hundred thousand likes on Facebook.

  By the time I was sixteen, I was running more than a thousand animals. The profits paid for my school fees, which was no mean feat seeing I was at St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, an expensive private school.