Something had to change

Something had to change. About a year ago, the last Northern White Rhino died. By then it was clear that all the South African rhinos were going to follow him in the medium term.

On the way out?

In our stand-alone thriller Shoot the Bastards – out in the US in a couple of months – American reporter Crystal Nguyen tries to get to grips with the rhino poaching and horn smuggling scourge in South Africa. The reason we made her an American was so that she could look at the issues with new eyes albeit initially very naïve ones. As a committed conservationist, she deplores any interference with the rhinos in the wild and focuses on how to stop the poaching – “Shoot the bastards,” she’s told – and how to break the horn-smuggling mafia. She's happy to dismiss alternate strategies such as selling horn commercially to break the illegal market – “Legalizing a banned substance never reduces demand for it,” she’s told. I guess my views would have been about the same as hers ten years ago. We were all pretty naïve in those days.

The last Northern White. Dehorned for security.

One strategy is farming rhinos and harvesting the horn for sale. About seven years ago I was part of a group that looked at mathematical models to try to predict the effect of doing so. Rhino horn is basically keratin, like hair or finger nail. (All the scientific evidence indicates that its medicinal properties are about the same as biting your finger nails.) The horns can be removed without pain. The rhinos have to be darted with a knockout drug, and the horn carefully sawed off. There's now a wealth of experience with the use of these drugs, and although there are occasional injuries (from falling badly, for example), in the vast majority of instances the animal shows no ill effects. But the horns grow back so the process has to be repeated about every eighteen months to prevent the rhino carrying any significant amount of a material now worth more than gold.

Part of a confiscated cache of 150 horns.

Conservationists in general abhor interference with a species in the wild and rightly so. South African Nature Conservation has been agonizing over the issues for at least five years. Who will fit the hefty bill? What will be the long term effects of dehorning wild rhinos? Might we not be altering their social behaviour and so, in a sense, destroying the very structure of wild rhino dynamics that we want to preserve? As Crys put it, “Everything cried out that there must be a way – a way to leave the rhinos in peace, undisturbed, completely wild.”

But there isn’t. Followers of Murder is Everywhere know that Stan and I each have shares in private game reserves bordering the Kruger National Park. Stan’s place is quite far east from the main north-south road and so far has been spared the rhino poaching horror. Mine is closer to the getaway routes, and we’ve been losing rhinos for several years. Since 2012 the population has declined by 70%! We have a heavily armed anti-poaching patrol camped on the property, complete with tracker dogs. The poachers encroach as often as once a week. Most times they're driven off by the team and the dogs with helicopter support, but occasionally they get a rhino. Yes, we have tried high-tech tools – infrared cameras, drones. Some men in the anti-poaching team are incredibly dedicated, others not so much. Rumours persist that it’s sometimes the members of the anti-poaching team themselves who tip off the poachers about where to look. Crys encounters that too…

The war on poaching is a real war with people as well as rhinos being shot. And while most of the time we win, there aren’t enough rhinos left to support the times we don’t. And the emotional impact of finding a dead rhino with the horns hacked off is enormous. It weighs down the people trying to protect them. It demoralises them. It drives them into other lines of work.

Not pretty. But alive.

So in the end Nature Conservation has come down on the side of horn removal. What's planned is a massive project covering all rhinos in the national park as well as the surrounding private game reserves. I received a newsflash last week that all the rhinos in our area are now dehorned. My reaction was a huge sense of relief.

We’ve been asked to call in any information and particularly to report any rhinos still sporting horns.

We will still need the team for security. We will still need to carefully watch each rhino to ensure that it never carries enough horn to tempt the poachers, and the rhinos will have to be dehorned on a regular basis. There will be a huge cost. We’ll need to study them for longer term ill effects and societal changes.

But now there will be a longer term for the African rhinos.

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Upcoming Events

A lot of familiar names in the panels below. Very lekker!

Crimefest, Bristol, England

FRIDAY, 10 MAY
17:10 – 18:00
Sunshine Noir
* Paul Hardisty
* Barbara Nadel
* Jeffrey Siger
* Robert Wilson
Participating Moderator: Stan Trollip

SATURDAY, 11 MAY
11:20 – 12:10
10 Year Stretch: The CrimeFest Anthology
* Peter Guttridge
* Caro Ramsay
* Zoë Sharp
* Michael Stanley (aka Stanley Trollip)
Participating Moderator: Kate Ellis


Once Upon a Crime, Minneapolis

Launch of SHOOT THE BASTARDS (This is the US title for DEAD OF NIGHT)

TUESDAY, 18 JUNE
18:30 - 22:00 
Stanley will be in conversation with Kent Krueger. 
Refreshments