ZIMBABWE - BLACK RHINO UNDER SEVERE THREAT

ANIMAL VICTIMS OF WAR

Zimbabwe black rhino slaughter
From Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg

The black rhino, one of the world's rarest and most valuable animals, is being killed in large numbers in one of its last three strongholds, Zimbabwe, according to farmers and conservationists in that country.
The assault is particularly drastic in the giant Bubiana conservancy, in the south of the country, where 104 of the country's last 400 black rhino live on some 160,000 hectares of land, from where at least two owners have been driven from their homes by the chief whip of President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party. "It is dire," said Johnny Rodrigues, director of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, which monitors the state of the countryıs wildlife. "When you look at what is going on you want to cry. They're just slaughtering everything. The rhino are just part of it, and it's going on right across the country."
Rodrigues stopped to take a telephone report from a conservancy near the Victoria Falls where a private reserve had found the skinned carcass of a black rhino calf. The mother was presumed shot for her horn, worth some $US65,000 - more than an equivalent weight in gold - on the Far East market, where powdered rhino horn is used in a variety of traditional medicines.
Another report followed from a national park on Lake Kariba where a black rhino had been shot dead and its horn removed. Bubiana is the litmus test of whether the black rhino will survive President Mugabe's state-sponsored anarchy. Bubiana and other smaller private conservancies came to the rescue when the country's black rhino population plummeted from 20,000 in the mid-1970s to just 263 animals in 1995. The wholesale slaughter in Zimbabweıs national parks from the seventies to the nineties was a result of civil war and subsequent massive poaching and top-level corruption. By the mid-1990s the Mugabe government realised the depleted and bankrupt National Parks system could not save the remaining animals and asked white commercial farmers in marginal agricultural areas to band together to form conservancies to save the animals and establish breeding populations. By careful management the conservancies have managed to increase the national herd to some 400. There are another 2000 surviving black rhino, mainly concentrated in South Africa, with tiny threatened herds also in Namibia and Kenya.
In the eighteen months to early January, an estimated 30,000 large wild animals had been killed by poachers at Bubiana, including one black rhino calf, and 200,000 trees had been felled, according to an official spokesman for the conservancy. Twelve black rhino had been caught in snares and badly wounded.
Since January there have been no official figures released from Bubiana, as a result of divisions among owners who have had their homes and properties trashed and others who are prepared to make extensive compromises with invading war veterans and the government in an attempt to save their homes and investments.
Johnny Rodrigues estimates from his reports that 30 to 40 Bubiana rhino are now dead and one of the owners driven from the constituency said: "It's finished. Bubiana will be depleted of all game within a month. The remaining elephants are dragging snares caught around their feet through the bush. There are complete areas there where the owners can no longer go. It's complete anarchy, and the West and the World Wide Fund for Nature don't appear to give a damn."
Piecing together reports from some very frightened people close to the various Bubiana owners, it is clear that at least two of the seven Bubiana owners, Peter Abbott and Noel York, were forced out of the conservancy on 3 March when the local MP and ruling ZANU-PF party chief whip, Joram Gumpo, is alleged to have issued both men with death threats. They abandoned their houses and went into hiding elsewhere, said one Bubiana owner, who asked not to be named.
The conservancy owners in 1993 knocked down all internal fences and erected huge external fences, strong enough to keep animals like elephant, rhino and buffalo in. They took in 36 black rhino the government wanted them to conserve and use as a breeding population. Each farmer was allowed to continue to run a few cattle, although game farming was the overriding aim of the enterprise. "War vets killed Peter's cattle in front of him while police watched," said the Bubiana farmer. "He had an internationally renowned fishing camp. It has been completely trashed by war vets who are netting the lake for black bass and bream, drying them and selling them at roadsides. The lake had a popular hippo, Henrietta. Theyıve killed her."
All over the country the owners of smaller conservancies report war veterans, police and politicians openly invading their properties, shooting animals and selling meat and skins on roadside stalls and butcheries.
Wally Herbst, national chairman of the Wildlife Producers Association, the private game owners organisation, said 40 percent of Zimbabweıs wildlife may have been killed in the past eighteen months. ³Itıs a result of land invasions, resultant bad land use, the collapse of any rule of law, game scouts being threatened and chased away. Thereıs a great increase in people invading openly with vehicles and firearms.
³When itıs all going to collapse totally is the million dollar question. It canıt hold much longer, the infrastructure is collapsing around us.² Even the government admits that at least 50 of the remaining 400 black rhino have been killed this year. Environment Minister Francis Nhema said some £30million would be lost this year a as result of the collapse of the international sport hunting industry. He said that wildlife worth some £1.5 million had been lost to poaching in the last four months a vast underestimate according to Johnny Rodriguez.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez received another report, this time from Lynwood Ranching, in southern Zimbabwe, a conservancy owned by seven farmers with 36 black rhino. ³Seven rhino have been snared recently,² said the report. ³One baby rhino has been burned to death. Three farmers have been unable to monitor their parts of the property because settlers wonıt allow the game scouts to patrol. The fate of rhino in those areas is unknown. Itıs impossible to say how many have been killed
³Meat can be seen drying in almost every settler village. Many animals have been slaughtered. One patrol found seven kudu, zebra and eland in a single snareline. When we sent in helicopters to dart snare-injured rhino, the deputy director of National Parks visited us. He saw first hand what was going on and assured us of his immediate response to the matter. We have not heard another word from him.²