Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (23 page)

Professional hunters are required to be registered in accordance with the regulation of the province in which they hunt. To hunt in all nine provinces, a PH has to apply for registration nine times.

‘To operate, he has to do his training and then write a practical exam and apply for a hunting licence.’

Kitshoff attributes some of the legal infractions by hunters to the un wieldy nature of the hunting regulations. ‘We would like to see one national system. If the government makes it difficult for you to do things correctly, then it becomes a case of impossibility. Say I go and hunt in Kwa-Zulu-Natal and I don’t realise that I need a hunting licence – I would actually be hunting illegally.’

Provincial nature conservation offices that issue hunting permits are also open to abuse. Corruption is said to be rife, particularly in North West and Limpopo provinces. Personal relationships quickly develop between professional hunters, game farmers and provincial conservation officers. Often,
they move in the same small circles. In one province, for instance, officials had been stranded without working vehicles. Because regulations require that a conservation official be present during a rhino hunt, the game farmers would arrange to pick them up the evening before a hunt and accommodate them overnight so that they could go out with the hunting party at first light.

Chris Mercer, a retired advocate who has championed efforts to outlaw the canned hunting of lions, says that ‘the hunting industry and provincial conservation officials are often one and the same’, and compares their oversight role to ‘asking Al Capone’s henchmen to monitor his activities’.

It takes a particular sort of hunter to shoot a rhino. You have to be rich – unless, of course, you are on an all-expenses paid holiday courtesy of a crime syndicate. Killing a rhino doesn’t pose much of a challenge, so you have to be in it for the trophy. Trophy hunters are collectors. Each head is a notch on an unwritten list. A hunter who hunts the Big Five wants all their heads on a wall. For some, it becomes an obsession. In the case of a rhino, whether you’re a trophy hunter or pseudo-hunter, it is all about the horn. For many hunters, though, a rhino hunt remains an unchallenging and unpalatable exercise.

Shooting a rhino is ‘about as sporting as shooting a horse’, Bradley Martin once wrote. The late professor Charles Guggisberg, a naturalist who lived for years in Kenya studying its rhinos, regarded hunting as ‘a good sport’, but felt ‘its participants should never become accomplices in the extermination of a rapidly diminishing species … To go out in a Land Rover, accompanied by a highly efficient professional hunter, in order to shoot an animal which is under heavy pressure from poachers … can hardly be rated as a sporting achievement’. Even Dawie Groenewald – who claims he has never hunted a rhino himself – says he fails to see the challenge in taking one of them down.

Former US president Theodore Roosevelt, who hunted rhinos on a bloody safari with his son Kermit in what was then British East Africa in the early 1900s, said that he considered the ‘rhinoceros the least dangerous of all real dangerous game, although many good hunters hold the contrary view’. Frederick Selous, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British explorer
and hunter, described white rhino as the ‘most harmless and inoffensive of beasts’ and black rhinos as ‘by no means the surly, morose and dangerous beast that some travellers would have one believe. They are, as a rule, very easy to shoot on horseback … They die very quickly when shot through the lungs or the upper part of the heart; but if shot from in front, and a bullet perforates one lung, they will go on to all eternity, though throwing blood out of their mouth and nostrils by the gallon.’

Peter Hathaway Capstick, the American hunter and author whose books influenced a generation of hunters in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote that rhinos are ‘the only critters that really give me a sense of sadness to hunt. Except in a charge, they are relatively easy to flatten with a bullet of proper size, and with the passing of each one, I have a terrible, hollow feeling of having smashed a priceless artefact … Today he’s like an arthritic, old soldier, a one-too-many-fight boxer who is losing his battle for survival. He’s dimwitted right off the bottom of the scale, a non-achiever in the changing struggle for existence.’

Aside from Asian syndicates, South Africa has attracted its share of unscrupulous rhino hunters, from Eastern European gangsters and businessmen with suspected ties to
Vory v Zakone
, or Thieves in Law – the Russian mob – to the playboy son of slain Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and the son of a former American presidential candidate.

Hunting records show that Saadi Gaddafi – footballer, businessman and all-round ‘black sheep of the Gaddafi family’ – hunted and killed two rhinos in 2009 and 2010. The first hunt took place in the Bojanelo District of North West province some time between 16 and 22 May 2009, three months after Saadi’s father was elected chairman of the African Union. In the same year, Saadi visited the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya and reportedly ‘threw a tantrum’ when he was refused permission to hunt there.

His second hunt was conducted at the luxury Lalibela Game Reserve near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in June 2010, seven months before the uprisings that saw the eventual overthrow of his father’s regime.

A colourful diplomatic cable sent by the US embassy in Tripoli to the State Department in 2009 provides a rare profile of Saadi Gaddafi. Its subject heading: ‘Black sheep made good?’ A former professional footballer who enjoyed a season with Perugia, Saadi owned a significant share in one of
Libya’s two main soccer teams and had briefly served as an officer in a Special Forces unit. His focus later ‘drifted’ to movies, and he set up a film production company. According to the cable, he had a ‘troubled past, including scuffles with police in Europe, abuse of drugs and alcohol, excessive partying and … profligate affairs with men and women. His bisexuality was reportedly a point of extreme contention with his father and partly prompted the decision to arrange his marriage.’

Following the fall of the Libyan capital Tripoli to opposition fighters in August 2011, Saadi Gaddafi fled to Niger, where he remains. An Interpol red notice in September 2011 calls for his arrest on charges of ‘misappropriating properties through force and armed intimidation when he headed the Libyan football federation’.

Another controversial hunt took place in July 2009 at the Mkuze Falls Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal and involved Henry Ross Perot Jnr, the son of the Texan billionaire and former US presidential candidate Ross Perot. Accompanying Perot Jnr on his African safari was his twenty-seven-year-old son, Hill. Hunting permits had been issued to both of them. Records indicate that Hill Perot shot and killed one rhino. His father, however, either missed or wounded a rhino, which escaped into the bush. For two days trackers followed the animal’s spoor and then lost it.

Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife’s position is that if a trophy animal is wounded and not found during the hunt, the trophy is forfeited. An ugly legal battle ensued. Perot Jnr – who was featured on the 2010 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires at No. 721, with an estimated net worth of US$1.4 billion – got his lawyers to fire off a letter of demand. If the animal was found, they insisted, it had to be killed and the trophy shipped to their client.

‘I’ve paid for it and I want it,’ was Perot’s blunt demand. Ezemvelo dug in its heels. Jeff Gaisford, a spokesman for Ezemvelo, said that never before had a hunter demanded a trophy despite failing to make a kill. ‘This is a bit of a first,’ he later told the
Telegraph
newspaper. ‘We will argue that one in court if needs be.’

Gaisford was disparaging of Perot Jnr’s hunting abilities. ‘It would be a bloody awful shot, like missing the barn wall at two paces. These animals are not difficult to hunt; they are very placid. It’s a bit like shooting a cow in a
field. But anyone can duff a shot. Maybe he was nipped by a bee as he pulled the trigger or wet his pants, who knows?’

Gary Kelly, the professional hunter who accompanied Perot Jnr, defended his client, saying the animal had moved as the shot was fired. ‘That could happen to anybody. He’s a very good shot, a great guy and a wonderful hunter.’ The rhino, meanwhile, appeared to have survived with a minor flesh wound and rangers were unable to find any trace of a carcass or wounded animal.

In November 2009, after months of legal wrangling, conservation authorities agreed to allow a ‘follow-up’ hunt. If it succeeded, Perot Jnr could have the animal’s head. But at the last minute, the hunt was called off. Writing in the
Mercury
newspaper, environmental journalist Tony Carnie said that the ‘initial decision to allow Perot’s agents to have a “second bite at the cherry” drew strong opposition after it emerged the animal would be shot by Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife if there was a visible bullet wound from Perot’s large-calibre hunting rifle’. Perot later relinquished his claim after it emerged that the animal he had shot at was alive and appeared to be uninjured.

Whenever a hunter or safari operator is arrested in connection with illicit trade in rhino horn, Adri Kitshoff hastily checks her membership lists to see if there is a match. ‘Every time a name gets mentioned, I rush off to check the lists, because in all likelihood it is going to happen that one of our members is arrested,’ she says. Since her appointment as PHASA CEO in November 2009 – the first woman to hold this position – she has become the public face and voice of the hunting industry. It is her job to put a positive spin on an industry that is drawing increasing criticism. These days, she has her work cut out for her.

‘It is heartbreaking what some people are doing,’ she says of the Vietnamese pseudo-hunts. ‘The man in the street, the man who reads a newspaper, doesn’t differentiate between those hunters and others who operate properly. All he sees is that the professional hunting industry is rotten. And your local hunter, who has never in his life shot a rhino, is going to look at the situation
and say: “
Ja nee
, it’s these damn PHs. Look at them carrying on like cowboys and crooks.” This is our industry. And for me, it is really heartbreaking that there are people out there dragging it down.’

Ian Player says the hunting industry should have ‘moved quickly and taken these guys to task. There are those in the game-ranching fraternity who’ve done tremendous harm, not only to conservation, but to South Africa … The pictures of the savagery and barbarism with which these rhinos have been treated … it’s not doing our country any good’.

PHASA’s problem lies in the fact that it is not a regulatory authority; it can do little more than suspend, expel or blacklist members found guilty of rhino crimes. Membership is voluntary and at least half the estimated number of professional hunters in South Africa do not belong to it. In an attempt to mollify critics of the hunting industry, the association has taken to aggressively promoting the ‘positive role that hunting plays’. In radio and newspaper interviews, Kitshoff repeats the association’s catchphrases over and over. ‘No other industry can create the value for wildlife that hunting does … Without the value, we wouldn’t have the wildlife in South Africa that we have today.’

There are the untested claims: ‘Since we introduced controlled hunting in the middle of the last century, our wildlife has increased from half a million heads of wildlife to more than 18.5 million.’ And there’s the economic message: foreign hunters bring in ‘about R2 billion a year’. But critics argue that eco-tourism generates a much greater income, with one study suggesting that it brings in ‘more than fifteen times the income of livestock or game rearing or overseas hunting’.

PHASA, which was formed thirty-five years ago, today has just over 1 000 members. The vast majority are uncomfortably white and male. At PHASA’s annual gala dinner, which I attended, the contrast between the sea of white faces at the tables and the images of black children and game rangers being projected on a giant screen – the beneficiaries of PHASA’s largesse – was stark. It seemed both patronising and an obsequious attempt to curry favour with the current government. There was something of an old boys’ club about it all. This preponderance of ‘pale males’ is something of which the association has been made acutely aware.