Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (32 page)

Steyl bends down to pick up a spent cartridge and hands it to the tracker. In the background, a Thai man looks on. The rhino’s cries are getting softer now. Steyl tries to reload, then swaps rifles with Claassens. Forty seconds after the fourth shot, Steyl speaks. ‘
Waar moet ek hom skiet
? (Where must I shoot him?),’ he asks Claassens uncertainly, voice hoarse with adrenaline.

The men move closer. About ten to fifteen paces from the animal, they
stop. Steyl clumsily shoulders the rifle. He fires quickly. Too quickly. The scope kicks back, cutting him above the eye. The bullet hits the animal in the head. Steyl pauses. The rhino’s movements are weaker, its squeals muted. ‘
Daai een te laag
? (That one too low?),’ he asks Claassens. Ten seconds tick by. ‘
Hy’s
gone (He’s gone),’ Steyl announces.

Steyl ejects the cartridge from the breach, hands it to Claassens and pushes the bolt home. He wipes blood away from his eye. But the rhino isn’t dead yet. Blood oozes from flared nostrils. An eye stares glassily into the middle distance. Its right hind leg twitches. Ragged breaths displace scrub and dust near its head.

The men approach their kill to inspect the damage. ‘
Kyk die eerste skoot, Harry. Die eerste twee. Is hy te laag daar
? (Look at the first shot, Harry. The first two. Is it too low there?)’ Steyl asks. Claassens says nothing. They watch the animal die. Steyl removes the camera and appears to hold it in his hand. The camera tilts and focuses on the Thai man. He’s standing there, expressionless, his hands at his sides. He’s not holding a rifle. Steyl walks away from the rhino. He looks down at the camera, fumbling for the off switch. There’s a flash of a striped brown-and-white Jeep golf shirt, blond hair and a ruddy, sunburnt face, puffy from too many braais and booze. Then nothing.

The dusty little Free State
dorp
of Winburg lies just off the N1 highway halfway between Kroonstad and Bloemfontein. It’s a shell of a town, grubby and decaying, the roads irreparably potholed. Those who can, escape when they’re young and rarely return for more than a fleeting visit.

A dirt road leads away from the R708 near Winburg to Steyl’s farm, Klipplaatfontein. Inside enclosures surrounded by double layers of game fencing, lions prowl listlessly in the sun, occasionally feeding off bloody, fly-blown hunks of meat. Corrugated containers, used for game capture and relocation, rust nearby.

Steyl founded a game-capture business here with his brother Nelius in 2001. Next they established Steyl Safaris and Boschrand Lodge, which was
‘built to fulfil all the needs a hunter might have’. The Steyl Group website boasts that the brothers are a ‘dynamic duo’ with a ‘passion for animals’. Their ventures are described as ‘intertwined … with the sole purpose of promoting South Africa & South African wildlife, and creating a heritage for future generations’. A gallery of hunting images shows an array of hunters grinning over their kills. Many are lions. In one photograph, Steyl crouches beside the carcass of a male lion. He has his arms around his young son. The boy doesn’t smile. The animal’s jaws are agape, its left paw is smeared pink with blood.

Steyl made headlines in June 2006 when one of his lions, an eight-year-old male, escaped from the farm. Breathless news reports in
Die Volksblad
, the local Afrikaans newspaper, described how stray lions were terrorising Free State communities. The Free State accounts for the largest number of captive-bred lions in South Africa. It is also a hotbed of ‘canned’ lion hunts, where caged animals are released, only to be shot weeks, days, and sometimes even minutes or hours, later. In some instances they’ve been doped to make them easier targets.

There have been other escapes from other farms. The previous month a lion had been tracked down and shot near Winburg after breaking free from a game farm. There were also reports of a lion being sighted near Harrismith in the Eastern Free State. In Winburg, a posse of thirty farmers were marshalled to find Steyl’s lion. It had apparently escaped after someone cut the game fence on the farm. Steyl picked up the bill, which ran to about R8 000 a day. It took the men two weeks to capture the errant animal and return it to its cage.

On a sweltering summer’s day in 2010, Johnny Olivier and Punpitak Chunchom set off on the 300-kilometre drive from Johannesburg to Winburg, bound for Steyl’s farm and a barn stinking of death. One of Juan Pace’s cronies, a man Johnny knows only as Izak, had seen an advert about Steyl’s captive-bred lions in
Landbou Weekblad
, a weekly agricultural magazine. He’d called him up. Steyl had lion bones for sale and was keen to do business.

Steyl had done well from breeding lions and from trophy hunts. But the hunters wanted the heads and pelts of their kills and little else. They’d have them mounted, usually with lifeless glass eyes and teeth bared in a silent snarl. Displayed in a pub, or spread out as a rug on a living-room floor, the dead beasts were the perfect talking point for alcohol-drenched evenings filled with improbable tales of danger and adventure in the African bush. Perhaps the hunters thought they were the next Hemingway or Selous or Percival. Trophies gave those fantasies a semblance of reality.

That left the carcasses, which had little use. Grey, skinless, headless obscenities, spattered with blood, they would be left for the vultures and scavengers to feast on or be hurriedly buried in pits to rot into the soil.

Steyl was a relative latecomer to the lion-bone trade. Other lion breeders in the Free State and North West provinces had been quick to cash in on the growing Asian demand for alternatives to dwindling stocks of tigers, whose bones, flesh, bile, blood, fat, eyes, teeth, claws and whiskers are used in traditional potions, medicines and vile-smelling ‘wines’.

In December 2009, the Free State’s Department of Environment provoked a furore when it issued permits to a controversial lion breeder by the name of Kobus van der Westhuizen, which effectively licensed him to kill lions and sell their bones. The department unsuccessfully attempted to mollify critics by emphasising that he was only allowed to trade with a dealer in Gauteng and not in China.

Buti Mathebula, the department’s head, did little to lessen the ire of conservationists and animal rights activists when he told
Volksblad
journalist Charles Smith: ‘Lions in the Free State are not of any value to us from an environmental point of view. They’re not roaming free in the wild. If someone wants to hunt lions in the Free State, that’s fine. We don’t want these lions here. We’re better off without lions in the Free State. There are problems with fences. If they escape, they kill people.’

Van der Westhuizen, the owner of the Letsatsi La Africa Wild Animal and Predator Park, was unrepentant. ‘Tell the greenies to go to hell and go moan somewhere else,’ he said. He seemed to have few qualms whom he would do business with. In fact, in June 2010, he invited Chai and a Vietnamese national, Bach van Lim, to visit the park and watch the FIFA World Cup there.

Werner Boing, a senior official in the Free State department responsible for issuing and enforcing permits, says there is not much he can do to stop the trade, which is not illegal.

Ninety per cent of the animals killed for their bones are lionesses, Boing says. ‘As long as the bones have value, I can’t tell a farmer that they can’t sell them. I don’t like it, but I don’t have any grounds on which to stop it.’ Male lions are rarely put down for their bones. ‘There is a big hunting market for male lions, particularly in North West province, where they are issuing an incredible number of permits.’

He confirmed that Van der Westhuizen had originally applied for a permit to put down twenty lions in order to sell their bones. That permit lapsed and another was issued. Ten lions were destroyed. Boing told me that a permit application for a lion to be put down has to include a justification.

‘You would have to say why you want to put the lion down. In a lot of cases it is old lionesses that don’t have breeding potential. They can’t just be shot. Our requirements are that a vet be there [to put the animal down] and a conservation official also be present.’

Official figures for lion-bone exports from South Africa are unreliable and contradictory, made even more so by chaotic attempts to merge statistics from nine provincial departments. In April 2011, the South African Minister of Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa, said eighty-six permits were issued in 2009 for the export of lion carcasses, and 171 permits for lion skeletons in 2010. All the consignments were destined for Laos. But more detailed figures, released earlier in response to questions posed by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), indicate that 142 carcasses and fourteen ‘floating bones’ were exported in 2009. The figures for 2010 state that 235 carcasses were exported from North West province alone, and 1 363 bones from the Free State. In contrast, records held by the CITES secretariat suggest that eighty ‘bodies’, five skeletons and 250 kilograms of lion bones were shipped from South Africa to Laos in 2009. The CITES figures for 2010 show that 130 skeletons were exported to Laos, along with 586 bones, fifty-four claws, ninety teeth, six skulls and fifty-four trophies.

Why the demand for lion bones? The answer lies in the steady decline of the world’s tiger population and an unwavering belief in many Asian countries that
the bones are a panacea for a range of ills. The staggering growth of Asia’s economic dragons and the increase in disposable income have fuelled the trade.

According to the WWF, the global tiger population is thought to have fallen by over 95 per cent since the turn of the twentieth century, down from 100 000 then to perhaps as few as 3 200 today.

A seminal sixteenth-century Chinese
materia medica
– which still holds currency in traditional Chinese medicinal circles – describes how the bones are used.

The yellow [bones] from the males are best. Animals shot with arrows should not be used because the poison enters the bones and blood and is harmful to people … The bones should be broken up and the marrow removed. Butter or urine or vinegar is applied, according to the type of prescription, and they are browned over a charcoal fire.

The bones’ uses are varied.

For removing all kinds of evil influences and calming fright. For curing bad ulcers and rat-bite sores. For rheumatic pain [of] the joints and muscles, and muscle cramps. For abdominal pain, typhoid fever, malaria, hydrophobia. Placed on the roof it can keep devils away and so cure nightmares. A bath in tiger bone broth is good for rheumatic swellings of the bones and joints. The shin bones are excellent for treating painfully swollen feet. It is applied with vinegar to the knees. Newborn children should be bathed in it to prevent infection, convulsions, devil possession, scabies and boils, it will then grow up without any sickness. It strengthens the bones, cures chronic dysentery, prolapse of the anus and is taken to dislodge bones which have become stuck in the gullet. The powdered bone is applied to burns and eruptions under the toenail.

Steyl appears to have little interest, beyond a certain morbid curiosity, in the medicinal uses of the bones. For him, it is about the money.