Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (45 page)

‘It is believed that rhino horns are identified by their distinctive odour.’ In January 2011, police in Thimphu – the capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan – arrested a man who was trying to pass off a fake horn. The suspect confessed, saying he had bought it in India for the equivalent of about US$14. He also admitted to selling another fake to an unwitting buyer for about US$7 000. He was charged with fraud or, as the newspaper colourfully described it, ‘deceiving and cheating’.

In March 2012, South African police discovered two ‘still-bleeding rhino horns’ after bumper-bashing in Bedfordview in eastern Johannesburg. Four men were arrested. One of them was wearing a SANParks uniform. The motorist who had crashed into them told Metro police that he had noticed them behaving ‘suspiciously’, trying to conceal a large cooler bag behind a tree shortly after the accident.

When police opened the bag, they found the ‘bleeding’ horns. Tests later confirmed that the horns were fake and carved out of wood. That same week,
a clerk employed in the police forensics laboratory appeared in the Pretoria District Court, charged with stealing several rhino horns from a lab safe and replacing them with plaster of Paris fakes.

In Zimbabwe, a senior civil servant employed by the country’s mining ministry was arrested in early 2012 after police searched his car and discovered what looked like a rhino horn. Hamandishe Chinyengetere – the ministry’s human resources director – spent the night in jail. Zimbabwe parks officials inspected the horn and concluded it was a cow horn. Chinyengetere was released without charge. A police spokesman told reporters no offence had been committed.

Days go by before I hear from Thando again. He’s been ‘to the bush’, he says. There are no leads on Mukwena. The man is a ghost. Pehaps he’s left Musina. Nobody seems to know. Thando asks me to fetch him in the township. God-knows and I meet him at 11 a.m. and we drive towards Beitbridge. Just before the border, we turn left past a long line of trucks waiting to cross into Zimbabwe. Customs’ computer systems are down and there are massive delays.

The road curves and dips and we’re at the fence. We turn left again, away from the army base and the bridge looming up above us, and follow the fence. I count the holes. There must be one every fifty or 100 metres. We drive past one of the army’s lookout posts. A soldier emerges into the sun, stretching and rubbing his gelatinous belly. His shirt’s off and he’s yawning as if he’s only just woken up. We drive on for an hour or more.

Finally we stop on the outskirts of a farm. Not far from the road are the box-shaped houses of the farm workers. Thando goes inside to find a friend. He’s away for a long time. Godknows fills me in. The man we’re about to meet is one of the transporters. His name is Moshe. His uncle had a reputation in the area – everyone knew him. ‘He was known as Rich. He killed lots of people. He used to rob people out in the bush. If they had cigarettes, he’d take them and kill them. One day someone decided to get rid of him. They drove into him with a car and then rode over the body to make sure he was dead.’

Eventually, Thando wanders back to the car with Moshe, who’s clutching a quart of beer in a brown bottle. Moshe knows some of the poachers operating in Zimbabwe. He can take us to meet one – his brother-in-law. As we drive, Moshe, sitting behind me, talks about smuggling and the cigarette trade.

‘The police escort the cigarettes in their vans. If you’ve got ten boxes, which you’ll sell for R30 000, then you give the cop R5 000 to take [the boxes] in his van away from the border. Then you have to get a guy to transport [the boxes], and that costs.’

Moshe is starting to brag now. He likes American action movies and it’s beginning to show. ‘We move at night,’ he says. ‘I like to use an Audi A4. You have to speed. We use fake number plates, sometimes Zim plates. We don’t stop for cops. Even if there’s a roadblock, we don’t stop. We make as if we’re slowing down and then, when they come close, we give it petrol.’ He boasts that he’s done the 460-kilometre trip to Pretoria in under three hours.

We stop at another run-down housing compound on a farm near the fence line. Steve, Moshe’s brother-in-law, lives here. He comes out to meet us. He looks ill and complains of chest pains. He says he recently quit smoking. Steve claims to have gone hunting for rhinos only days before, somewhere in southern Zimbabwe. He won’t tell me where.

‘It was too difficult. We couldn’t find any, and it was dangerous because of the rangers. The guys [poachers] who shoot stay in Beitbridge [on the Zimbabwean side of the border]. I used to assist them to get it [rhino horns] across the river and then someone would take it to Johannesburg. It was the real thing. I checked it myself.’ He claims not to know the identity of the buyer.

‘Some of the people that kill those things, they don’t even use guns. They use poison. They put it in the water or inside cabbage and leave it there for the rhinos. They once asked me to go and buy that poison. I went to the shop, but when I go there they wanted letters saying I could buy it.’

The poison he’s talking about is aldicarb. In the townships, they call it ‘two-step’ because, once you’ve ingested it, so the story goes, you will be dead in the time it takes you to walk two steps.

Aldicarb is the active ingredient in two commercially available poisons: Temik and Sanacarb. The small black granules that make up the poison
resemble poppy seeds. Its distribution is meant to be strictly regulated, but it is readily available on the black market. Packets are often sold by informal traders at taxi ranks and spaza shops. It is frequently used as ‘rat poison’. House robbers favour it as a means of killing any dogs on a property before they break in. It is also often used in suicides.

There may be some credence to Steve’s story. While the poisoning of rhinos is rare, there have been cases. In 2005, five rhinos were found dead at the Nwanedi Nature Reserve in Limpopo. The horns of one of them had been hacked off. Police said at the time they believed a waterhole had been laced with Temik. Dozens of other animals had also been killed.

Then, five years later, Richard Holtzhausen, the operational manager of Wildlife Ranching South Africa, an organisation established to represent the interests of game farmers, released details of another incident. Fourteen cabbages, cut in half and ‘sprinkled with blue crystals, smaller than the size of ground peppercorns’, had been found in the vicinity of rhino middens on a game farm in Mookgophong. The rhinos were just a hundred metres away when the cabbages were found. None of the rhinos died.

And in Zimbabwe, there were reports that self-proclaimed ‘war veterans’, who had seized land in the Chiredzi District, were poisoning game and rhinos. A local resident, Nelson Maponga, told a reporter: ‘The poachers are placing poisoned cabbages at animal drinking points so that when the animals come for water, they will also eat them. They will track them until they die, then take the horns off … Most of them are working as poaching agents for South African–based rhino horn dealers.’

We drop Thando off in the township near the dumpsite. He wants to check on his horn. He’s heard about a buyer who is prepared to pay ‘big bucks’ for rhino horn. Over the past six or seven years, he says he’s made ten to fifteen horns. People have come to Musina from all over the country in search of rhino horns. And they’ll keep coming.

‘It’s all a game, bra,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. It is all just a game …’

16 January 2012

On the outskirts of Pretoria, Colonel Karel Swanepoel is driving back to the office from a crime scene when he spots a lone figure crossing an open stretch of veld. The man is carrying a black plastic refuse bag in his left hand. It seems heavy, perhaps a little too heavy. Swanepoel, the commander of the Kameeldrift police station in Pretoria, slows the car to a crawl. After twenty years on the force, he trusts his instincts.

The man approaches the road, walking fast along a footpath. As he nears Swanepoel’s car, he suddenly lurches forward into a run. The cop floors the accelerator. The runner rounds a tree, dumps the bag and keeps running. He doesn’t get far. Seconds later, Swanepoel cuts him off and arrests him. The reason for the 100-metre dash soon becomes evident. Inside the bag are three rhino horns. They’re still ‘fresh’, clearly the result of recent kills. One barely qualifies as a ‘horn’. It is probably that of a calf.

At the police station, the suspect is booked. A photograph is taken. His fingerprints are recorded. Someone scrawls a case number and a name on the cover of a brown docket-folder: ‘Kameeldrift CAS 71/01/2012 … Rodgers Mukwena’. The ‘game’ has finally caught up with the ‘Teacher’.

The Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the Onderstepoort campus of Pretoria University is situated on the second floor of a cold, echoing old building. The doors leading into the lab are fitted with electronic locks and keypads. Large padlocked chest freezers guard police evidence bags and samples of rhino horn. There’s also a ‘cupboard full of weapons’, ranging from knives and axes to pangas (machetes) and even chainsaws.

It is here that samples from the three horns are sent for analysis. Holes are drilled into them and the filings are collected in plastic containers and bagged. Normally, 20 milligrams is the smallest sample size that can be used to map the DNA of an individual animal. However, the lab has previously managed to extract DNA profiles from microscopic fragments of horn vacuumed up from the carpet of a car.

‘We only deal with samples. We don’t keep any horns here,’ says Dr Cindy Harper, who heads up the laboratory. ‘It is such a valuable commodity now that it is extremely dangerous, so the horns are kept in stockpiles [that] are either managed by the police or SANParks.’ DNA profiles of rhinos killed by poachers and horns recovered by police are recorded, along with a growing inventory of live animals, on a computer database dubbed the Rhino DNA Index System, or RhoDIS. It is loosely modelled on CODIS, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s mammoth Combined DNA Index System, which stores roughly 10 million DNA profiles.

Harper’s laboratory uses a set of twenty-five DNA markers and an additional ‘sex marker’ to sequence the unique ‘DNA fingerprint’ of an animal. By contrast, the FBI’s CODIS database uses only thirteen genetic markers to generate individual DNA profiles. Because rhino populations are so small, they are likely to be inbred, and therefore more markers have to be used to make an individual identification.

Until fairly recently, scientists believed it was impossible to obtain nuclear DNA – the type of DNA used to make individual identifications – from rhino horn. That changed in 2007. A wildlife forensics conference held at Onderstepoort became the catalyst for a research project to determine a means of ‘individually identifying rhinos from their horns’. It was conducted in conjunction with the TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network, an international NGO established to promote the use of forensic science in wildlife crime investi gations. The timing was fortuitous. The following year, rhino-poaching incidents in South Africa would increase sixfold.

‘Everyone thought it couldn’t be done, because it was commonly believed that rhino horn was just a clump of hardened hair,’ Harper explains. ‘But if you look at the actual structure of rhino horn, it’s not hair at all. Rhino horn does not contain a bony core. It is made up of cells that grow out from the surface of the skin of the nose. The cell tubules harden and connect together with a matrix of calcium and melanin. It is keratinised or hardened, a bit like a horse’s hoof. And where there are cells, you can find nuclear DNA.’