South Africa says rhino poaching back on the rise

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South Africa says rhino poaching back on the rise

2:11 CAT | 27 Feb 2024

Rhino poachers have turned their attention to South Africa’s oldest state-run nature reserve where they killed 307 of the endangered animals last year.

The shift to the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in the southeastern KwaZulu-Natal province comes as the illegal hunters shift south from the Kruger National Park where years of poaching has decimated rhino numbers and drawn a stronger response from the state.

The surge in poaching in the rolling green hills of the park, which at 960 square kilometers (371 square miles) is a 20th the size of the Kruger, a conservation area the size of Wales, saw the reserve last year account for three fifths of the 499 rhinos in the country last year. The bulk of rest were killed in the Kruger or on private reserves.

“Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park facing the brunt of poaching cases,” Environment Minister Barbara Creecy said in a statement on Tuesday. “This is the highest poaching loss within this province” to date, she said.

Overall the number of rhinos killed in South Africa, where almost all of the world’s southern white rhinos live, rose to a four-year high from 448 in 2022 even as the number killed in the Kruger fell 37%. White rhinos are by far the most populous of the five species of rhinos.

Poachers shoot rhinos with assault rifles, often by the light of the full moon, and then hack off their horns to sell to buyers in east Asia. There they are ground down into potions, erroneously believed to cure cancer and boost virility.

Southern white rhinos were driven almost to extinction a century ago. The numbers have since been built up from a population of about 50 that then lived in the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park. Northern white rhinos, which are very similar but lived across east and central Africa, are functionally extinct with just two left in a park in Kenya.

Source: Bloomberg