National Geographic: The Rhino War Page #4

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Zambezi River in Zimbabwe,

where he protects the last

large wild rhino population

left in the world.

The project involved moving

one third of the

valley's population,

to safer ground.

The fight to protect the

rest is a desperate one.

Rangers live year round in

camp with their families.

who realize that some of the

men may die in armed conflict.

What we're doing here is

to fight the poachers.

Every day that a group of

poachers are in here,

they are potentially able to

kill two or three or

maybe even four rhino.

One group killed six rhino

one morning here,

here in the Zambezi Valley.

To our north is Zambia,

and these poachers are

crossing from there to here.

The river is the

international boundary

but there is no

barrier as such.

There's two border posts

on that section of the river.

We cannot cover 150 miles of

river frontage every day of

the year, It's an impossibility.

You'd need more than a

division of men to do that.

Even then because of the bush

warfare we'd be fighting,

it's an impossibility.

As in Kenya, the odds are staggering,

and the

danger is real.

Operation Stronghold has just Many

of the rangers are

veterans from opposite sides

of Zimbabwe's war of independence,

now fighting together

against a common enemy.

Facing heavily armed

Zambian-based poachers,

the rangers shoot to kill

with the government's consent.

Since 1985, more than 30

poachers have been shot dead,

and at least 20 taken prisoner

In the same period,

some 330 rhino have died.

Until the network of dealers

and middlemen is broken,

Zimbabwe's rangers know they

can do little more than stem

the tide.

Privately, many wonder how long

it can go on.

We've got people here who've

been in the bush for two years,

they go out for 20 days in

a month, they occasionally have

success, But it's very very...

demanding on them physically,

It's demanding on

their families, its demanding

of their well-being.

They are buoyed up

with enthusiasm every time

you have a successful contact,

and perhaps this is a

good enough reason to

have a contact,

is to boost enthusiasm,

If no other reason.

You have captured,

you have recovered

one and what direction is

the other poacher running to?

No problem, as soon as the

chopper arrives we will get

into your...

I guess the big thing is now,

is to get all the others,

if he's gonna be on the ground

for too long I'll have to go

fly over and pick him up...

One down, one running.

Okay, can't we get them in

and start leap-frogging them?

The support units are on their

way now and...

And the one, as I said,

had been shot in the groin,

was in fact bleeding.

I don't know how, in fact,

he got as far as he had.

He scrabbled about 15 paces

on his stomach and died there.

It all happened so

very quickly.

One tends just to pick up

little images

of what was happening rather

than as an overall thing.

You get images of rounds from

the people behind you,

the expended cartridge cases

landing on your head.

The gang had killed four rhino

in as many days.

Each poacher had risked his

life for a few hundred dollars.

The rangers know that Zimbabwe

is the last stand for

the wild black rhino.

Still, the dilemma they face

is a terrible one.

One often wonders about the

human life for a rhino life,

And at this stage it's a

human life for about 20 rhino lives.

The morality is

perhaps secondary to the fact

that there doesn't seem

to be any other way in which

we can in fact stop

these blokes from getting away

and getting back.

A group of poachers would come

into the country,

they'll start killing rhinos.

We've got to react to that,

and one must never forget

the central objective of

this whole exercise,

this whole operation,

is save the rhino

We are not manhunters,

we're not mercenaries.

We are here as

conservationists.

But desperate situations

require desperate measures.

No, there's no joy in

killing people, but it's a job,

and quite obviously, we're just

pawns on either side

for men who are

just exploiting people

to make themselves rich.

Forty five million years of

nature, unraveled by man

in an evolutionary microsecond

Still, the rhinoceros

can still be saved.

If a major international

effort were mounted to

stop the poachers, the rhino

would almost certainly bounce

back.

But until the incentive

to kill is removed

the profit for the poachers,

middlemen and dealers the

battle will go on.

If the fight is lost,

the rhino will be doomed

to exist only as a drawing in

a child's picture book

of things that once were

and are no more.

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