Hunting for Poachers Amid South Africa’s Bloody Wildlife War

We’re just a stone’s throw from the vehicle when we see the first bootprints in the sand. They’re a few days old and cross a dirt road that runs along the backside of a large waterhole. The eight of us spread out along the same two-track and wait for Eugene Troskie’s signal before marching into the thick South African scrub. We walk in a straight line, slowly and deliberately as if navigating a minefield. 

Only instead of explosives, we’re sweeping for snares. These crude loops of wire or cable are set by poachers along game trails and near water sources, where unsuspecting game is bound to pass through. Once the loop tightens around their neck animals rarely make it far, and the ones that do break free are typically maimed for life.

We find five snares during the first three minutes of our sweep, which takes us across part of a high-fenced game reserve outside Phalaborwa near Kruger National Park. It’s not yet 8 a.m. and the November sun is already beating down. I follow behind Troskie, who gives me pointers on what to look for: a cut branch here, a brushed-in path over there. But at this point in the morning, it’s the .375 bolt-action slung over his shoulder that I keep glancing at. I want the Winchester nearby as we tour one of the many battlefields in the war to defend South Africa’s wildlife from poaching.

At the heart of this violent and ongoing conflict are some of the continent’s most iconic wildlife species. As criminal gangs systematically slaughter and traffic these animals to feed an insatiable black market for illegal wildlife parts, a scrappy troop of park rangers, scientists, trackers, and other conservationists are putting their own lives at risk to stop them. Here are a few of their stories.         

A Park Under Siege

The Phalaborwa Ranger Station lies just beyond a guarded gate on the edge of a vast grassland wilderness. This gate forms a border that separates the sprawling mining town of Phalaborwa from Kruger National Park, a world-famous safari destination that’s roughly the size of New Jersey. Although I’m just another tourist passing through in a rental car, I know there are other, more clandestine routes into the park. These are the paths worn by poachers, who’ve been a devastating force on the landscape.

Since 2011, Kruger has lost roughly 75 percent of its white rhino population to poaching. Put another way, more than 8,000 of the giant, prehistoric animals have been killed only for their horns, their bodies left to rot. It has been the most severe and prolonged onslaught on a single species in a single African park in modern history, according to a former chief ranger there.

This is what Piet Shilowa, Never Mabunda, and Given Mabunda are up against.

The three men step through the office doorway and stand at attention. From her desk in the South African National Parks ranger station, Phalaborwa section ranger Karien Desmet rises to greet them. They’re all wearing polished boots and combat fatigues.

“They’re going out on a five-day patrol,” says Desmet, who was appointed the park’s first-ever female section ranger in 2001. “We normally drop them off without a vehicle in what we call our hotspot areas. Or [we’ll drop them] in places you can’t get to on a daily basis.”

The field rangers confirm a few things with Desmet in a language I can’t identify. Then they unlock a gun safe, from which they each grab an R1 bush rifle and ammunition. If I didn’t know they were SANParks employees I’d peg the three as soldiers, not park rangers. But their job description has changed in this corner of the world.

When Desmet was first hired as a Kruger field ranger in the late 90s, the ranger corps’ primary responsibilities revolved around traditional conservation work like animal counts and invasive plant removal. Today, those rangers must be ready day or night to pick up suspicious tracks in the park and follow them. Rhino poachers typically travel in groups of three, Desmet explains: One carries a rifle, another hauls their food and water, and the third carries an axe to hack off horns.

Most of these horns end up in the hands of foreign buyers, primarily in Asian countries. Though it has no known medicinal properties rhino horn was used as a panacea in Chinese medicine, and it’s increasingly viewed as a status symbol. Buyers are also driving demand for other illegal wildlife parts sourced from Africa, including lion bones (which are typically sold as a proxy for tiger bones) and elephant tusks.  

Desmet says the three rangers are headed to an area where a few rhinos were spotted recently. It’s important to look after these survivors, she explains, because over the last 16 years, the corner of the park that she oversees has lost around 95 percent of its white rhinos.

This is a global concern, since South Africa is a key stronghold for the species and holds more white rhinos than any other country. The nation is also home to roughly half of the world’s remaining black rhinos. These critically endangered animals were already the rarer of the two species when the poaching crisis started escalating in Kruger around 2008, and there are now fewer than 300 of them living in the park, according to some estimates.

This carnage is driven almost entirely by organized criminal gangs, which hire locals from surrounding areas to do the dirty work. And with rhino horn fetching up to $60,000 per pound in some countries — where it’s worth more than cocaine or gold — poaching kingpins are able to continuously recruit locals with the kind of money that doesn’t exist in the impoverished communities where they live. 

Many of these rural South Africans have first-rate bush skills. They can walk for days and live on little water, and most have more to gain than they stand to lose.

Battle Scars

By 10 a.m. we’ve removed 73 snares from the high-fenced property. I’m getting better at spotting the thin loops of wire, which blend in with the thorny branches and are held in place by thin strips of knotted bark. But my haul is nowhere near Tshepiso’s, a fresh-faced junior ranger who lives in the small community of Namakgale. 

“This is what they do for the predators,” Tshepiso explains as he points to machete marks in the branches that are placed alongside a game trail, creating a brushy funnel. “It forces the lions to go this way, so they walk right into the snare.”

The sharpest eyes on our team belong to Antoni, who carries no backpack, just a plastic water bottle wedged under a skinny arm. Although I’m unsure of his age, and can’t ask him because I don’t speak Shangaan, he seems to be the eldest of the five rangers — or, at least, the most experienced. He often moves ahead of the crew, his lean figure slipping through the brush as he scans for clues I’ll never recognize. When he stops, we all pay attention.

Snaring is not new to the African continent, or to the rest of the world for that matter. For thousands of years humans have used snares to catch antelope, deer, and other game for sustenance. What I’m seeing today, though, is a far cry from subsistence poaching. 

Troskie, who would find the occasional snare while walking fencelines in the Free State province as a boy, explains that it’s no longer just a handful of hungry locals trying to catch dinner. The practice, known locally as “bushmeat poaching,” has become profit-driven and the meat that does get collected from snares is typically sold in local black markets. The poachers are now targeting high-value animals like lions and hyenas, too, and on a massive scale. Working behind the scenes are some of the same criminal gangs that deal in rhino horn.    

“They are no longer interested in just catching one or two animals, because it’s now become commercial,” says Troskie. “If you’re just setting a couple snares to survive, that’s one thing. But you would not go out and set a couple hundred snares at a time.”

In the four years since Troskie founded the nonprofit, the Phalaborwa National Heritage Foundation has removed more than 8,900 snares from an area just around Phalaborwa. A career safari guide, Troskie says he and volunteers spent Christmas Day 2023 hunting for snares. They typically see a spike in snaring around the holidays — when apparently poachers want extra spending money, too — and this season was no different.

“The amount of animals we’ve found killed in snares, just this year [2024], is around 236. Can you imagine a pile of 236 dead warthogs? Now throw in a couple of buffalo and lions, some antelope and hyenas, an elephant calf, and a giraffe. That is what we’ve physically found — what we were too late to rescue.”

He adds that it’s not just the number but the size of the snares that’s concerning. Some of the cables he’s found are as thick as a pinky finger and, when attached to the right tree, are strong enough to anchor an elephant calf. Even scarier, he says, is the increase they’ve seen in poisoning — where poachers will snare an animal and then lace the carcass in hopes that a lion or hyena (or some other predator with valuable hide and bones) will feed on it. 

Everything else that’s not stripped for bushmeat before spoiling becomes bait. Poachers using poison will often wait days between checking their lines to increase the chances that a high-value animal will come by. As Troskie explains: “They want something rotting in the snare line.” 

Wearing a short-sleeved camo shirt and safari shorts held up by a leather belt with a cartridge holster, Troskie looks the part of a South African hunter. He takes pride in that identity, along with the scars borne from his time in the bush. I notice one of these marks, a jagged line that runs up from his bearded chin to the corner of his lower lip.

“They want something rotting in the snare line.”

Troskie explains that last January, he and his wife came across a young impala that had just been snared. The animal wasn’t breathing, so he started chest compressions while his wife gave the ewe mouth-to-mouth. After about five minutes, the impala was breathing again. Before she ran away, though, she thanked Troskie with her hoof and nimbly broke his jaw. 

These survivors are exceptions to the rule. And I can feel the anger in Troskie’s voice when he talks about the dead lioness they found on a nearby property, just days after he darted that cat and put a tracking collar on her. She had died from feeding on a poisoned carcass and was left there headless and pawless, her collar chucked into a nearby waterhole.

“I’ve seen furrows dug into the earth and the trees flattened all around, from where a mother elephant circled her calf until it died there in the snare,” Troskie says. “I remember a buffalo cow that was caught, and she broke the tree and dragged it behind her only to be caught in a second snare. Then, while dying there, basically from stress, she went into labor.” 

Troskie found the calf lying behind her. It, too, had died.

Calling in the Cavalry

The day after I join Troskie’s team on the snare sweep, Desmet leads me to the stables behind her office at the Phalaborwa Ranger Station. A short and wiry woman who’s constantly attended by a pair of working dogs, she wears a solemn expression as she walks. But when her horse trots over to nuzzle her shoulder, I see what might be interpreted as a smile .

The longer we talk, the more I can understand Desmet’s hardness. 

She tells me about her husband, Andrew, a SANParks ranger who was shot five times while tracking a group of poachers. Andrew lost a few ribs, his spleen, and half a lung, and is lucky to be alive. 

There are also plenty of other ways to be killed in the African bush.

“I can’t recall any people dying from snake bites,” Desmet says. “But buffalo, elephants, and, yeah, hippos. I think it was two years back, when two field rangers were charged by a buffalo, and one ranger accidentally shot the other one.”

Still, poachers are their biggest threat. Most of them just want to shoot their rhino, take the horns, and get out, says Desmet. But if you confront them, they will fight back.

Miraculously, only one of Kruger’s field rangers has been killed by a poacher in an armed confrontation. This is due in large part to the training they’ve received since around 2012. At that time, Kruger’s poaching problem had gotten so out of hand that SANParks brought in a former South African Army General to transform the ranger corps into a paramilitary unit.  

“We had no other options. The world was saying to South Africa, ‘Look what is happening. You can’t even protect your own wildlife.’ And it was a bold step at the time,” General Johan Jooste tells Outdoor Life of his appointment as chief ranger of Kruger Park in December 2012. “It was also an intervention of necessity.” 

SANParks’ records from 2012 show that 425 rhinos were poached in Kruger Park during that year alone — a 50 percent uptick from the year prior. By 2014, the number would climb to 1,215. 

“Nothing could prepare me for what I found there, that I can confess,” says Jooste, who had previously retired as deputy chief of the South African Army after a 35-year career. “We were losing around three rhinos a day. You would fly out in a helicopter and see three of four [carcasses] in an area the size of a football field … It was never ending.”

Jooste’s appointment during the height of Kruger’s rhino-poaching crisis was steeped in controversy. And there are some who still criticize the hard-handed approach — which introduced surveillance equipment, dogs trained to subdue poachers, and military-grade weapons — as ineffective at addressing the root causes of poaching. (Jooste details his experience at Kruger in the book, Rhino War, that he co-wrote with journalist Tony Parks.) But the discipline and strategies that were implemented during the General’s tenure have fundamentally stabilized — or at least, displaced — the park’s rhino poaching problem.

By establishing counter-intelligence networks, incorporating new technology, and coordinating with surrounding parks and game reserves, the SANParks ranger corps has gotten better at thwarting poachers. The number of rhinos killed in Kruger started declining by 2017, Jooste points out, even as the number of incursions into the park increased or remained the same. 

The transformation of Kruger’s ranger corps into an elite, anti-poaching unit has also been a model for other African parks and private reserves. Many of them are now using similar strategies to protect their own wildlife populations.

“We lost many rhino, and it was painful. It still is. But we also saved a lot of rhino,” Jooste says, noting there’s a core rhino population in Kruger that’s recovering. “People say there are less rhino being poached [today] because there are fewer rhino to be found. Yes. But they all would have been killed if we didn’t keep up the effort.”

High Fences, Chainsaws, and the Cost of Raising Rhinos

The two rhinos on the far side of the tank pay us little mind as Phillip Vivier parks the Land Cruiser near its edge. My guide, Vivier, is also their caretaker. The field manager for a rhino rehabilitation center and private wildlife reserve near Hoedspruit, he expected the cow and her 18-month-old calf to be here.

Rhinos rarely venture far from water during dry periods, Vivier explains, and the current drought has been so bad he’s had to supplement their diet with hay. The cow is still nosing through the remains of a pile he’d left days earlier when I notice the two stumps where her horns should be. 

The whole idea behind dehorning is to make a rhino less appealing to poachers. It’s one way to keep an animal around that is worth more dead than alive.  

Electric high fences also help with security — as does hiring someone like Vivier, who can look after a herd full-time. A softspoken scientist with a thick Afrikaans accent, Vivier has a background in wildlife rehabilitation. Most of the rhinos he looks after were orphaned by poachers and, once rescued, hand-reared. They live on the 3,500-acre reserve along with the full suite of plains game and predators, including lions, hyenas, and leopards. This is as close as they can get to the wild while still having the protections that a private reserve offers.

These rhinoceroses aren’t a rarity. Today, more than 60 percent of South Africa’s white rhinos are privately owned. 

Looking after a rhino isn’t easy or affordable, however, and Vivier says that by dehorning their animals, they can save a small fortune on security costs. The property where Vivier works and lives still has its own anti-poaching unit, complete with a trained K9, that patrols the reserve constantly.

“A lot of the reserves around us were against de-horning at first, because they were afraid that people, especially photographers, wouldn’t want to see it,” Vivier says. “The thing is, it’s better to see a rhino with no horn than no rhino at all.”

Dehorning is now commonplace across most reserves, and it’s being done more and more in public parks like Kruger. Vivier says modern rhinos can live and reproduce just fine without horns, which are used primarily by bulls to assert their dominance. (Rhinos use their horns, to a lesser extent, for self-defense and foraging.) 

Their horns, which are made of keratin, also grow back. Using tranquilizers, chalk, and a chainsaw, a good team of wildlife veterinarians can put down, de-horn, and wake up a rhino inside 20 minutes. They can then repeat the procedure every one to two years as needed. 

I can’t help asking Vivier where the center keeps their sawed-off horns — current law requires rhino owners to store them in a secure location. He says he honestly doesn’t know. Because these days, even someone like Vivier is not above suspicion. 

The War from Within

The most insidious aspect of South Africa’s wildlife war goes beyond the sheer number of animals killed to the number of people with a hand in the killing. Beneath the criminal hierarchy of kingpins, middlemen, and trigger pullers is a vast network of supporters greasing the wheels. This corruption exists at all levels, from the courts and local police — which help poachers and traffickers avoid prosecution — to the guides, maids, contractors, and other service workers who get paid for information.

“It’s not just one individual poacher who goes onto a property looking for rhino,” Vivier explains. “You’ll typically have an informant who tells them where the animals are.”      

General Jooste says he’d recognized the scope of the corruption problem as soon as his second week on the job at Kruger. He says this “war from within” has been one of the hardest things to confront. Because as poaching gangs find it harder to get past field rangers, they’re not only expanding their efforts to less secure areas — they’re ramping up their bribes. And rangers, who aren’t paid much for the thankless and dangerous work they do, aren’t immune to temptation.

“We tried to be good leaders by noticing where a guy or girl was leaning that way, so we could engage with them one-on-one,” Jooste says. “We’ve also considered amnesty, where a ranger was involved once or twice. And then in another category, you have the snakes. And you hunt them down with all the resources you have.” 

Rodney Landela was one of the slithery ones. Known as the “crown prince” of Kruger’s field rangers, Landela was promoted to regional ranger by Jooste, and most assumed he’d make chief ranger someday. That all changed in July 2016, when Landela and a state veterinarian were arrested for allegedly poaching rhinos near Kingfisherspruit. Rangers found two bloody rhino horns and an axe in the getaway vehicle. They also discovered two additional horns nearby, along with a hunting rifle issued to Landela.

“It was a great shock to the system, and one is not prepared for that,” Jooste says about Landela’s bust. “What do you say to the rest of the rangers?”

Desmet, too, lacks the right words.

“I don’t actually know how to describe it, that betrayal,” she says.

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Landela has yet to be convicted of any crimes. SANParks spokesperson Isaac Phaahla says there have been several delays in the court proceedings, including postponements filed by Landela’s defense attorney. Phaahla expects the case to resume in February.

Then there are people like Anton Mzimba, who worked as head ranger at Timbavati, a large private reserve that borders Kruger National Park. A prominent figure in his local community of Bushbuckridge, Mzimba earned a reputation for being incorruptible. During his 25-year-career as a ranger, he repeatedly turned down offers to provide information to poaching syndicates.

Role models make conspicuous targets, however. And by 2022, as Mzimba was about to be featured in the full-length documentary Rhino Man, the offers from poachers had turned to death threats. He received several phone calls that spring warning him and his family, but he carried on with his duties. On July 26 that year, Mzimba was gunned down at home in front of his wife and children. His wife was shot, too, but survived. Mzimba died on the way to the hospital. 

Those familiar with the situation say there is no doubt that the shooting was an organized, mob-style hit. Mzimba’s killers took no money and sped away after firing the shots.

It has now been more than two years since Mzimba’s murder, and authorities have yet to file any charges — an injustice that still weighs heavily on the local conservation community. At the same time, Mzimba’s legacy is an inspiration for the next generation of wildlife warriors.

“What I’m doing now, I’m not doing for my own sake,” Mzimba said in an interview just five months before he was murdered. “I’m doing this for the world, for my children’s children, so that one day, when I hang my boots — when I retire, when I die — they are going to enjoy the wildlife.”

John Jurko, who directed Rhino Man and became close with Mzimba’s family during filming, is now leading a campaign to support the ongoing murder investigation. Jurko tells Outdoor Life three of Mzimba’s sons now want to be field rangers when they grow up. 

They’ll be needed, too. Because the war for South Africa’s wildlife has continued since Mzimba’s death, and in some ways it has worsened.

Holding the Line

As the criminal gangs who profit from poaching find new ways to turn a buck, Desmet and other rangers are seeing more pressure on a whole variety of species. Some of the most concerning, she says, are the elephants, lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild dogs. The lesser-known pangolin, meanwhile, remains the most highly trafficked mammal on the planet. Like rhinos, these animals are being killed for their parts — their tusks and claws and scales and bones —  that fuel the roughly $20 billion black market for illegal wildlife.  

Desmet’s growing focus is around snare poaching and poisoning, which have far-ranging effects on the larger ecosystem. She says vulture populations are visibly declining, and notes a recent incident where 80-plus vultures were discovered dead. This ultimately benefits the poachers, she explains, since rangers use the birds to detect carcasses.

“We had another scene recently, just on the other side of our border, where we found two [dead] lions, a lioness with a cub. They found another scene nearby with one [dead] lioness and two sub-adults. That is basically like wiping out a whole pride.”

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It can be hard on a person to witness this systematic deletion of wildlife. SANParks field rangers are now required to see a psychologist after every contact with a poacher, and Desmet says more than one ranger has committed suicide over the years.

“For some people it’s the psychological and emotional stress of seeing a dead person, which we have to deal with quite a lot,” she says. “And I’ve seen so many dead rhino. We’ve actually brought people out just to show them, ‘Look at this carcass just lying there with the horns chopped off. And there’s an orphaned baby rhino just a few days old …’ Sorry, I get …”

Desmet pauses as I look down at the dirt and give her a moment. 

“So many things that are mentally not good for you. And if you see those things, you’ll understand.” 

By 12:15 p.m., it’s around 100 degrees out. We’ve removed 127 snares, along with a poacher’s spear made of sharpened rebar and a crudely welded knife that was stashed in the crook of a tree. I’m physically beat and sun-cooked, my water bottle as dry as the sand under my boots. I’m trying my best to hide the discomfort when I’m hit with a one-two punch. The stinging in my eyeballs from sweat and sunscreen mixes with the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh.

We find the dead impala nearby, a pile of hide and bones surrounded by six other snares. I walk away with clenched teeth as my eyes begin to water. I wish I could blame the sunscreen, but I know they are tears of rage.

The post Hunting for Poachers Amid South Africa’s Bloody Wildlife War appeared first on Outdoor Life.

Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/south-africa-anti-poaching/