Rhinos relocating Down Under

Gaborone – The founder of the Australian Rhino Project says his organisation will over the next four years relocate 80 rhinos from South Africa to Australia to save them from rampant poaching, which saw more than one thousand of the animals killed last year.

In an interview aired on Monday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australian Rhino Project founder Ray Dearlove said the first six white rhinos would be moved into a quarantine facility in Johannesburg in May before being airlifted to the Monarto Zoo Safari Park outside the city of Adelaide in Australia in August.

According to Dearlove, the relocation, which he described as a “biological insurance policy” against extinction, had been approved by the governments of South Africa and Australia.

“There is no safe place in Africa for rhinos today. They have become extinct pretty much from the top down to South Africa where probably 85 to 90 percent of the white and black southern rhinos that are left in the world are.”

The numbers are deteriorating fast. “I thought Australia is one of the safest places on the planet to start this breeding herd, with the eventual intention that they would be repatriated to Africa when those [poaching] issues are sorted out. If you or I don't do anything about it, who is going to do something about it?”

Dearlove told ABC. He said the Australian Rhino Project would relocate 20 rhinos, acquired at a cost of $75,000 each, per year from South Africa between 2015 and 2019.

The first six white rhinos would be airlifted to a quarantine facility in Johannesburg where they will be held between May and August before being flown to a second quarantine faciity at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Australia. After another two months in the quarantine facility, the rhinos would be airlifted to their destination at the Monarto Zoo safari park outside Adelaide in October.

However, Dearlove did not say where the project, which has been widely criticised as a commercial breeding and sale programme by South African conservationists, would source the rhinos from.

Dearlove and the South African government have for the past three years tried without success to convince a deeply skeptical global conservationist lobby that the project is focused on the conservation and not commercial exploitation of the plight of rhinos.

The conservation lobby has consistently accused Dearlove, an Australian citizen of South African extraction, of taking advantage of the poaching threat to make commercial gains from the breeding and sale of the rhinos. – African News Agency