A shift to save rhinos?

The Hindu , Friday, May 13, 2016
Correspondent : JON DONNISON
A South African expatriate plans to move the giant animals to Australia

A South African expatriate’s desire to protect rhinoceroses from poachers is driving an unusual plan to breed the giant animals down under. “I have a deep passion for rhinos,” 67-year-old Ray Dearlove tells me. Now Dearlove wants to bring rhinos on the same long journey to Australia that he made three decades ago. He’s leading an ambitious project to airlift 80 white rhinoceroses from Southern Africa to Australia in order to protect the animals from poaching.

“Some would say it’s far-fetched, just the idea of another dumb South African,” he admits with a smile. “But with rhinos we’re close to a tipping point right now. We need to start thinking laterally.”

Dearlove’s love of the rhinoceros can be traced to his childhood. He was born and raised in the north-east of South Africa, close to the border with Mozambique.

“The Kruger National Park was on our doorstep so most of our holidays as kids were spent there,” he says, referring to one of Africa’s biggest game reserves. “It was pretty wild at those times when we were little people. I grew up loving animals.” The plan is to airlift 80 white rhinos to Australia over the next four years, with the first batch of 20 to be brought over by the end of 2016. “They will go to an environment as close to the African climate as we can find and as close to the African vegetation as we can find,” he says.

“They need to be in a secure environment where they can breed.”

Dearlove is keeping the exact location close to his chest for now, but says his dream is to one day to have a smaller version of the Kruger National Park somewhere in Australia.

The target is to increase the size of the herd from 80 rhinos to about 130 before eventually repatriating them to Africa, if and when the poaching situation improves.

But rhinos take time to breed.

They have a gestation period of about 16 months and only have one calf at a time. Usually they will wait three to four years before having more offspring.

“With such a high rate of poaching, it’s going to take time to catch up,” says Dearlove. A white rhino weighs about 2500kg.

“When we first started I thought you could just stick them in the hold of a Qantas jet,” he says. “But they’re too tall to fit through the doors of the hold.” Special cargo planes will need to be used for the 11,000km journey from Johannesburg to Sydney, at an estimated cost of about US$60,000 per rhino.— New York Times News Service

 
SOURCE : http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-in-school/a-shift-to-save-rhinos/article8591719.ece
 


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