A bittersweet report received through our Management Headquarters this week. A dead rhino. Unfortunately, as one does in this landscape, you immediately jump to the poaching scenario.
Security and investigations teams fly up to the report area, expecting to find a brutal scene of a carcass. Lists of protocols and phone calls to be made; all at the top of their minds. Scenario after scenario coming to mind, of how and where the incursion could have occurred; internal involvement and of course the worst-case scenario of possibly finding an orphan calf which would need instant care and relocation to a rehabilitation centre.
These are just a few of the scenarios that run through all our security and Conservation staff’s minds, having lived and worked through it all too often since the proliferation of rhino poaching in 2008.
With a sigh of relieve, it was discovered that the deceased animal was actually our ‘Northern Gogo (Grandmother)’ or ‘Old Lady’ who we light-heartedly refer to her as. She gently passed away from age, lying in, what looked like, a comfortable resting position. What the sweet, in the bittersweet is, is that we are able to celebrate that this old cow lived her life through to the end and died as she was intended, naturally and probably due to the recent cold snap. Her estimated age was around 39-40 years old, the limit at which White Rhino have been known to live to in the wild. We first came in close contact with her in May 2022 during the initial dehorning operation which we sadly initiated due to the unrelenting pressure of poaching in South Africa. A decision which was not taken lightly and was based on prediction models on population viability in relation to annual poaching rates. We surpassed the threshold in 2021 which resulted in the decision to dehorn our population of rhino in early 2022. On the bright side it gave us an opportunity to understand and document all the individual rhino in our protected area at that time. This is when we first documented the advanced age of this female and have since realised how lucky she was to have lived and died naturally; providing the important role of an ecosystem engineer and facilitator of natural processes necessary for other species to thrive and survive. So, a bittersweet day it was! RIP Old Lady ‘.
Photo Credit:Marcel Viljoen
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