Rhino Poaching: Meet Its Human Victims

In a candid and sometimes emotional interview, Dr Dave Cooper, an award-winning wildlife veterinarian with Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, reveals the toll that the rhino poaching scourge is taking on him and his colleagues.

- Lloyd Phillips

How long have you been a wildlife veterinarian, and what does your job typically entail?

I began working for the then KwaZulu-Natal Parks Board, now Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, in 1995. For many years, my job involved ensuring the welfare of animals that were captured and trans located to other conservation areas. At the same time, I conducted disease surveillance and control in game populations within KZN Wildlife’s protected areas. I also had to treat animals that were caught in poachers’ snares.

However, over time my work priorities have changed, mostly due to rhino poaching. Whereas I used to conduct only two or three forensic post-mortems a year on poached rhino, since about five years ago this has rapidly escalated and I now spend about a third of the year conducting forensic post-mortems on poached rhino and treating rhino wounded by poachers.

Also taking up much of my time nowadays is the insertion of tracking devices into live rhino for security purposes, dehorning live rhino as a deterrent to poachers, and strategic translocations of rhino out of high-threat areas.

When a rhino has been killed or wounded in a poaching incident, how are you required to respond?

My primary role is to collect any physical evidence related to the death or wounding of the animal. This mostly involves collecting the bullets that may have led to its death or injury. This evidence is then handed over to the police to be used in follow-up investigations. I’m also tasked with determining the cause of each rhino’s death, which may not necessarily be a result of a poacher’s bullet. If a rhino poaching case does eventually get to court, which, unfortunately, does not happen often enough, the evidence presented against the suspects must be reliable, and must have been collected by a credible witness such as the attending veterinarian.