Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (27 page)

His voice rises in anger. ‘I don’t want legalisation in a selfish way. The
rhino
needs legalisation … There is only one victim in this whole fuck-up: the rhino. I don’t mind being called names, but it doesn’t help the bloody rhino.’

The legalisation debate is one of the most divisive and incendiary issues in conservation today. Ian Player has faced a ‘torrent of abuse’ for his tentative support of the idea. ‘In conservation, you have to develop a skin as thick as the pachyderms’ for which you are responsible,’ he once told me during an interview. He believes that consideration should be given to opening trade for horns obtained ‘from natural mortalities and shavings’.

Many private rhino owners and a fair number of conservationists have thrown their weight behind public calls for the 1977 CITES trade ban to be lifted. Within SANParks and South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs there are a number of officials who privately express a belief that legal commercial trade may be the answer. Wildlife authorities in KwaZulu-Natal have also made a strong case for legalisation. ‘[A] rhino is worth more dead than alive,’ says Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife rhino security co-ordinator Jabulani Ngubane. ‘Today you can buy a rhino on auction for about R300 000. Tomorrow you can sell the horn of that animal for R1.5 million.’

The price of live rhinos is decreasing as poaching incidents increase and the animals become ‘a liability rather than an asset’.

For the past twenty years, conservation economist Michael ’t Sas-Rolfes has argued in favour of reopening legal trade in rhino horn. The CITES ban, he says, has succeeded only in driving the trade underground and making it nearly impossible to monitor. The spike in poaching in South Africa from 2008 and 2009 onwards coincided with increasing restrictions on hunting and a moratorium on internal domestic trade in rhino horns. He believes that farmers like Groenewald ‘played a role in delaying an inevitable resurgence of poaching activity’ rather than creating a market or ‘fuelling a demand’ for rhino horn.

‘The fact that poaching levels started to rise dramatically after the imposition of restrictions on domestic trade and Vietnamese hunts suggests that
the South African suppliers were not only not “fuelling demand”, but had probably been acting as a buffer against potential poaching activity.’

Were it not for them, ’t Sas-Rolfes believes the sudden increase in poaching would have ‘started far sooner than it did’.

‘The rhino horn trade ban no longer makes either economic or conservation sense,’ he writes. ‘The natural mortality rate of rhinos in Africa alone yields as much horn as has been poached to supply the market in recent years. Furthermore, rhino horn is a renewable resource that can be easily harvested without killing rhinos. And African conservation agencies and landowners already hold between fifteen to thirty years’ supply of rhino horn [at the current rate of black market supply]. These stockpiles are worth millions of dollars, money that could be usefully spent on rhino conservation, but the ban will not allow them to be sold to raise this money.’

Tom Milliken, the regional director for TRAFFIC in East and southern Africa, disagrees. ‘The notion of legalising the rhino horn trade is hugely problematic for the simple fact that all of the Asian consuming countries, including Vietnam, have banned its usage. So, if you legalise this commodity, and you start to trade it, who are you dealing with? You do not have the support, at least yet, of any Asian government who’s willing to change their legislation. So, if you’re going to market horn as a legal commodity, you’re basically marketing it to criminals. Rhino horn presents a real challenge for a legalised trade at this time. As a commodity – you can’t see it. It ceases to appear as a horn. It’s ground up. Regulating a trade like this to try and keep the legal stream unpolluted by illegal horn laundered into it presents a challenge that, at this point in time, can’t be effectively met. So I think, for the moment, it’s completely off the table.’

In a 2012 newspaper article, Richard Vigne, the CEO of the OI Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, said there was a danger that legalisation would give legitimacy to claims that rhino horn had medical benefits. ‘That, in turn, could stimulate increasing demand amongst two billion Far Easterners, far beyond the capacity of Africa’s remaining rhinos to supply. Prices for horn would therefore be driven upwards rather than downwards. In the absence of absolutely watertight controls over the legal trade, the same criminals who currently specialise in killing rhinos would thus be incentivised to
remain involved for short-term gain, and poaching pressure would increase rather than decrease.’

It started with a leopard. In January 2010, Dawie Groenewald was arrested by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Montgomery, Alabama. He was at the airport, about to board an aircraft back to South Africa after visiting his brother Janneman. A month later, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of smuggling and infringements of the Lacey Act, the US wildlife statute.

Groenewald was accused of selling an illegal leopard hunt to a US sports hunter, Glen Davey, in 2006, but no permit was issued to the hunter that year. Two years later, when the trophy was finally exported, Groenewald attempted to cover his tracks by ‘fraudulently’ applying for a leopard hunting permit in the hunter’s name. CITES export paperwork stated ‘falsely’ that the animal had been killed in 2008, not 2006.

Groenewald spent eight days in jail and two-and-half months under house arrest at his brother’s home as the case dragged on. He eventually pleaded guilty, was sentenced to ‘time served’ and fined $30 000.

‘The United States is not a good place to sit in jail,’ Groenewald says. ‘They treat you like a serial killer, my friend. I had flu. I was so fucking sick, I almost died. The guys were nuts in that place. They would block the toilets with toilet paper and flush the thing so the whole jail cell is under water. It was the worst time in my life. For a fucking leopard?’

He maintains that the hunt was legal, that he had a permit for the leopard, but that the paperwork got lost by nature conservation officials. Groenewald says while he was under house arrest in the US, his business in South Africa was losing money and he couldn’t afford to remain in the US any longer. So, against his lawyer’s advice, he pleaded guilty. ‘Now I’ve got a felony conviction against me, so I’m kicked out of Safari Club International for five years and I can’t go to their shows.

‘It is not like we wanted to smuggle a leopard into the States. The stories doing the rounds are unbelievable – that we were smuggling rhino horn
inside the trophy and that sort of shit. I can tell you, a lot of it is jealousy. Jealousy plays a big role in this.’

The Limpopo police Organised Crime Unit had begun ‘Project Cruiser’, their investigation into Groenewald’s activities, in June 2009. The investigation was registered after two of Groenewald’s farm labourers, Paul Mathoromela and Joseph Maluleke, were stopped by police near Pretoria. Four rhino horns were found in their vehicle and they were arrested. (The horns subsequently disappeared from a locked police safe in a forensics laboratory and were replaced with plaster copies. Three years later, a senior police administration clerk, Azarial Matjila, was arrested and appeared in court on charges of stealing the horns and defeating the course of justice. He denied any wrong doing.)

It was while Groenewald languished in his Alabama jail cell, and then later at his brother’s home in the US, that another incident occurred that piqued the police’s interest. In February 2010, one of the professional hunters (PHs) working for Groenewald, Gys du Preez, filed a police report about a break-in at the farm. Thieves had stolen dozens of rhino horns, he said.

‘I was on my “long vacation” in the States,’ Groenewald tells me. ‘About eighty horns were stolen. [They were hidden] under my couches and the beds in my room. Somebody just broke in and cleaned out [the place]. An inside job.’

Tielman Erasmus, another PH, who was present at the farm at the time, claimed that the horns had not been locked up in the lodge’s walk-in safe because ‘all our waiters and staff have got safe keys’.

‘That is why we didn’t keep it in there. They all go in and out of the safe all the time to get booze, etcetera.’ What about the bank? I asked, thinking of Hume’s stockpiles.

‘The bank doesn’t want to take it,’ Groenewald says, ‘and it takes six months or seven months to get Reserve Bank clearance.’

All the horns had been microchipped, he says, but it is ‘so easy to take a chip out. You can just drill it out or break it.’

The police took another view. According to a statement by Colonel Johan Jooste, the head of the endangered species unit at South Africa’s Directorate for Priority Crimes Investigations, the Hawks, ‘police suspected something untoward’, and investigations later ‘determined that the house break-in was staged’.

According to Jooste, Groenewald had discovered a way he could ‘score twice’: dehorning rhinos and then selling the horns and the dehorned animals separately. ‘During 2009, at least fifty-nine rhinoceroses were moved from the farm, of which nineteen were dehorned. This trend continued in 2010, when 100 rhinoceroses were moved from the farm, of which sixty-four were dehorned.’

Prosecutors will argue during Groenewald’s trial that, while he was in custody in the US, he became increasingly worried that environmental inspectors might visit his farm and discover dozens of newly dehorned rhinos, but no horns. The ‘break-in’ solved that problem.

Colonel Johan Jooste is almost always in a hurry. ‘If I don’t answer my cellphone, it is because I’m busy, not because I’m ignoring you,’ he tells everyone he gives his number to. His phone never stops ringing. There are five detectives in his unit tasked with investigating wildlife crime – specifically rhino horn cases – across South Africa. Jooste’s men don’t investigate all the cases themselves, but they play a major support role in collating and distributing information, guiding local investigations and ensuring that big cases are pulled together properly.

In contrast, twenty years ago, when Jooste joined what was then the Endangered Species Protection Unit, it had thirty members.

Jackie Selebi, South Africa’s disgraced former national police commissioner, saw to it in 2002 that the ESPU and other specialist units like it were shut down and their officers scattered to police stations. The long-term consequences were devastating. With the demise of the ESPU, Jooste joined South Africa’s elite FBI-style crime-fighting unit, the Scorpions.

But the Scorpions fell victim to the political intrigues surrounding the abortive corruption trial of South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma, and Jooste found himself back in the police at the helm of an endangered species ‘desk’ in 2009.

Months later, in response to the worsening rhino crisis, the desk was expanded into a unit. In January 2010, the National Prosecuting Authority also
established a specialised organised crime component to work closely with Jooste’s unit to bring rhino horn cases to book. It is headed by Advocate Joanie Spies, a seasoned prosecutor. Rhino poaching was declared a ‘priority crime’.

Jooste believes that the hunting and game-farming industries need to be ‘cleaned up’.

‘I get the
moer
in with some of the farmers,’ he says. ‘When they all made money out of rhinos, everything was fine. But now that the shit has hit the fan, it is the police’s fault. Some of them helped create the market [for rhino horn]. Some of them dealt illegally, and now that this thing has come back to bite them, it is the police’s fault.’

The Groenewald case was the first major case investigated by the newly formed rhino task team. Political and public pressure for arrests had been steadily mounting. In May 2010, Jooste took over the faltering Limpopo Organised Crime Unit investigation. Five months later, Groenewald and his co-accused were arrested.

Jooste’s investigations turned up evidence that rhinos were ‘regularly being killed and dehorned on the farm’. Between June and August 2008, Groenewald sold twenty rhino carcasses to Daniel Karl Johnson, the owner of the Taste of Africa butchery a few kilometres from his farm.