Fiona Macleod
A ranger shooting a rhinoceros in the world-renowned Kruger National Park goes against everything national wildlife reserves represent. Hunting and poaching are forbidden in these reserves, and one of the rangers’ jobs is to protect endangered wild animals like rhinos from people who want to shoot them.
But what about a ranger who finds himself caught between a charging animal and tourists walking in the bush with him? Should he be allowed to shoot to kill?
It’s a rare occurrence. The Wilderness Leadership School (WLS), which pioneered the concept of taking tourists into the wilderness on foot, has been conducting walking trails in the nature reserves of KwaZulu-Natal for 30 years. In those 30 years, only two animals have been shot by WLS rangers because they threatened the lives of tourists.
In the Kruger park, which has offered walking trails for the past 21 years, an average of one or two such shootings happen each year. Experts put this discrepancy in the numbers down to the law of probabilities. The Kruger offers far more trails – with about 6 000 traillists every year – than the WLS, which takes a maximum of 440.
But knowing these statistics doesn’t lessen the trauma of witnessing the death of a white rhino bull, killed because people were walking in its territory and it took offence.
White rhinos are the second-largest mammals on land. When they run, the ground shudders; at a charge, a white rhino is like a steamroller without a driver.
With a bullet in the brain, this awesome creature stops dead in its tracks. It crumples, its legs tucked up underneath it, blood pouring from its nostrils.
Perhaps, when our hearts have stopped pounding and we sit quietly, an ear will prick up or the legs move again. It’s hard to believe such a tiny wound can stop 2 300kg of thundering mass so quickly.
I was one of seven traillists on the Wolhuter wilderness trail in the south- western corner of the Kruger park recently. We had come within 30m of eight white rhinos and more than 50 elephants over two days of walking through the bush.
As senior ranger Jaco Badenhorst pointed out, though, bumping into big game was not the main object of the exercise.
“Wilderness trails are aimed at people who want to walk in vast, unspoilt areas,” he said. “They are about solitude, remoteness, the wonder of nature. Here, animals have right of way. Our objective is to observe them doing their natural thing, not to disturb them.”
In the 21 years that the Kruger park has conducted walking trails, only three people have been injured. Two were lightly wounded by wild animals, one was bitten by snakes.
Again, knowing these statistics did not reduce the adrenalin rush every time we came across one of the “big five”. But our confidence in Badenhorst and his assistant ranger, Sandros Chivodze, grew with each incident-free encounter. Perhaps we became too confident.
In the dying rays of the last day, after we had sauntered past three elephant bulls, Badenhorst chided us: “Maybe you are getting too blas. Remember, these are elephants and rhinos, and they can turn at any time.”
Ironically, 20 minutes later we saw the massive white rhino bull about 100m away on a hillside. We circled through the bush to get closer, and he must have got wind of us. There was no time for the rangers to throw sticks or fire a warning shot to deflect his charge, as is customary.
Most of the traillists scrambled behind a rocky outcrop, but at least one was still out in the open. Badenhorst shouted desperately at the top of his voice, but the rhino came straight towards us. When it was about 5m away from him, Badenhorst fired two shots into its brain and Chivodze fired one shot into the body of the bull.
Quick as a flash, a life had been lost – and the memories of our trail had changed for ever.
Badenhorst crouched dejectedly at the head of the slumped animal. “It’s so unnecessary,” he whispered.
Would things have been different had the rangers not carried guns? Would we have been more cautious in approaching that rhino bull?
‘We’ve debated this point,” says the director of the WLS, Bruce Dell. “But I doubt if anyone is going to say let’s give it a try. And who will come with you if you do? Definitely not your average American tourist.”
Adds Bruce Bryden, head of the Kruger wilderness trails rangers: “Our standpoint is that the rangers only shoot as a last resort. Our approach is not to antagonise the animals, but there’s not a single animal whose life is worth more than a person’s life.”
Is it fair, then – to the people and the animals – to take walkers into areas where they are threatened by animals? A basic philosophy of wilderness trails is that the people should leave behind nothing but their footprints.
“Carl Jung said the wilderness is a great mirror, that we see parts of ourselves reflected in it,” says Dell. “These tragedies leave you with feelings of guilt. There’s a perception that we cause the death of an animal just by being there, or by breaking certain rules.
“Then you start asking, why do we need to be there, why don’t we just leave the animals alone? The answer has to be that humans are not separate from animals. We also have to kill and be killed. The peace and harmony in nature is part of this.”