The Pretoria High Court has suspended the death sentence hanging over Baixinha, a highly endangered black rhino due to be killed in a “canned” hunt on a farm in North West province.
Judge Hekkie Daniels ruled last Friday that Baixinha must be moved to a wildlife sanctuary, safe from the “hunters” prepared to pay up to $60 000 to hang her head on a wall.
The ruling could have major implications for the “canned” lion-hunting industry, the culling of Table Mountain’s tahrs and other controversial wildlife management decisions. The Wildlife Sanctuary Group, a coalition of local animal welfare organisations, says the Baixinha judgement could see thousands of permits regulating South Africa’s wildlife industry declared unlawful.
Baixinha (“pretty one”) is one of less than 500 East African rhinos left in the world. Now 26 years old, she was imported to South Africa 13 years ago to become the star of a wildlife celebrity ranch near Brits. She is so tame that movie crews and tourists are able to stroke her.
A Mail & Guardian report in June last year about plans to “hunt” her caused a worldwide furore among conservationists and animal lovers. SanWild wildlife sanctuary in Limpopo negotiated with Baixinha’s financial backer, American businessman David Laylin, to raise the funds to buy her and move her to safety.
“I want to allow her to live out the rest of her life in a natural sanctuary,” says SanWild founder Louise Joubert.
“She will have a full-time human companion, but it is too early to say whether she will cope with introducing her to a rhino companion after all these years of being on her own.”
The SanWild Wildlife Trust launched an urgent court action after an application for a permit to move Baixinha was turned down four times by officials in the Limpopo Department of Finance, Economic Affairs and Tourism. Laylin’s frustration at the rejection of the permits led to him renegotiating with overseas “hunters” to have her turned into a trophy.
In his judgement Judge Daniels ruled that junior officials in provincial departments are not competent to deny permits unless they have explicit authority from the MEC to do so. He said the officials who rejected Baixinha’s permit had not applied their minds properly to the case, and he overruled their decision with costs.
While Baixinha gets to move to a place of safety later this month, the Wildlife Sanctuary Group says the judgement could mean thousands of permits authorised by junior provincial officials around the country since 1995 are effectively unlawful.
“We are taking legal advice on whether to use this judgement to challenge every permit which has been unlawfully issued to the detriment of animal welfare,” says Chris Mercer, a former advocate and member of the Wildlife Sanctuary Group.
This could include permits issued for an estimated 2 500 lions being kept in small enclosures by more than 40 lion breeders around the country, who charge between R50 000 and R500 000 to have them “hunted”. Watch this space./
} Tobias endorses critical importance of new skull find
` Nicola Mawson and Sapa
^ The discovery of a pre-human ancestor skull in Chad has forced scientists to rethink theories on the origins of humankind.
The find is the oldest trace yet of a pre-human ancestor.
The skull is of a previously unknown species that walked upright as far back as seven million years ago.
It was found 2 414km west of earlier pre-human discoveries in East Africa.
It has been nicknamed Toumai, which means “hope of life” in Goran, a language spoken in Chad, and was found with jaw fragments and several teeth.
Toumai was uncovered a year ago by a 40-person Franco-Chadian research team led by Professor Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France.
“The skull is of considerable significance for the unravelling of human evolution in Africa, and on the planet Earth”, says Phillip Tobias, Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and a world authority on palaeoanthropology.
Toumai, of the newly dubbed species Sahelanthropus tchadensis, is one million years older than previous hominid fossils. The discovery challenges previous beliefs about the evolution of man.
Tobias says: “What is so terribly important about this high antiquity is that for 25 years scientists have held the view that the hominids [family of mankind] separated from the ancestral chimpanzees between five and seven million years ago.
“Since 1975 there has been a worldwide consensus that the earliest hominids appeared on the face of the Earth in Africa between five and seven million years before the present.
“For the first time we have a skull that has been dated to seven million years old, about a million years older than the previous record holder, which weighed in at six million years, in Kenya and was found only last year,” says Tobias.
Sceptics questioned French researcher Brigitte Senut’s find of a new six million-year-old hominid species, Orrorin tugeneniss, in Kenya.
Toumai reinforces her find and dates the separation of man and chimpanzee further back than previously thought.
Tobias says: “The new find has forced us to rethink that dogma and it indubitably overthrows the five and seven million year paradigm. If the new Chad specimen, affectionately nicknamed Toumai, was seven million years old, and if it was a hominid, it means that the split of our line from that of the chimps occurred yet earlier.”
Tobias says that he is not surprised to find there were hominoids seven million years ago because “Swedish colleagues have found good molecular evidence that the five to seven million-year story was out by a factor of two. This is to say, the chimps and hominoids separated from one another between eight million and 12-million years ago.”
Tobias points out that the find reinforces the general belief that humankind originated in Africa.
“The fact that the new specimen is found in the republic of Chad, 2 414km west of the Great Rift Valley from which so many of the East African finds had come, confirms a view I have long held. Clearly, the origin of humankind was not an East African phenomenon, not a South African kick-off, but a Pan-African happening.
“This great African continent, which is nearly a quarter of the world’s habitable land surface, was the cradle of humanity.”
Tobias said that while he had not seen the specimen yet, from the accounts it provided a stunning illustration of the way in which our ancestors humanised.
“Some parts humanised early and rapidly, some parts lagged behind. Thus, our teeth and posture were human-like long before our brains!
“A very big shake-up will follow, even in regard to the time of origin of modern humans,” Tobias predicted.