One of Southern Africa’s most noted conservationists, Clem Coetzee, died after suffering a heart attack at his farm in southern Zimbabwe, family members and friends said on Thursday. He was 67.
Coetzee, an internationally renowned veteran game ranger who pioneered techniques to relocate elephants and a wide range of wild animals from habitats affected by drought and environmental degradation, collapsed on Sunday after an early-morning tour of his farm and its wildlife research and breeding pens in the Triangle district, about 400km south-east of Harare.
”His death is a great loss to wildlife conservation not only in Zimbabwe, but [also] elsewhere in Africa,” said Justice for Agriculture, a farmers’ support group, in a tribute on Thursday.
Coetzee developed methods to move elephants in family groups by darting them with sedatives from a helicopter and lifting them via heavy-duty rubber conveyor belts into truck containers or freight train cars, where they were revived and fed and given water for journeys of hundreds of kilometres.
In the Gonarezhou nature preserve in southern Zimbabwe during a drought in 1992, he moved at least 40 elephants to new habitats in neighbouring South Africa in the first operation of its kind in which electronic tracking microchips were implanted beneath the animals’ skin.
Subsequent groundbreaking research showed the elephants suffered no ill effects of being moved — as long as the family unit of bulls, cows and young was left mostly intact.
The technique was later used to relocate game animals in Kenya and several other African countries.
He was also responsible for spearheading a campaign to sedate and saw off the horn of the endangered African rhinoceros as a means of combating rhino poaching.
Rhino horn is prized in the Middle East and Asia for traditional dagger handles and as a medicine in its ground form.
Coetzee is survived by his wife, Em; his daughter, Beth; his son, Vicus; and three grandchildren. A funeral service is planned in the garden of his farm in southern Zimbabwe on Saturday. — Sapa-AP