One of the longest but ultimately most successful battles fought by the SanWild Wildlife Trust was to save a highly endangered black rhino female from a “canned” hunt.
It took 12 months of legal wrangling, endless badgering of officials and countless telephone calls overseas to save the rhino, called Baixinha (“pretty one”). Though she is one of less than 400 East African black rhinos left in the world, Baixinha was being offered to a Norwegian “hunter” for $60 000. Her owners – a Gauteng businessman and his American partner – had been using her for film shoots, so she was tame and friendly towards people.
When SanWild stepped into the fray, Baixinha was lonely, suffering from boredom and very ill. SanWild managed to persuade her owners to allow her to live out the rest of her life in peace at the SanWild natural habitat sanctuary in Limpopo province, but conservation officials refused to give permits for her to be moved.
Baixinha’s physical condition started deteriorating and during the last six months of 2001 she collapsed twice. SanWild arranged for veterinarians to treat her while the trust lodged an urgent application in the Supreme Court.
On July 5 2002, a precedent-setting judgment was given in her favour and she finally arrived at SanWild on July 22 2002. Within three days her ailments cleared up and she showed no ill-effects from the translocation.
“I know that what we did for Baixinha was the right thing. At least now she can live in a place of peace and quiet. It will not be necessary for her to earn her keep – she can just be an old, happy rhino and enjoy the company of the other wild animals that share her world,” says Louise Joubert, SanWild founder and trustee.
Rhinos were the reason why Joubert originally started on the path that led to the establishment of SanWild. In 1989, while she was based in Cape Town and working in marketing, the Rhino & Elephant Foundation launched a fund-raising campaign for black rhinos under the name Project Rhino.
Joubert suggested the foundation run a telethon to raise funds. This was an entirely new concept in fund-raising at the time, but her initiative resulted in National Rhino Pledge Day on October 29 1989. The telethon raised R1,78-million and a large portion was used to buy land to extend the Addo Elephant National Park, which has a significant population of black rhinos.
This brush with wildlife conservation and its personalities changed Joubert’s life. She decided to leave Cape Town and her career behind and moved to Limpopo to work with wild animals. She was soon confronted with one of the darker sides of the growing wildlife industry – the traumas, injuries and fatalities involved in game capture.
The suffering of particularly the young, unweaned animals prompted her into action and she began taking in orphaned and injured animals for hand-raising. She became increasingly successful at raising and releasing plains-game species such as zebras, kudus and blue wildebeests.
Over the past 10 years, she has also become an outspoken critic of unethical and inhumane operators in the wildlife industry. “Everybody likes happy endings and at SanWild we are no different,” says Joubert. “For as long as it takes, we will continue to rescue and save as many individual wild animals as we can. Our job is to rehabilitate them to become independent, free-ranging wild animals – exactly as they should be.”
To this end, SanWild set up a non-profit wildlife rehabilitation and emergency rescue centre about 16km away from Gravelotte. It is surrounded by more than 2 000ha of bush that SanWild is reclaiming from old farmland. Plans are under way to add a further 2 457ha on to the sanctuary in the near future.
Meanwhile, small miracles continue at the sanctuary. An operation on a kudu calf with a broken leg in mid-January this year was one example.
SanWild bought the injured kudu doe from a farmer who was offering her to the highest bidder after she was found roaming around his farm. Most people would just have shot the animal, but Joubert responded with her usual concern for a wounded individual’s life.
The kudu was crippled in her right front leg and in obvious pain. At SanWild a splint was attached to the leg because Joubert thought she had torn ligaments. When this treatment failed, x-rays showed that the leg had been broken previously and that it had grown back skewly.
Joubert and two veterinarians decided that breaking and re-setting the leg was the only option. The biggest problem was that there is no documentation for wildlife anatomy and the vets would have to base their surgery on the anatomical diagrams of cattle.
The procedure had never been attempted on an antelope, although it had been successfully performed on a cheetah. The vets had to break the bone and insert steel pins to straighten the leg and mend the bone.
When the bandages were removed three weeks later, the wound had healed without complications and the young animal was walking around quite comfortably on her mended leg.
At about the same time, Joubert received a phone call from a man who found a young waterbuck in his swimming pool. When she went to collect the youngster, she discovered he was blind.
This new challenge resulted in Joubert transporting the buck more than 700km to a Johannesburg hospital for an eye operation. “The good news is that the little waterbuck has already starting seeing,” Joubert reported enthusiastically a few days after the operation. “He follows us all over the place and has even started playing, jumping and running, which he has never done before. Great!”