Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  19 January 2012

  John Hume likes to say that he would buy rhinos from the devil himself. Today, the devil – at least as far as the demonstrators outside the Musina Regional Court are concerned – is seated opposite him with a Knysna loerie on his shoulder and a klipspringer nuzzling his hand.

  Dawie Groenewald had flown in earlier to see ‘Oom John’ (Uncle John), as he calls him, about a sale of buffalo. Hume’s office, on his farm Mauricedale in Mpumalanga near the southern boundary of the Kruger National Park, opens onto a magnificent aviary. A stained white towel covers his computer keyboard to protect it from the droppings of birds that constantly fly in and out. There are thirty or forty buck inside the aviary, including tiny suni antelope, red duiker, blue duiker and klipspringer, along with dozens, if not hundreds, of exotic birds.

  The klipspringer licking Groenewald’s hand with a wet, black tongue is a particular favourite of Hume’s. ‘She’s always been like this,’ he says. ‘That is, until about three months ago, when she started to take umbrage to every second man and she’d go fucking moggy and try and bite them. Now she’s calming down again. She’s pregnant with her fourth kid.’ The klipspringer makes no attempt to bite Groenewald and eventually hops up onto a chair before wandering out the door.

  Hume – the largest private rhino owner in the world – is trying to persuade Groenewald to do an interview with a television crew. ‘You people need to go on camera and talk about this,’ Hume says. ‘Somebody will ask you, “Do you shoot rhino?” and you’ll answer, “Yes, we do. We hunt rhino with permits.”’

  ‘Some without,’ Groenewald laughs, and winks at me. He decides against doing the interview. Later, as Hume takes me to see the rhinos on his farm, Groenewald calls him on a cellphone from his helicopter. His voice is barely audible over the clatter of rotor blades. ‘Typical fucking Dawie,’ Hume says, shaking his head. Theirs is an odd relationship. ‘John lets me do all these things for him,’ Groenewald says. ‘He trusts me with a lot of money and the things we do together.’ Much of Groenewald’s time has been spent sourcing rhinos for Hume’s farms.

  ‘I like John’s operation,’ he tells me. ‘That man has so much horn. If they legalise rhino horn tomorrow, he is going to be one of the richest men in the fucking world because he’s got tons of horn ... But if I had his money, I would do it in a much better way than he’s doing it.’

  When I ask Hume about the rhino deals he’s transacted with Groenewald, he answers bluntly: ‘I will buy rhinos from the devil himself, especially if I think I may be saving the rhino’s life. Bring me any fucking crook, murderer – doesn’t matter what [they are]. If he’s offering to sell me a rhino and it suits me, I’ll buy it anyway.’

  He seems to have a gruff fondness for Groenewald, although he is quick to point out that ‘Dawie is always bloody wheeling and dealing.’

  ‘He’s what we in Rhodesia would have called a “wide boy”. In other words, he’s a wheeler and dealer, a ducker and diver. You’ll never change Dawie. Where he sees a gap to make money, he’ll take it; if it [means] bending the law, he’ll do it. I think he does have some morals, though. He certainly doesn’t mind killing animals but, as far as robbing a bank or poaching – I don’t think so. Dawie’s opinion is definitely that “I own the rhino, I bought it and if I want to kill it, I’ll kill it. But give me the incentive to keep it alive, then I’ll keep it alive.” And in that way, he’s no different from ninety-nine out of a hundred farmers.’

  ‘There is no money to be made out of rhinos without the legalisation of horn,’ John Hume tells me as we bounce along a dirt road in his bakkie towards a cluster of about forty cement troughs, where herds of rhinos are gathered like cattle to be fed. ‘If there is no money to be made, how are we going to get farmers to farm with them?’

  Hume bought his first black rhinos, six of them, on auction from the Natal Parks Board in 1996. ‘It was to be a retirement project,’ he says. ‘I wanted a place where I could retire and farm like a gentleman. That is when I struck on this idea of being a big-game rancher.’

  He had spent his boyhood growing up on a farm in what was then Rhodesia. A precocious child, he displayed an early aptitude for business, roaming his father’s farm collecting bones, wool from dead sheep, bits of copper, the lead from spent batteries, empty bottles – in fact, any scrap that he could find to sell at a profit.

  He dropped out of school at fourteen, despite the valiant efforts of an English teacher who tried to persuade him to stay on another year so he could get into Cambridge University. Hume told him, ‘Cambridge? What the hell do I want to go to Cambridge for?’

  He bought his first farm at eighteen. ‘I was some sort of natural trader, I suppose.’ By the time he was twenty-five, he had three. But he quickly came to the conclusion that farming was a ‘mug’s game’ and that ‘there must be easier ways to make money’. He bought the Zimbabwe Ruins Hotel and later the Baobab Hotel in Wankie. Then a taxi company. By 1979, as white minority rule crumbled, Hume, like many other white Rhodesians, began to spirit his money out of the country to South Africa. ‘I moved my money illegally from Rhodesia. There were so many bloody adventures, I tell you. I bought fucking gold mines. I took emeralds from one guy in exchange for a supermarket in Salisbury.’

  In the late seventies and early eighties, Hume says he ‘lost the plot’ and made the mistake of investing heavily in Hollywood films. ‘I had a hell of an adventure in movies and, for my trouble, I lost $1 million.’

  One film – Zulu Dawn – starred Peter O’Toole, Burt Lancaster and Bob Hoskins. ‘All of them were a bunch of arseholes,’ Hume says. The only one Hume seemed to like was the South African actor Ken Gampu.

  Hume recovered from his losses, and in the mid-eighties turned his attention to timeshare, building some of the first resorts in South Africa. He made millions. Today, he has a ‘lot of fucking rhinos’.

  ‘I don’t like to talk numbers, but it is a lot of hassle, a lot of responsibility, a lot of worry … a lot of rhinos.’ By some accounts he owns more than 800 and, according to the Financial Mail, boasts revenue of R25 million a year, of which about 80 per cent comes from selling live animals to farmers and exporters, and 20 per cent from trophy hunting.

  In recent years, Hume has become perhaps the most vocal public proponent of legalising the trade in rhino horn. With the help of his assistant, Tanya Jacobsen, he writes a steady stream of letters to newspapers and does interview after interview arguing his case.

  ‘My frustration and depression for the rhinos is that not one of the Dawie [Groenewalds] or Marnus Steyls would be killing a rhino if the trade was legal,’ he says, referring to the lion breeder and rhino hunt outfitter Marnus Steyl. ‘To me it is absolutely nonsensical that the only way you can legally change the ownership of a rhino’s horn in this country is to kill the [animal]. I cannot for the life of me understand why we are killing the very goose that lays the golden egg; the very rhinos that are capable of saving their species from extinction.’

  Hume argues that if the horns are harvested, ‘every rhino could go on growing a kilo of horn a year for the next thirty years’, which could be sold to meet the Asian demand for rhino horn.

  ‘Legalisation is their only hope. Our problem is that we are losing the war. Poaching is rocketing. If we try legalising the trade and it doesn’t work, what have we lost? We are losing anyway.’ The possibility that legal trade might involve the same criminal syndicates that currently control the market, and serve to fund the trafficking of other wildlife and contraband, doesn’t seem to perturb him.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ he says, ‘but surely if you stand a chance of saving rhinos’ lives, that should be paramount?’

  Hume has stockpiled a vast quantity of rhino horn, which he claims is stashed away in trunks in the safety deposit rooms of banks across North West province and Limpopo. ‘It is a pain in the arse,’ he tells me, ‘but the banks don’t seem to mind.’ He chuckles. ‘Officially I’m an old-book collector … The trunks
are obviously heavy.’ His detractors say he is simply promoting legal trade to serve his own interests. In response, Hume – who turned seventy a few days after the interview – says: ‘If I sold my rhino horn stockpiles – and it would be a huge shithouse full of money I’d get – I don’t know what I’d do with that money. Put it in shares and lose it? Or put it in gold, maybe. But what [if] the broker [is] crooked or the fucking bullion house [goes] belly-up? [Rhino horn] is an asset that has [increased in value] more than anything else. I don’t think my heirs will bitch if I don’t sell it.’

  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 p
olice 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.