Project Rhino K9 Unit: Defending African Wildlife

Dear Friends and Supporters

This year to date has been a particularly busy year for the Project Rhino K9-Unit, who have been hard at work fighting wildlife crime, working alongside local police, the HAWKS, reserve Anti-Poaching Teams and local security companies in Zululand. The team is on standby 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

Most of you would be familiar with the fact that our K9-Unit does not work in a silo, but collaborates with most of our other projects, from aerial support, equine support and community support. From February 2022, when our new pilot started, until the end of June 2022 a total of 287 hours were flown of which 239 were for patrol and reaction. 12 Poached rhino were found by our airwing, 2 wounded rhinos were detected and successfully treated and 4 calves from poached adult females were located and successfully moved to a rhino orphanage to ensure their survival. From January 2022 - June 2022, our K9 team removed 294 snares from our game reserves, responded to 65 emergency call outs, made 21 apprehensions of criminals, retrieved 2 illegal firearms, recovered stolen goods from 7 incidences, recovered 5 high jacked vehicles, responded to 10 armed robbery / burglary cases, dealt with 1 abduction case and successfully found the missing person, retrieved narcotics from 3 separate incidences where arrests were made (+/- 6kgs narcotics, 2x truck loads of counterfeit goods worth R15 million rand).The teams also conduct daily patrols, assist at roadblocks and help recover missing wildlife.

The Project Rhino K9 team is proud to announce that we are participating in the #WildlifeRangerChallenge for the 3^rd consecutive year this September. This is an initiative to support the men and women across Africa’s protected areas who continue to see drastic cuts in resources and an increase in poaching due to the devastating economic impact of Covid-19. The #WildlifeRangerChallenge supports 80+ conservation areas, 45 iconic species and 5,000 Wildlife Rangers.

We are also delighted to share that the Project Rhino K9-Unit has been recognised with a highly commended award at this year’s International Ranger Awards.

The winners of the second International Ranger Awards, presented by the IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Commission on Protected Areas (WPCA), were announced at the IUCN Africa Protected Areas Congress in Kigali in May this year. A total of 21 awards were given to rangers and ranger teams across the globe, recognising their tremendous work as the “unsung heroes and heroines of conservation.”

We are grateful that we have managed to keep our teams operational and supported to date and that we have also managed to keep up with the continuous training of our teams, which is an enormous morale booster. We actively do operations simulator training with our member reserves which focuses on what to expect in real life situations in order to respond to any challenges and shortcomings. This also ensures concrete trust relationships are built between the Project Rhino K9 and aerial response teams and the reserve APU teams, so that they know the other team will absolutely support them in a crisis situation.

We would like to extend a sincere thank you and appreciation to all our donors and supporters that help us keep our teams on the ground, it would never be possible without your ongoing motivation and support.