Just feeling the soothing shot, the panic -stricken female rhino ran to shelter in a wooded area, avoiding a low -fly helicopter, trying to prevent her escape.
The rhino had to be transferred to another park in Kenya on Saturday, but outsmarted people.
A few minutes later, Rangers in 4×4 vehicles searched through thickets, too thick for the crane truck that had to take it.
A decision was quickly made to administer the antidote of tranquility to prevent it from collapsing. If she fell the wrong way, she could suffocate.
Therefore, the young woman will remain where she was born.
“The rhino is the greatest to move,” said Taru Sheldrick, who piloted the helicopter in Nakuru National Park in northwestern Kenya, an oasis of greenery surrounding a deep blue lake.
“When you shoot them, if you don’t have long enough, they run straight to a thick bush, which is their security,” he said.
“Every time you strive for a rhino, you have a little fear. Because it is a kind in danger. Every animal is just as important.”
Rhinos, which can weigh up to two tonnes, have once been abundant in Africa of Subsahara. But hunting from European colonizers and later large-scale poaching pushed them to the edge of the disappearance.
– a time competition –
The Rhino International Foundation (IRF) says about 28,000 left in the world, nearly 24,000 in Africa.
Kenya is home to more than 2000 of them.
Rhinos are less effective if too many of his relatives live in the same place, according to the Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS), which runs the country’s parks.
Therefore, moving them is important, but rhinos are vulnerable to soothing, which slow down their breathing, raise their body temperature and affect their heart rate, said KWS Dominic Miele.
So this is a time race as soon as a veterinarian, aboard a helicopter, administers the medicine using a Dart gun.
Five to seven minutes after the injection, the rhino begins to feel ugly.
Then he collapsed, as AFP noted on Saturday: after the first female withdrew in the bush, three other black rhinos were anesthetized within a few hours in Nakuru.
A rescue team arrived on the spot within two minutes of each shot, moving like a well -oiled machine.
About a dozen carers surrounded the animals, spraying them with water to cool their body temperature, turning them over to their sides to ensure that their breathing was not prevented by applying oxygen and monitoring their vital signs.
At the same time, several other rangers secured the animals with straps strung through the transport cell and attached to the front bumper of a jeep.
Fifteen minutes after the arrival of the rescue team, the antidote is applied.
The animal is then shaken to the feet and is immediately directed to a cage that loads the truck.
– ‘number one’ –
Miele boasted of Kenya’s incomparable experience.
“We are number one in the world. We have successfully made so many Rhino translocations,” he said.
Johen Zeitz, the owner of the Segera Private Reserve, where about 20 rhinos have been moved in the last two weeks, he could not hide his relief after the last operation.
On its 200 square kilometers of land, elephants, buffaloes, lions, leopards, cheetahs and others, they wander freely, said the former Puma CEO and the current CEO of Harley-Davidson.
But the reserve lacked the “this emblematic appearance”, which was present until 60 years ago in the Segera, but has since disappeared.
The welcome of the rhino is “the completion of the preservation of the work we have done as a basis in the last 22 years” after acquiring the ground, he told AFP.
Due to the high risk of poaching for their horns, security measures had to be significantly strengthened with 100-150 new security staff, Zeitz said.
Late Saturday, a small group witnessed the release of the three nasodes from Nakuru, who arrived in Segera after a six -hour driving.
In the dense night darkness, they listened when the metal bars of the transport cells were removed, the doors creaked open and the heavy stepping, accompanied by bottled growls, ranging.
The rhinos finally arrived in their new home.
JF/ER/CW