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All Rhino Species |
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When I arrived in Zambia there was a mood of optimism in conservation circles. 'Save the Rhino Trust' (SRT) had recently been established with what was then WWF's largest ever single grant of US$ 0.5 million over three years and believed it was succeeding in its aims because patrols were capturing large numbers of offenders (Anon. 1980-85). This represented a great improvement on the 1970s when the National Park and Wildlife Service had lacked the resources to undertake any patrolling. But was it enough? To answer this question it was obviously necessary to monitor trends in rhino and elephant numbers rather than to count captured offenders and by 1982 it had become clear that SRT was not succeeding (Leader-Williams 1985). Individually recognized rhinos were being killed in the study area, around 70% skulls found throughout Luangwa valley were axed and scouts were seeing fewer rhinos on their patrols (Leader-Williams 1988; Leader-Williams and Albon 1988).
On the one hand SRT had received a very large grant and needed to appear worthy of support if it was to raise further funds after WWF's grant ran out in December 1982. On the other, the funds allocated to SRT had only permitted it to field an anti-poaching unit of 22 men in Luangwa, too few to cover the 16,660 sq km of national parks let alone the 34,910 sq km of game management areas. As a solution to the problem I recommended in early 1983 that SRT should retrench to cover the areas of a few hundred sq km where rhinos still survived in higher densities (Leader-Williams 1985), utilizing the rule-of-thumb that scouts need to be at an effective density of one man per 50 to 20 sq km (Cumming, Martin and Taylor 1984; Bell and Clarke 1986). In the event SRT responded with only a partial reorganisation. This was effected initially by some redeployment and assigning one or two permanent patrols to one small area, and latterly by an increase in manpower following NORAD's funding of SRT in 1984.
By 1985 it was clear these changes had been fruitless. Rhinos had declined at rates varying from 99% to 24% per year since 1979, the lower rates being for the more heavily patrolled smaller areas where rhinos were still sighted relatively regularly; elephants too had recognized such areas of comparative safety by moving into them. However the point was that rhinos and elephants still continued to be shot in all areas, the effort was spread too thinly to prevent the decrease of rhinos in any sector. In a formal analysis of the data from Luangwa, it was shown that rates of change in rhino and elephant sightings by patrols were directly related to patrol effort, corrected for size of area and initial sighting rate (Leader-Williams and Albon 1988). Extrapolation of the relationship to a 0% change in rhino numbers does indeed suggest that SRT should have concentrated all its available manpower in one small area of 400 sq km. We return, therefore, to the fact that the quandary that 'big is best,but small is feasible' was not faced squarely in the 1980s.
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Luangwa rhinos: 'Big is best, small is feasible'
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