A herd of 2,000 rhinoceroses urgently in need of a new owner has finally found one: The rhinos and the farm where they live in South Africa have been purchased by a conservation group that plans to release the animals into the wild over the next decade.
The southern white rhinos, thought to be the largest single population of their kind, were put up for auction in April with a starting price of $10 million. No bidders came forward. At that point, the future of the animals appeared precarious. But the conservation group African Parks announced this month that it had reached a deal to take over the herd.
“We felt we had a moral obligation to step in,” Peter Fearnhead, the group’s co-founder and chief executive, said.
The 30-square-mile farm, Platinum Rhino, about 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, was set up in 2009 by John Hume, a businessman originally from Zimbabwe. Mr. Hume has said that he created the farm because he wanted to help rhinos by building up their numbers. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
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Mr. Hume did “an amazing job” at maintaining genetic diversity in the herd, said Mike Knight, chairman of the rhino specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, making it especially valuable for conservation.
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All southern white rhinos alive today, estimated at 16,800, are descendants of that group. Roughly 80 percent of the surviving population is in South Africa, and of those animals, roughly 53 percent are privately owned, Mr. Knight said.
Northern white rhinos, the only other subspecies of white rhino, have been reduced to just two surviving individuals, both female, in Kenya.
Platinum Rhino had been struggling financially for years. Around 2015, a sharp increase in rhino poaching drastically increased the cost of maintaining the farm and other private and public herds. State-run nature parks and private rhino owners were forced to spend exorbitant sums to protect their animals from illegal hunters seeking rhino horns. Mr. Hume has said that, by 2016, he was burning through $175,000 a month for security.
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The southern white rhinos, thought to be the largest single population of their kind, were put up for auction in April with a starting price of $10 million. No bidders came forward. At that point, the future of the animals appeared precarious. But the conservation group African Parks announced this month that it had reached a deal to take over the herd.
“We felt we had a moral obligation to step in,” Peter Fearnhead, the group’s co-founder and chief executive, said.
The 30-square-mile farm, Platinum Rhino, about 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, was set up in 2009 by John Hume, a businessman originally from Zimbabwe. Mr. Hume has said that he created the farm because he wanted to help rhinos by building up their numbers. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
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Mr. Hume did “an amazing job” at maintaining genetic diversity in the herd, said Mike Knight, chairman of the rhino specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, making it especially valuable for conservation.
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Mount Rainier’s glaciers. The most glacier-covered mountain in the contiguous United States is losing its glaciers as the burning of fossil fuels heats up Earth’s atmosphere, according to a survey published by the National Park Service. The study found that the total area of the mountain covered by glacier ice had shrunk by 42% between 1896 and 2021.
Paris Agreement goals. Eight years after world leaders approved the landmark agreement in Paris to fight climate change, countries have made only limited progress in staving off the most dangerous effects of global warming, according to the first official report card on the global climate treaty.
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All southern white rhinos alive today, estimated at 16,800, are descendants of that group. Roughly 80 percent of the surviving population is in South Africa, and of those animals, roughly 53 percent are privately owned, Mr. Knight said.
Northern white rhinos, the only other subspecies of white rhino, have been reduced to just two surviving individuals, both female, in Kenya.
Platinum Rhino had been struggling financially for years. Around 2015, a sharp increase in rhino poaching drastically increased the cost of maintaining the farm and other private and public herds. State-run nature parks and private rhino owners were forced to spend exorbitant sums to protect their animals from illegal hunters seeking rhino horns. Mr. Hume has said that, by 2016, he was burning through $175,000 a month for security.
Now Available: 2,000 Rhinos, Free to Good Homes With Plenty of Space
The animals, from a financially struggling private herd in South Africa, have been sold to a conservation group and will be released into the wild.
