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The Rhino Lady of Limpopo Province

Anna Merz literally rescued Africa's threatened rhino population from extinction. Here's her story.

By Claudia Flisi

Anna Merz, the Rhino Lady, doesn't live on a 61,000-acre rhinoceros sanctuary in Kenya anymore. Her home today adjoins an 88,000-acre game reserve in South Africa, which has its own resident rhinos. After all, the woman who devoted much of her life to Africa's threatened rhino population shouldn't be far from the creatures she literally saved from extinction.

In her early 80s with short white hair, a wiry and fit frame, and both a firm gaze and handshake, Merz lives alone with nine dogs on a compound in the Lapalala Private Game Reserve in South Africa's Limpopo Province. She calls her compound Samia, in honor of the rhinoceros immortalized in her best-known book, Rhino at the Brink of Extinction.

She rarely walks or rides in the bush without her gun and knife. She isn't afraid of stray rhinos but of buffalo, baboons, warthogs and puff adders. Her favorite horse, Grizelda, was bitten by a puff adder on the muzzle a few years ago and almost died.

However, the most dangerous predator in the African bush is man. Merz learned this soon after moving to Kenya some 30 years ago. British by birth, she moved with her husband to Africa for what she thought would be an early retirement. In the early 1980s, she attended a lecture in Nairobi by American Esmond Bradley Martin, a world authority on the illicit rhino-horn trade – then exploding exponentially.

In Kenya, black rhino numbers declined from an estimated 20,000 in 1970 to around 450 in 2002, with an all-time low of 280 animals in the early 1980s, according to the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (a group that evolved from the rhino sanctuary originally founded by Merz). The primary threat: illegal hunting for the rhino horns, which go for $80,000 per kilo in Asia. One horn alone weighs five or six kilos, so it is "literally worth more than gold," says Merz, noting that the Chinese and Korean markets are driving the destruction of rhinos – and tigers. The threat isn't from the occasional poacher, she insists, but from organized crime. "Bands of 14 men armed with sophisticated weapons kill rhinos openly on the game reserves," she explains. "A lot of money buys a lot of corruption. The only way to protect them is in private reserves, fully patrolled, well-secured and fenced. And such reserves cost a minimum of $2.5 million per year."

Merz turned the plight of the rhinos into a personal crusade, persuading the Craig/Douglas family, Kenyan landowners, to set aside 5,000 acres of their estate, Lewa Downs, for a rhino sanctuary, which they named the Ngare Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary. The sanctuary received its first rhino, a white rhino male called Mukora, in 1984 and by 1988, by then expanded to 10,000 acres, was home to16. Six years later, the entire estate, as well as the government-owned Ngare Ndare Forest Reserve, was enclosed by a 2.5-meter-high electric fence, creating a 61,000-acre rhino sanctuary.

Merz not only spearheaded the creation of the sanctuary and its enlargement but also financed the project personally. And she paid for visits to community leaders, contacted conservation groups, made speeches and wrote articles to increase awareness. She worked closely with the rhinos in the wild, raising a number of orphan black rhinos and successfully rereleasing them into the bush. One female orphan, Samia, became the focus of Merz's best-selling book and the basis of her contention that rhinos are more intelligent than many wildlife experts believe. She offers two examples.

Once, when Samia was young and still living in the compound, Merz hid from the rhino to see what she would do. Using her flexible upper lip, Samia opened the gate where the dogs were kept, then followed the dogs, who tracked Merz.

After releasing Samia, Merz regularly took walks with her dogs, and Samia usually emerged from the bush to join them. One day they came upon three rhino bulls who were not kindly disposed to a human or her dogs. Samia, smaller than the males, broke away from Merz and charged up to the males in a belligerent manner, snorting and somehow communicating, If you want to charge the human, you have to charge me first. The three males backed off and scattered.

Merz was devastated when Samia and her infant son, Samuel, died in a freak accident in the wild in 1995. In a 1997 interview, Merz said, "I have lived my life with animals and have hand-raised many, but my relationship with Samia was unique. … I never tried to discipline or hold her. She lived as a wild rhino, as part of the local community. Yet of her own free will, she kept alive the bond between us."

Although Merz is no longer running the rhino program at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, she returns to Kenya for two months each year. Today the sanctuary boasts 50 rhinos, 10 percent of all Kenyan rhinoceroses. Merz believes that the fate of these animals depends on the private sector because African governments are overwhelmed with pressing social demands like starvation, disease and dehydration. Pressure from the U.S. government on China and Korea to discourage rhino horn trafficking and would help ensure the future of Africa's rhinos.

The rhino does not receive as much public attention as the elephant, but it is the world's second largest land mammal, and Merz believes they're even smarter than elephants. Fortunately, Merz is neither compliant nor undemanding, and the surviving rhinos of Africa (few but feisty) are a living testimony to her spirit.

 

For more information on how you can help, click lewa.org or savetherhino.org. Or visit amazon.com to purchase Rhino at the Brink of Extinction.