What Does It Take to Move 2,000 Rhinos?

A minute ago, Donovan Jooste’s attempt to save the rhino from extinction was going well. Jooste, 37, tanned, stocky, rarely out of a safari shirt and shorts, worked for African Parks, a nonprofit that manages wildlife reserves. Lately, his bosses had him taking care of the world’s biggest rhino herd, 2,000 southern white rhinos on a ranch outside Klerksdorp in northern South Africa, which African Parks acquired in 2023 when the animals’ original owner, a rhino-mad millionaire, ran out of money.

The initial priority had been simply to ensure that the animals were properly fed. But CEO Peter Fearnhead had also been working up his own crazy rhino scheme: to divide the herd into dozens of breeding pools and sprinkle them across Africa, in an effort to create an inexhaustible, risk-diversified, poacher-protected rhino supply. To try to save the species forever.

That was the grand plan, anyway. Jooste’s job was to make it work on the ground. To that end, he had been breaking the operation down into scores of translocations of 12 or so animals at a time, to reserves across the continent, in a program that will last a decade. When I joined him one morning last March, he was into his third year, preparing to move 16 rhinos to a reserve at the foot of the Waterberg mountains a day’s drive away.

And for the first hour, things went smoothly. A crew of 64, including rangers and volunteers, assembled at the ranch before dawn. Managing the relocation with Jooste was Kester Vickery, boss of Conservation Solutions, Africa’s leading large-wildlife mover. At first light, the two men guided a convoy of 10 pickups, plus two semis carrying 16 custom-made rhino crates, on a dirt track toward the enclosures. A chopper shadowed them overhead. The convoy entered a field of several hundred acres. The helicopter, scouting the savanna grass, located its first mother and calf. With practiced skill, the pilot dropped to 10 feet off the deck and held his machine at a hover, while a marksman leaned out of a side door and darted each animal with two perfect shots to their rears.

Then Jooste’s plan fell apart. Rather than succumb quietly, the mother tore off through the bush at 30 miles an hour, smashing a tunnel through acacia trees and man-size anthills, her calf galloping behind her. Unable to follow, Jooste was forced to slalom his pickup between trees and shrubs and navigate by glimpses of the mother’s horn tip, sticking out of the grass like a periscope. Just as he was about to lose the two rhinos entirely, they burst onto open ground. Through a gap in the thorn scrub, Jooste watched the calf come to a dead stop. For a moment, the animal blinked and shook its head. Then its rear legs collapsed, and with a squeal, it went down. That much, at least, was as Jooste had intended. Then the calf’s legs started convulsing. Like an epileptic fit. Like an animal in its death throes.

Jooste raced his pickup through the bush, skidding to a halt in front of a thorn tree. He and Vickery jumped out and ran the final 30 feet to the calf.

“We’re going to have to work quickly,” Vickery said.

Vickery helped Jooste loop a rope around the calf’s nose. Vickery then stuck the animal with a shot of diprenorphine—a “wake-up” drug, he said—as Jooste tugged a cloth blindfold over its eyes, notched its ears with a hole punch, and drew a syringe of blood for DNA analysis. With nothing else to do but wait, Jooste pressed his ear to the calf’s hide, while Vickery watched for breaths.

Ten seconds passed. It was impossible to hear a heartbeat over the noise of the helicopter. The only breathing they could hear was their own.

Twenty more seconds went by. The calf’s legs continued to spasm.

A full minute passed.

Two.

Nothing.

The collective term for a group of rhinos is a crash. From a foot away, a grazing rhino sounds like someone tearing out his hair in clumps while pausing every now and then to burp like an ogre. If you tickle a baby rhino’s stomach, it will freeze like a kid stage-dying in a game of cops and robbers, then topple over on its side. These were some of the fun rhino facts that Jooste had learned since taking over at Klerksdorp. But mainly he’d discovered that what defined the life of every rhino on Earth, and everything and everyone around it, was poaching.

In the past 20 years, poaching for rhino horn—mostly used in traditional medicine in Asia, jewelry, and ornaments—has reached existential levels. There are a number of reasons an animal might get classified as endangered: when a population drops by at least 70 percent, reaches below 2,500 animals, or occupies a tiny area, among others. At the latest count, the number of Sumatran rhinos was down to an estimate of 34 to 47, Javan rhinos to 50, and Indian rhinos to 4,075. In Africa, poachers completely wiped out the animal in West Africa and all but two female northern whites in East Africa and killed thousands of southern whites in South Africa, the global population epicenter. There, the count for rhinos of all species was down to fewer than 15,000.

The giant Klerksdorp crash was conceived as a response to this crisis by John Hume, a South African hotelier with a passion for game farming. Hume, who lost his first rhino to a poacher in 2007, had a soft spot for the animal, which he considered the overlooked ugly duckling of Africa’s coveted big five. (The other, prettier club members are the lion, leopard, elephant, and African buffalo.) But poaching also offended Hume as a businessman. Rhinos didn’t have to die to give up their horn, which could be removed safely and painlessly from a sedated animal. When you considered that a horn grew back in a few years, ready to be harvested a second time, that made the butchery only more senseless. Poachers killed because they were on a clock—crews had minutes to cut through a reserve fence, shoot a rhino, saw off its horn, and escape before rangers showed up—and bullets worked faster than darts. As it was, by obliging owners like Hume to spend a fortune on armed guards, CCTV, drones, radar, and heat and movement sensors, without any legal way to recoup the costs, the poachers had created an ominous economic conundrum: A rhino was worth more dead than it was alive.

Hume proposed a two-part solution. Legalize the trade in rhino horn, then flood the market with product taken from intensively farmed, anesthetized rhinos. Together, he predicted, these measures would depress the price of horn and discourage poaching, while also yielding an economic rationale to keep rhinos alive.

Hume achieved only half his plan. Over approximately 14 years, he bought hundreds of white rhinos. The animals breed at 7 to 8 percent a year, and by 2023, he had 2,000 animals at his 30-square-mile ranch outside Klerksdorp, making him owner of about one out of every eight white rhinos in the world and about one in 13 rhinos of any type.

But Hume’s operation outraged nonprofit conservationists at Save the Rhino International Inc., the International Rhino Foundation, and others, whose philosophy was based on appeals to conscience, not commerce. They argued that to farm a wild animal was to destroy the essence of it. To legalize the horn trade was also to encourage it, they said, and even to reward organized crime. So while Hume’s lawyers won a restart to trade inside South Africa, the activists quashed his attempts to sell horn globally. In 2023, Hume was 81 and close to broke, after spending $200 million on his herd over the years. Worse, his rhinos were suffering. On visiting Klerksdorp, Markus Hofmeyr, director of the Rhino Recovery Fund, said inadequate feeding had produced a gathering “welfare situation.” In 2023 alone, 100 of Hume’s rhinos died.

Enter Fearnhead, 57, who co-founded African Parks in 2000 to manage safari parks for governments on the continent that couldn’t afford them. Seized by the urgency of Hume’s failing operation, Fearnhead decided against a general appeal to his donors in favor of a 20-minute call to his biggest one: Walmart heir Rob Walton, worth an estimated $138 billion. Walton said yes, African Parks bought the Klerksdorp farm for $13 million, and within months, Jooste had begun to turn it around. In 2024, Jooste said, they had just 29 deaths.

African Parks’ rescue of 2,000 white rhinos was not only impossibly fast but also historic. It encouraged Fearnhead to think bigger—to take what Hume started and combine it with African Parks’ continental reach. He sketched a three-word strategy: “Rescue, rewild, renew.” How hard could it be?

As he made his plans, Fearnhead steeled himself with the thought that conservationists had saved the southern white rhino once before.

More than a century ago, colonial big game hunters reduced the white rhino population to, by some estimates, 20 to 40 animals. A last-ditch effort to preserve the species in 1895 saw the survivors given sanctuary in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in South Africa. The scheme worked. By the early 1960s, there were about 400 rhinos at the reserve, enough for conservationist Ian Player to start Operation Rhino: taking handfuls of animals from the park and reintroducing them to areas where they had been wiped out. Africa’s rhino population exploded. In Kenya, about 50 relocated animals became a population of close to 1,100. In South Africa, a few hundred rhinos grew to around 18,000 by 2013. But that same year a new set of hunters once again began shooting them faster than they could breed.

The difference with African Parks’ plan was scale and ambition. This time the source herd was not 400 animals but 2,000—or even 3,000, given how the animals would reproduce in the 10 years it would take to translocate them. The destination was no longer a few select spots in South and East Africa but across the continent, using Africa’s vast size to spread risk. The goal had also been infinitely expanded, from preserving rhinos in the present to rescuing them for all time.

But big plans bring big problems. Because African Parks was restocking rhinos in places where poaching continued, there was a danger that it might be catering to the slaughter. Because only about 2 percent of South Africa’s 10,000 private game reserves were prepared to shoulder the cost of keeping rhinos, it was an open question whether there were even enough homes for the Klerksdorp rhinos. Dispatching rhinos across a huge continent would also require partnering with a bewildering mosaic of game parks and wildlife authorities.

Perhaps no element of African Parks’ project was knottier than Fearnhead’s notion of moving 56 rhinos to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). That idea would require flying more than two dozen two-ton mothers and their calves 3,000 miles north, then trucking them for hours down jungle roads. The DRC was also one of the world’s poorest countries, with little in the way of infrastructure. Complicating matters further, since the mid-1990s, Garamba had been an on-and-off war zone, fought over by government soldiers, rebels, and local militiamen who, when they weren’t fighting each other, had freely plundered its wildlife, including, by 2006, all its rhinos.

Vickery had made a previous, pre-Klerksdorp run to Garamba with 16 rhinos, in 2023. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, all those animals were still alive. So, in early 2024, Jooste and Vickery began planning to take another 56 animals to Garamba. Their idea was to use two planes, a Boeing 747 to take the animals as far as Entebbe, Uganda, then a Hercules to take them the last 500 miles to the DRC in groups. (The Ugandans’ price for assisting? Eight rhinos to add to their population of about 40.)

As it happened, almost nothing went as planned. A few months before the scheduled transfer day, the civil war in the eastern DRC erupted once more, and armed local militias began blocking traffic and robbing vehicles along the road to Garamba, forcing a six-month postponement and spotlighting the risks of flying into a war zone on a plane that resembled a military transporter. Then floods washed away the only bridge to Garamba. Jooste and Vickery lost several weeks trying and failing to organize a replacement from pontoon barges. Then they switched to extending the small dirt runway inside Garamba to accommodate the Hercules, which meant building across a swamp and dismantling a Catholic church, brick by brick, and building a new one a quarter mile away.

When relocation day finally dawned in December 2025, the rhinos touched down at Entebbe to be engulfed in a rainstorm strong enough to send metal cargo crates tumbling across the apron. The next morning, a heavy mist in the DRC delayed the transfers by five hours. By the time the last flight left Entebbe, it was near sunset. The plane’s controls iced up, forcing the pilot to drop to low altitude, and at one point the plane disappeared from Vickery’s flight-tracking app. He was with the team in Garamba as they scrambled to light the runway with the headlights of every motorbike and pickup they could rustle up. “Just insane,” Vickery said. “But the [pilot] did a beautiful landing on this gravel strip, absolutely dark, in Congo, middle of nowhere.” The doors opened. The rhinos barely stirred. “And these big grown men, myself included,” Vickery said, “we’re all crying.”

White rhinos are classified as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and so African Parks’ success or failure is measured one animal at a time. As fate had it, on the morning I joined Jooste and Vickery outside Klerksdorp, the future of the entire endeavor suddenly narrowed to a single calf and the question of whether it would live or die.

Jooste kept his ear pressed to the animal’s side. Three decades of moving rhinos had taught Vickery that they were peculiarly sensitive to opioids, requiring a quarter of the dose that could fell a large antelope. There was a risk of hypoxia—oxygen starvation—of which the calf’s shaking legs were a symptom. Rhinos also have terrible circulation, and just lying awkwardly could cut off blood flow to parts of their body, with catastrophic effect. Complicating matters further: Every rhino was different, and reacted in its own way to darts, crates, and transport.

Jooste checked his watch. Close to three minutes had passed without any sign of life.

Vickery lifted his head and turned slowly to Jooste. He seemed about to speak but was struggling to find the words.

Abruptly, the calf snorted loudly.

Jooste exhaled deeply. Vickery let his head hang between his outstretched arms. Later, he would say the calf had been seconds from death. At the time, his only words were “Let’s turn it.”

With the help of more ropes and six rangers and volunteers, they heaved the calf onto its stomach, gave it a few minutes to revive some more, then pulled it to its feet. As Vickery jogged off to tend to the mother, which had come down a hundred yards away, Jooste and the rangers walked the calf, blindfolded and stumbling like a drunk, toward the row of crates now off-loaded from the 18-wheelers. Calf and mother walked into their containers without issue. The truck crane then hoisted them next to each other on the flatbed.

Jooste and Vickery took a moment to catch their breath. Despite the dawn chill, Jooste’s shirt was soaked with sweat. He reached through the opening of the crate and patted the calf’s side. “You gave us a bit of a worry,” he said. Then he leaned up against the truck, pulled out his phone, rubbed his eyes, and began tapping.

Vickery looked at him quizzically.

“I’m updating my status to ‘It’s complicated,’ ” Jooste deadpanned.

Twenty-four hours later, the men were up at dawn once more, preparing to release the animals into their new Waterberg home. Aside from onlookers’ astonishment at traffic lights on the way up, the trip had been uneventful. But for the rhinos, it had been 24 hours in a tiny steel box, and several were restless. One large female was bucking and smashing the sides of her cage. At the sight of a human face peeking in, another adult headbutted the crate door.

By now, however, the calf that had caused Jooste and Vickery such concern was fully recovered. He and his mother were off-loaded, the truck crane bouncing with the mother’s 3,000-pound weight as it set her down in the dirt. The pair sniffed and whinnied at each other through the opening. Then Jooste hooked a crane cable to the gate traps, the crane lifted the doors, the mother bouldered out, and her calf trotted after her. The pair walked 30 feet up a small incline, then the mother turned around. For 10 long seconds, she surveyed the scene behind her: two giant semis, 16 rhino crates, six pickups, and 64 dusty spectators looking back at her. Then she turned, and mother and calf disappeared behind a thorn bush.

“Incredible,” murmured Jooste.

“Never get tired of it,” Vickery replied.

African Parks is learning that the upside of taking on an impossible mission is that the path to success is paved with miracles. By the end of April this year, it had relocated 745 rhinos to the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda and 17 reserves in South Africa. Poachers had killed 12 of those—a tragedy, to be sure, but more than offset by the 50 new calves born to translocated mothers. All 20 new populations were stable and growing. Not one of the 56 Garamba rhinos had been lost. In a perfect reversal, some of the rhinos moved to South Africa’s Greater Kruger area were returning home after being moved out earlier by Hume to escape the poachers.

None of this would have been possible without Hume’s original initiative. But as African Parks’ plan gained momentum, his problems deepened. In August 2025, at the age of 83, he was arrested and charged with running a rhino horn smuggling syndicate. Hume claims the charges were concocted by South African officials unduly influenced by campaigners adamant that only charity can save rhinos. Ironically, just as Hume was making his second court appearance in Pretoria in March, the South African government signaled an about-face on the horn trade: It now agrees that one way to fund rhino conservation and defeat poachers might be through a highly regulated international trade.

With seven years to go before the last rhino is moved, more difficult days are a certainty for African Parks. But Fearnhead has now identified enough poaching-protected homes for all 3,000 rhinos. His latest scheme is reintroducing the animal to the Chinko Conservation Area in the Central African Republic—as unruly as the DRC but more remote and in a region where rhinos have been absent for a generation. As Fearnhead’s confidence in African Parks’ success grows, his hopes are turning to the program’s wider benefits. How the return of a keystone species can restore entire ecosystems across Africa. How a well-run wildlife program can be an advertisement for good governance in lawless areas. How success can show conservationists of all stripes—for-profit and nonprofit—what can be achieved when they work together. African Parks saw about 15 percent of the world’s white rhinos heading for disaster, Fearnhead said, and made a new future for a threatened, iconic species and for African nature. When you give people the chance to fight for a common goal, he told one interviewer in 2024, the result can be “Wow. Isn’t that amazing?”

For Jooste and Vickery, both more comfortable fixing broken truck axles than articulating their feelings, voicing the momentousness of what is unfolding before their eyes can be precarious. “Dangerous,” Jooste said. “You can get all fluffy.” Vickery, whose lifetime in conservation has often meant watching species after species disappear, said that he too had become familiar with an unaccustomed new emotion: “Joy.”