Anna Merz literally rescued Africa’s threatened rhino population from extinction. Here’s her story.
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 thirty 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 fourteen 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.”
.gif){kind=icon}
