For years, South Africa’s wildlife has been under attack. Some of the country’s most iconic species, including rhinos, elephants, and lions, are being systematically slaughtered by poachers, who are funded and supported by criminal gangs. These animals are killed for their parts — their horns and tusks and claws and bones — which are then sold on the global black market.
Rhinos have been among the hardest hit animals, especially in Kruger National Park. The situation had become a national crisis by 2012, when 425 of the park’s rhinos were poached, their horns chopped off and the carcasses left to rot. (Around 75 percent of that population has been lost to poaching since 2011.) This ongoing bloodshed required the country to take “a bold step,” says Gen. Johan Jooste, a former South African army general who was appointed Chief Ranger at Kruger Park in late 2012.
“We had no other options. The world was saying to South Africa, ‘Look what is happening. You can’t even protect your own wildlife.’ And it was a bold step at the time,” Jooste tells Outdoor Life in this week’s podcast. “It was also an intervention of necessity.”
Jooste’s main directive over the next few years was to transform the park’s ranger corps into a highly trained paramilitary unit. (He details his experience at Kruger in the book Rhino War that he co-wrote with journalist Tony Parks.) Although his appointment as a former military officer was controversial, and some people still criticize the hard-handed approach — which introduced lie detectors, surveillance equipment, dogs trained to subdue poachers, and military-grade weapons — he says the situation he walked into was, by definition, a kind of war.
“If I look in the dictionary, it says a war is two opposing forces using armed force, and that is what happened there,” says Jooste, who continues to combat poaching in his current role at Global Restoration Partners. “I have never regretted that [approach]. It has caused [discomfort] among academics and in all their writings, but they don’t know what I do, and they know nothing about what happened at that stage in the African bush in our beloved Kruger.”
Read Next: Hunting for Poachers Amid South Africa’s Bloody Wildlife War
To hear more about South Africa’s bloody wildlife war, and the critical role that Gen. Jooste and anti-poaching rangers still play in the ongoing crisis, listen to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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