Independent Study

To start off my second week, Mia left and went back home to Pennsylvania, and a new student named Mary came to live with me at the Burns’ house. Mary was just as nice as Mia, and as soon as she arrived we began to work on a ton of rhino cases with Dr. Rogers. On June 1st, we headed out extremely early to a reserve where we were going to dart and relocate two adult rhino bulls to new game farms. After working with Dr. Rogers, I have learned a ton about techniques and drug combinations for darting rhinos. In the veterinary industry, the opioid M99 is very popular for darting adults, since it is 10,000 times stronger than morphine and causes the dangerous animals to be immobilized quickly. However, M99 often causes respiratory depression, so oxygen is always administered and breathing is carefully monitored. Transporting rhinos though requires different drug combinations, since the animals cannot be sedated too heavily because they are extremely heavy and thus need to be walked into the crates. After Dr. Rogers darted each rhino bull, a blindfold was used to cover the rhino’s face and a rope was attached to the horn. A few people pulled the rope towards a steel crate to guide the rhino’s movement, while a few other guys and I manned the sides of the rhino and repeatedly had to push it to prevent it from falling during its drugged stupor. Since the bulls weighed close to three tons, this was nearly impossible; I can now say that I have almost been crushed by rhinos more times than I can count. Their skin is also as rough as sandpaper, so pushing with all your weight tears apart your hands. Moving each bull was painstaking, but we eventually got each into its crate without injury. It was exhausting work, but it was simply amazing to interact with wild rhinos and witness their strength first hand.

Working with all the rhinos was not always that fun though. Over the month I was in South Africa, we were called out to work on many rhinos that were victims of poachers; I’ve seen a rhino that had been shot, a rhino that was recovering after being left alive after its horn was hacked off, and orphaned baby rhinos whose mothers were killed. Everyone hears about poaching and all of the statistics in the news, but it’s simply impossible to grasp how big of a crisis it is without actually seeing it. It is astounding how commonplace the crime actually is – one rhino gets poached every six hours, and no one is surprised at all when it happens. Poachers are literally everywhere and groups are almost constantly in each reserve, and although owners spend tons of money on fencing, security, and anti-poaching teams, there is no way to successfully combat such an insanely large group of people. On June 2nd, we got called out to see a female rhino that had escaped after being shot by poachers. The bullet had penetrated so deep that it had entered her lungs, so when we injected antibiotics and antiseptics into the wound they proceeded to poor out of the poor girl’s nose. Even though Dr. Rogers said she was most likely going to die, she was still alive each time we re-checked her over the course of my stay. It was awful seeing for myself what happens as a result of poaching, and really makes you realize how little the rest of world knows how to handle the issue. Almost everyone in South Africa wants to legalize trade in the horn, since the horn can be painlessly removed and regrown, in order to reduce demand and thus poaching, but conservationists removed from the issue in other parts of the world have prevented them from doing so.

We also did a lot of work with orphaned baby rhino at the Hoedspruit Exotic Species Center (HESC). There were four babies, all of which had lost their mother’s to poachers at some point in time. Two of the little guys kept coming down with cases of diarrhea, so we repeatedly gave them antibiotic treatments to help them feel better. After spending so much time working with rhinos, talking to experts and veterinarians, and being on the front lines of South Africa’s poaching crisis, I decided to change the itinerary of my project and continue working with Dr. Rogers for my entire stay instead of going to the Care for Wild rhino sanctuary as I originally planned. Looking back I’m very glad that I made that decision, since I saw so much more in the extended period that I spent with Dr. Rogers.

Once the week ended, the Burns drove us to two awesome attractions over the weekend. The first was Jessica the Hippo, a tame hippopotamus that was hand reared after she was rescued from a flood the day that she was born. Hippos are typically vicious – they kill the most people in all of Africa each year – so it was very cool to be able to get up close to one. There isn’t really any other way to get to feed and pet a hippo. After seeing Jessica, we traveled to a section of a game reserve where we walked through the bush with two 11 month old white lions. The lions had also been hand-reared after they were found abandoned at five days old, so they were somewhat tame and we were able to pet and interact with them. It was pretty awesome to be able to kneel down next to the kings of the jungle.

After spending sixteen hours on a plane and another five hours on a bus, I finally arrived at my destination in South Africa; the tiny, beautiful town of Hoedspruit located right next to the massive Kruger National Park and Drakensberg Mountain Range. I was a little nervous at first about meeting everyone and adjusting to my surroundings, but those fears were quickly alleviated once I met the Burns, who were my host family for my entire month stay in the country. The Burns owned a house on a 21 hectare portion of a small game farm, and had five dogs, four cats, sheep, geese, chickens, and other animals constantly around to play with. Everyone was ridiculously nice – Sheridan, the mother, her two grown kids, Ailsa and Murray, and Ailsa’s son Luke lived at the house,
and were constantly around to make us feel comfortable, make us amazing meals, and tease us for our American habits and not calling dessert “pudding.” Throughout the trip, they took us all over the area to various activities and tourist attractions, watched movies with us, and taught us how to play rugby. For the first week, I was also with one other student named Mia from Pennsylvania that was equally as nice. There was never a point on the trip where I did not feel at home.

Once I had settled in, the week began working with Dr. Rogers and his assistant Janelle, and we ended up working with dogs, cats, rhinos, nyalas, a waterbuck, buffalo, elephants, cheetahs, a leopard, and other animals; it was a busy week. Dr. Rogers owned a small animal practice in Hoedspruit, which acted as his base from which we operated out of and gathered drugs and supplies before travelling into the bush on private game farms and reserves each day. We shadowed and assisted Dr. Liesel, the small animal veterinarian, when there was no wildlife work. Otherwise, we were with Dr. Rogers in the field working with African wildlife. On my first day, I was immediately thrown into the action as we darted and treated a white rhino bull that had gotten in a fight with another rhino. I helped monitor respiration and shoved an oxygen tube up the bull’s nose as Dr. Rogers dressed the wounds and implanted a tracking transmitter in the horn. Not all veterinarians get to treat rhino due to the high profile nature of the cases and the confidentiality involved due to the prevalence of poaching, so it was a privilege to see Dr. Rogers, the best veterinarian in the country according to everyone we met, work with them. Unfortunately, I cannot post any pictures of the rhinos we worked with, since there has been multiple incidences where rhinos were poached based on information found on the internet.

On my second day, we went to a game farm so that Dr. Rogers could treat a waterbuck bull that was blind and extremely weak due to a massive ulcer in his eye. Dr. Rogers decided to sew the eye shut, since completely closing the eye could potentially allow capillaries in the eyelid to grow and provide the damaged eye with increased nutrients in order to help it heal. The bull was extremely weak though and had been suffering for a while, so Dr. Rogers made it clear that it was still most likely not going to survive. The thing with wildlife veterinary work is that it can be very emotional, since oftentimes not much can be done. The vets do whatever they can, but wildlife in South Africa is an industry; not all animals are valuable enough to save, and oftentimes sick animals are found too late. The waterbuck ended up dying a few days later.

On my first weekend in the country, the Burns family took Mia and I Elephant Whispers, a small reserve area where wild elephants are trained to interact with people and let them ride on them. The elephants are trained humanely using only positive reinforcement, and some knew up to 150 commands including shaking their head, turning, flapping their ears, and speaking to us. We had previously darted elephants with contraceptives with Dr. Rogers, but it was pretty awesome to get this close to some, especially since we got to feel and feed them. In the same day, we also went to Graskop up near the top of the mountain range, where we got to do a 68 meter free-fall jump into a gorge. It was ridiculously terrifying.

To close out the week, we ended up treating a leopard that had been hit by a car at the nearby Air Force Base. The leopard was in pain and had laid in the road before retreating slightly into the bush, causing panic because injured leopards have a history of being extremely dangerous. Dr. Rogers maneuvered through the brush to the leopard, where he darted it with a drug cocktail called BAM, which consists of butorphanol, azaperone, and medetomidine. BAM is extremely useful in predator species because it is fast acting and can quickly be reversed by administering antisedan and yohimbine to wake the animal up. In this case, it was also darted with a very powerful sedative to prevent it from waking up during tests. After darting the leopard, which weighed a massive 77 kg, we rode with it in the back of a pickup truck back to the hospital to take x-rays and provide treatment. Upon examination it had no broken bones and only muscle damage, so we gave it an anti-inflammatory and put it in a crate to be released back into the bush around the Air Force Base. It was awesome to see such a beautiful, powerful animal up close.

Today marks almost one week before I get on my flight and head to South Africa for the next month. The reality has not fully sunken in yet that I’ll be going back for four weeks, but I’m ridiculously excited to work again with African wildlife. I’ll be spending my first two weeks with a veterinarian named Dr. Rogers, one of the best veterinarians in South Africa, as he works cases at his clinic and private game reserves. Afterwards, I’ll be spending two weeks at Care for Wild Africa, a wildlife rehabilitation facility that specializes in caring for rhinos. It’s going to be amazing to see some of the high profile veterinary cases that Dr. Rogers works on, and getting hands-on experience working with infant and adult rhinos will be just as awesome.

I still need to get most of my things together before leaving, but now I’m mostly just waiting for the 23rd to arrive. I won’t have much internet access while in South Africa, so I’ll be posting the rest of my blogs once I return at the end of June. I can’t wait to start my adventure this summer!