A dehorning operation designed to save Zimbabwe's endangered black rhinoceroses from extinction has become a victim of its own success.
The radical plan, which made rhinos worthless to poachers, has been scuppered by the inexorable regrowth of the horns, to up to 3.2 inches a year, from where they were sawn off three years ago.Now conservationists are waiting with grim expectation for the first news of the resumption of the onslaught against the black rhino.
Apart from the unexpected regrowth, the main reason for the re-emergence of the threat to one of the few wild populations of black rhino in Africa is the Zimbabwean government's inexplicable of a successful rhino survival operation.
Since the dehorning operation, not a single rhino has been poached, even though demand for rhino horn is as strong as ever, selling for about $4,500 per pound among ethnic Chinese communities in the Far East.
But the regrowth has meant that most of the rhino population is now sporting horns up to 10 inches long and has become a target again.
"They have now become a very attractive poaching proposition again," said Dick Pitman, president of the Zambezi Society, a wildlife charity closely involved in rhino survival. "It makes them as vulnerable to poaching as they were before."
In 1993, Zimbabwe's Department of National Parks adopted an emergency black rhino survival strategy. In 10 years, the population, once Africa's largest, had crashed from an estimated 3,000 animals to just under 300 - the fastest collapse of any large mammal species in Africa. But a paramilitary operation by the department, backed by the police, army and air force, with President Robert Mugabe's personal approval for patrols to shoot poachers on sight, was ineffectual.
The new strategy involved dehorning the entire population and concentrating the animals in small areas, called Intensive Protection Zones, situated in both national parks and private game ranches, where they would be constantly monitored by well-armed rangers. Any poachers risked being shot. With only a tiny stub of almost valueless horn as their prize, it worked.
Not only did the killing stop, but biologists were thrilled to find that the absence of a horn made no difference to a rhino's ability to defend itself and its young from predators. The population has been growing at a robust 10 percent a year, and the sight of a rhino cow, with barrel-like calf trotting at its heels, has become a cheeringly common feature of the IPZs.
But the new hope for the species is under threat. In June last year, newly appointed Environment Minister Chen Chimutengwende ordered a halt to all dehorning operations on the grounds that he wanted a "review" of all parks department operations.
Only a few rhino which had regrown their horns have had them removed again.
Chimutengwende stopped a program to fit radio collars to rhino, a vital part of the monitoring operation that kept track of them 24 hours a day.
Now, said Pitman, "There are eight rhinos with collars still on. The rest have fallen off."
In the IPZ in Matusadonha national park in northern Zimbabwe, there has been no aerial tracking of rhinos for three months. At the same time, a core of expatriate researchers working in the IPZs where rare close-up access to rhinos was providing valuable new insights into the species was given its marching orders.
Chimutengwende also ordered that the rhino steering committee running the strategy be "restructured," which saw the removal of all the representatives of private wildlife organizations whose support had been critical to the strategy.
Of the two veterinarians - both white Zimbabweans - who pioneered valuable new techniques to tranquilize rhinos and perfected the skill of whittling down the horn to the bone on the snout, one has left the department out of frustration and the other is shortly to follow.
Some of the department's actions could only be interpreted as harrassment. Late last year, a large shipment of firearms was donated to a private conservancy for its game rangers to protect a group of rhinos. It was seized by the department.
A year later, there's no sign of the promised review. The worst news was in March, when the Finance Ministry suddenly withdrew $1.5 million from the department's budget, threatening to bring anti-poaching patrols inside IPZs to a standstill.
Pitman said it's "very difficult to know what is going on in the IPZs now."
"The rhino survival strategy has been abandoned," he said.