Rhino Rescue: Can a plan to airlift South Africa's rhinos to safety protect the animals from poachers--and extinction?

• Author: Anastasia, Laura
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

As a rhinoceros lumbers across a field in South Africa, a helicopter suddenly appears. With the aircraft hovering overhead, the massive mammal breaks into a run--but it isn't fast enough. A skilled shooter leans out of the helicopter and takes aim. With one shot, he knocks the 4,000-pound animal to the ground.

Illegal hunters kill a rhino every 8.5 hours in South Africa. But this rhino is one of the lucky ones. Groggy but unhurt, it has been hit by a tranquilizer dart and is now in the hands of a conservation group called Rhinos Without Borders.

A team of skilled vets, animal handlers, and armed guards will transport the animal to a secret location in South Africa. Then they'll carefully fly the rhino to the neighboring country of Botswana and release it into the wild.

Botswana has one of the lowest rates of poaching in Africa. That's why Rhinos Without Borders aims to finish moving 100 rhinos there by the end of this year. The project, which began in 2014, is one of the largest airlifts of rhinos in history. As of press time, the group had already moved 77 of the animals.

At a cost of about $45,000 per rhino, the move is expensive--and extreme. But experts say that if drastic measures aren't taken, Africa's rhinos could become extinct within 10 years.

In 2015 alone, poachers wiped out more than 1,300 rhinos across the continent, almost all in South Africa. Since 2008, poachers have killed about 6,100 rhinos in South Africa.

Poachers kill the animals for their horns, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars per pound on the black market in Southeast Asia. Many people there mistakenly believe rhino horn has healing properties. In reality, the horns are made of keratin, the same material found in human fingernails, and have no known medicinal value.

A Lucrative Black Market

Dereck Joubert, a filmmaker and conservationist who runs Rhinos Without Borders with his wife, Beverly, says that extinction of the rhino would be a crippling blow to Africa's ecosystem.

"Rhinos play a vitally important role in keeping the ecosystems in Africa alive," he says. "Letting rhinos go is the start of a slippery slope of letting everything go."

One million rhinos roamed Africa 150 years ago. Today, only about 5,000 black rhinos and 20,000 white rhinos remain there. (The three other rhino species live in Asia.)

Buying and selling rhino horns across country lines is illegal. But the practice persists on the black market because it's so lucrative. One pound of rhino horn can fetch $30,000 to $50,000.

In South Africa, impoverished communities often help poachers in exchange for a cut of the profits. Some local people even track rhinos, then radio the animals' locations to poachers.

Many poachers in South Africa come from the nearby nation of Mozambique, which is one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique also lacks strict penalties for poaching or for possessing rhino horn. Its hunters often cross undetected into South Africa's Kruger National Park, kill rhinos and hack off their horns, then escape back across the border.

The poachers are highly skilled, says Beverly Joubert. They use tools such as drones and night vision equipment. Some line their escape routes with armed men to help them avoid capture. "They're in and out very, very quickly," she says.

Most poached rhino horn ends up in Vietnam, according to Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network. The Southeast Asian country's economy has grown in recent...