Texas hounds chase down rhino poachers in South Africa
Kruger National Park, South AfricaTwo years ago, Joe Braman was living a regular family life with his wife and two daughters on his remote ranch in southern Texas. A part time cop, businessman, and cowboy, he’d never given a thought to the rhino poaching crisis in South Africa. But in May 2018, Braman and his free-running hounds were sprinting across the acacia plains close to Kruger National Park chasing armed rhino poachers.
To date since then, according to authorities, his hounds have helped law enforcement teams in the greater Kruger region catch an unprecedented 145 poachers and confiscate 53 guns, boosting the overall rate of successful arrests and providing a new strategy to fight poaching in Africa.
“Just think about it,” Braman says. “If you spun a globe and threw a dart and it stuck, what’s the odds you’ll find a low-key guy in southern Texas’s coastal bend gettin’ picked to stop the extinction of a species?”
Some 8,000 rhinos, whose horns are smuggled to Asia for unfounded medicinal uses, were poached in South Africa from 2008 to 2018, with more than half killed in Kruger, the country’s signature national park, and the surrounding private reserves. There are some 20,000 white rhinos and just over 5,000 critically endangered black rhinos in the wild across Africa. South Africa is home to about 80 percent of the world’s last remaining rhinos.
The Texan connection started early in 2017, when Theresa Sowry, CEO of the Southern African Wildlife College—a wildlife management and training facility based near Kruger—visited Braman in Refugio, Texas, to discuss his experience with hounds and watch them in action. She’d heard about a unique bloodline of aggressive free-running pack dogs—black-and-tan hounds—used in Texas law enforcement to track down escaping prison inmates.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/09/texan-hounds-fight-rhino-poaching/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SunStills_20190915&rid=FB26C926963C5C9490D08EC70E179424
= new reply since forum marked as read
"unfounded medicinal uses" - aphrodisiac
