In 1984 WWF Holland sent funds to Garamba after the fundraising of 1983. We received 400.000 dollars.
Due to the war, Kes Hillman Smith and her husband Fraser Smith are worried about the future of the northern white. They had to relocate with their family to Nairobi. The park wardens in Garamba should quickly get cars, fuel, weapons, and radio-equipment, due to the war everything is gone. Happily the rhinos are a bit protected because the grass is 2 m high at this time of the year and the animals are hard to find. Poachers come from Sudan and they move around in the park. We have to do something before the grass burns after a few months. This summer Kes made her last flight above the reserve. They saw 18 rhinos, very few compared to other times. Shocking is that there were 49 poacher's camps within the park bundaries. In July Kes had her first talk with the government in Congo. The minister of the enviroment, Angulu Mabenge, led the talks. WWF has agreed to send a technical advisor to the headquarters in Kinshasa, we need to help the new government to find its feet.
Early in the 1990s the government started dehorning operations, hoping that a dehorned rhino is unattractive to poachers. It was an emergency. In 1 ? years time we dehorned over 300 rhino. That was expensive, but we recieved financial aid from WWF Holland. At first the operation seemed unsuccesful, because poachers even killed dehorned animals, we found some 20 dead dehorned rhino in Zimbabwe. But the killing of these rhino suddenly stopped. Possibly the middlemen wanted to wait until the horns had grown again. Raoul du Toit doesn't think that dehorning will again be necessary. The translocations stopped in 1995, we feel that rhinos now live in reasonably safe areas.
