Platinum Rhino, the world’s largest rhino conservation farm in South Africa, will be sold at an auction in April due to the high cost of breeding endangered rhinos.
Picture: Getaway gallery
The farm, spanning 8,500 hectares and home to nearly 2,000 southern white rhinoceros, is a significant portion of South Africa’s rhino population, which accounts for about 80% of the world’s total. The farm’s owner, John Hume, explained that breeding rhinos are costly, saying, ‘I have been breeding rhinos for 30 years without profit.’
Hume is looking for a buyer ‘with a passion for conserving rhinos and the means to keep the breeding project going.’
According to Hume, preventing poaching has taken a significant toll on the farm’s finances, with a cost of up to half a million rand ($28,000) to breed a rhino up to the age of four. The rhino’s horns are highly prized on black markets in Asian countries such as China and Vietnam for use in traditional medicine. Last year, the South African government reported that 448 rhinos were killed, almost the same as in 2021, with an increasing number of poaching incidents happening on privately owned reserves.
In 2017, Hume organized an online auction of rhino horns he had amassed by sawing them off to prevent their killing by poachers. The sale did not attract as many buyers as anticipated and sparked controversy. The southern white rhino subspecies is now considered endangered, with approximately 20,000 individuals remaining worldwide, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The farm’s chief veterinarian, Dr Michelle Otto, said that Platinum Rhino’s plan to release 100 farm-bred rhinos into the wild each year “could repopulate the whole of Africa” if there were sufficient funding for the project.
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