IT BREAKS MY HEART

After 30 years of keeping these endangered animals safe, rhino breeder John Hume has no option but to sell his beloved ‘pets’ and his farms

- ISABEL VENTER

FOR sale: 2 000 white rhinos and two farms on 8 500 hectares of North West bushveld paradise.

The price? Around $10 million (R193m), but buyers will need to have very, very deep pockets over and above paying the asking price.

The rhinos on this land form the world's largest private herd - one-fifth of the global white rhino population and farming and protecting the animals is an expensive business.

Just ask John Hume (81), owner of the Platinum Rhino Project who's throwing in the towel after nearly three decades of rhino breeding and conservation.

It breaks his heart, but he simply can't carry on any longer.

"It's impossible to say what these 2 000 rhinos have cost me," John says.

"Billions. I was rich then. And now I'm not.

Farm operations cost around R8,2 million a month and more than half of that is for security, including armed rangers, dogs, helicopters, vehicles and equipment, according to auction documents for John's properties. Despite these efforts, poachers have still managed to kill some of his rhinos and remove their horns, leaving John devastated each time. In a 2017 interview he told YOU how he would weep next to the butchered carcasses.

"I don't feel for people the way I feel for animals," he said. "Rhinos are like my pets." His team started cutting off the rhinos' horns and selling them before a moratorium was placed on the rhino horn trade in SA in 2009.

John now has a stockpile of about 500kg of rhino horn that's not part of the sale. To pay his farms' bills, John brought a successful court application in 2017 to have the rhino horn trade moratorium lifted. "Am I not allowed to earn an income on the billions of rands I've invested the past 22 years?" he said at the time.

"What I want to prevent at all costs is the demand in rhino horn being met by murdering my rhinos."