I believe that one of the elephant hunters that deseves more atention is Clem Coetzee ,hes the hunter who killed more elephants of all the time ,near 16000 and MORE IMPORTANT hes the conservationist that did more for them relocating entire herds ,i believe we must judge a hunter by his conservationist eforts and not by his killing numbers .Im getting old and i feel that we must give the nature more than we take.Clem was one of thses guys that give a lot even his life to the conservationist cause .During his cullings he used dragunov rifles and a double 500 as Dennis Croukamp stated in his wonderfull book RHODESIA BUSH WAR ..Please any information about him is welcomed photos etc .Im writing an article about him .

I have heard so much great stories about him, it will really be wonderful to all more.

What strikes me most about Clem Coetzee is the awe in which he appears to be held by those who worked for him. I hunted with an old Parks hunter and his attitude towards Clem was the same as what you see in print. It was something like "Sure I was involved in some things I'm proud of, but I'm not in Clem's league. He's a real hunter conservationist."

I can't think of higher praise.

Dean

Juan,

Please post a link to your article once it is completed.

I will look forward to reading it.

Juan,

I spent four days with Clem at Hwange in the late 80's. When I get down there for that bird hunt I want to do, I'll fill you in on the details. He was one of those special people that it is a privilege to spend some time with.

465H&H

Just ordered the Rhodesian bush war book

So will I. I was not familiar with this gentleman and am looking forward to discovering him in print.

Dutch

Ron Thomson talks about Clem quite a bit in his book Black Rhino I believe. Clem ended up working with Ron on the black rhino relocation program. If I recall correctly, Clem ended up being gored by a rhino during the relocation program.

I had the wrong Coetzee. The person in Ron Thomson's book was Paul Coetzee.

We met Clem and his son (Vickers if I recall corrctly)many years ago in Zim. We ever got to watch game capture. It was very interesting. They were very skilled.

Just read about Wally Johnson
What a story

quote:

Originally posted by juanpozzi:
I believe that one of the elephant hunters that deseves more atention is Clem Coetzee ,
hes the hunter who killed more elephants of all the time ,

He used a self-loading .308 with military ammunition for many of his ele Kills..... correct?

and of the many thousands he shot, One must remember there were many yougnsters in that number,
After the adult females were shot, the young calves would huddle together in fear, and then they would all be cut down.

Having to slaughter thousands & thousands of young calf elephants would be a distasteful task for most people.

I had the pleasure of spending a month with Adrian Reed last year. He worked with Clem on many of those culls and took over from him as I understood. Adrian reckoned he shot 15k elephants and Clem's figure was around 30K! He said that he and his brother were incredibly quick and terrific shots!

I have a video clip of Adrian shooting an elephant cow in self defense. She dropped a couple of paces from his boots, from the video you can see you can see that he was unfazed and honestly upset that he had to shoot her. I remember him telling me that he could kill an elephant stone dead from any angle. I guess after 15k of them you develop the skill!

Juan,

I personally know Clem Coetsee's brother which is still alive. If you want I can get you the contact details of Paul Coetsee. He stays in my area. Paul also did a lot of culling and conservation work himself.

Derek (Gomez) Adams also worked for Clem on the culling team and would be a good source of info.

465H&H

Gentlemen any iformation is greatly apprecaited ,i would love to chat with his brother .I write mostly for Argentine Magnum magazine ,when i finish the article ill post it here ,The site of the magazine is www.revistamagnum.com.ar there are many articles related with my good friend ganyana ,he colaborates with me in some African matters .Im writing about GEOFFROY DE GENTILE too .

Clem and Emily Coetzee are great family friends.Vickus Clem and Emily's son is still based in Triangle operating his transport company.He still has all his capture equipment.I have sent you a pm with Vickus and Emily contact details.Good luck and look forward to reading the end product.

Clem and Emily Coetzee are great family friends.Clem and his son Vickus captured over 600 elephant from Ghona re zhou in the early 90s and translocated them to Humani and the SVC.If you would like to visit us on Humani we can get Vickus and Em down and you could capture many stories from Roger Whittall and neighbours like Barrie DuckWorth and Clive Stockil.Please send me an email and i will send you Vickus and Emilys contact details.

I didnt received ,a pm .Please any details books or articles about Clem will be welcomed .

In 1995 the BBC aired a 3-part documentary called Africa's Big Game. It featured interviews with lots of well known hunters and conservationists and I recall that a Clem was one of those featured. I have a copy on VHS (poor quality, recorded off the TV) but try as I have the BBC will not sell me a DVD copy and say they have no plans to release it. I guess it doesn't fit with their left wing agenda. It was excellent though...

Im getting some information when i have everything ill post some here .Curretnly im on safari with rjanz .BUT THANK YOU FOR THE INFO.

GREAT.
I looking Forward.

Best wishes.

The "O

Clem Coetsee - Rhodesian Game Conservationist Game Warden
who pioneered methods for relocating elephants and rhinos to safe
reserves across Southern Africa.
Clem Coetsee was one of Africa’s most respected game
conservationists.
Although in the early stages of his career as a gamekeeper he
had to cull about 15,000 elephants, he hated doing it and killed
them as quickly and humanely as possible. Their numbers in the
national parks of what was then Rhodesia were threatening to grow
uncontrollably, after which they would eat and smash their habitat
before starving to death. It was a personal triumph for Coetsee,
therefore, when he developed a technique of drug-darting, crating
and transporting full-grown elephants, and later whole families, as
an alternative to culling them. He also rescued many thousands
of other animals, from tiny klipspringer antelope to rhinoceros and
buffalo, that he captured from overstocked or poacher-threatened
environments and moved to more secure homes.
Although asthmatic, Coetsee chased his quarry himself, and
often on foot. He used scrap metal and simple Rhodesian farmer
technology to build ingenious machines to contain the largest and
most violent beasts.
He had an extraordinary affinity for animals. He used to face
charging bull elephants until they stopped, five metres from him,
turned round and walked away, and he would soothe panic-stricken
buffalo in the capture pens by talking quietly to them. He once kept
an adult hyena as a pet - it ate garden furniture and bit chunks out
of car bodies - and an African lungfish in a bath.
Andries Marthinus Coetsee, known to all as Clem, was born
into a poor Afrikaner family on a smallholding outside the central
Rhodesian town of Gwelo (now Gweru), and grew up holding a rifle.
He completed his apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic, but after four
years joined the Southern Rhodesia National Parks Department in
1965.
The Government was clearing uninhabited, tsetse fly infested
areas in the remote north of the country to resettle black Rhodesians.
Biologists then believed that every wildlife species was host to
the tsetse fly, and that slaughtering all game was the only way to
eradicate it. Coetsee’s job was simply to kill all the game he could find.
By 1973, when he became a senior ranger in charge of a park on
the shores of Lake Kariba, the policy had shifted from carnage to
capture. It was an epiphany for Coetsee, who pioneered a way of
rolling a drugged two-tonne black rhino on to a heavy rubber mat and
winching it into a truck. He also was the first to learn how to catch
buffalo calves without darting them.
Under the eyes of their deadly mothers, he dazzled them in a boma
(stockade) at night with the headlights of a Land Rover, jumped out
of the vehicle to snatch their hind legs from under them and tossed
them into the back of the vehicle.
In 1972, Coetsee was involved in a helicopter crash. He was
awarded the Meritorious Conduct Medal for Valour for rescuing the
badly-burnt pilot.
In 1979, he was put in charge of National Parks game management,
including elephant culling. He operated mostly in Wankie (now
Hwange) national park, which was being reduced to a dustbowl by
its 20,000 elephants. Coetsee perfected the Technique of eliminating
an entire herd, except for its infants, in one fusillade, to avoid the
psychological trauma that elephants experience after witnessing the
violent death of their peers.
Helicopters would drive a herd of elephants toward a trio of
Parks marksmen, standing in arrow formation. When they were
close enough the hunters would open fire and, usually, in about 12
seconds a herd of up to 50 elephants would be dead, each killed
with a single bullet.
Coetsee also ran the recovery of the ivory, hides, feet, ears and
tails and the distribution of meat to local people, and he spent hours
th the orphans in the bomas, talking to them as he hosed them and
rubbed them down.
He was relieved to be able to spend more time rescuing animals with
the National Parks capture unit. Soon after Independence in 1980, an
onslaught of poachers in the Zambezi Valley ravaged its 2,000 black
rhino, Africa’s last sustainable population of the endangered species.
Coetsee’s team snatched the 300 survivors to guarded conservancies.
In 1985, he was awarded a citation by the WWF for his expertise in
both capture and culling, in which it said: “He has few, if any, superiors
anywhere in Africa.” Such skills came at a price: on different occasions
a rhino gored him, smashing his ribs; he was pulled out of his sleeping
bag by a hungry hyena; he was knocked down by an elephant bull,
kicked by a giraffe and had a narrow escape from a rogue lion.
In 1988, he left National Parks and set up his own wildlife management
company in the south eastern Lowveld. In 1992 the worst drought
in a century impelled him to do what wildlife experts thought was
impossible: to relocate adult elephants. He was already experienced at
moving juveniles to areas still with water supplies and vegetation, and
he realised that the adults, wasted by starvation, had been reduced
to a manageable size. For the first time, individual adult elephants
were loaded on to cattle trucks and taken hundreds of miles to private
conservancies.
After individuals, he tried families. By now he had also refined the
use of drugs. From a helicopter, Coetsee would dart a group of a
dozen elephants with massive doses of imobiliser, winch them one at
a time into a reinforced 40-foot container, inject them with a tranquiliser
and an antidote to the immobilising drug. The elephants woke in the
containers and rose to their feet as the knock-out drug wore off, but
were too drowsy with the tranquilliser to cause any trouble. Since they
were standing their rib cages did not collapse under their own body
weight - Coetsee also learnt that they suffocated if they fell on their
trunks, and it required desperate scrambling around to shift them when
they did. He moved 270 that year.
He continued in 1993, and became so efficient that he could move
three families in a day. Even when they had recovered from the drought
and were at full weight, up to five tonnes, he took only 90 minutes for
each operation.
He moved 670 that year, 200 of them delivered to a South African game
reserve, a two-day journey over 1,200km, with no casualties. Coetsee
was in demand all over Africa, and in 1994 gave demonstrations in
South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.
The enterprise was killed by political infighting between ruling party
supporters in national parks. Coetsee faced the absurd accusation
that he had “clandestinely” taken 300 elephants across the border to
South Africa.
President Mugabe’s land grab in 2000 pushed squatters on to his
ranch in Chiredzi in the Lowveld. Under constant harassment, Coetsee
gave up the ranch three years ago and kept only the homestead.
Last December a local ruling party grandee smashed his gate, parked
a caravan immediately in front of the house and dumped furniture on
his verandah. His battles with belligerent officialdom were a sad end
to his life of service to Africa.
Andries “Clem” Coetsee, wildlife expert, was born on May 13,
1939. He died from a heart attack on September 4, 2006, Age : 67.
Taken from Contact.
The Meritorious Conduct Medal senior Ranger Andries Marthinus
Coetsee
“For brave and gallant conduct over and above the call of duty, in
that on 2 May, 1972, while a crashed helicopter from which he had
escaped was on fire, one of its petrol tanks exploded and he returned
to the blazing wreckage and released the pilot who was trapped inside
by his safety harness. During this action, the second petrol tank
exploded, and, although Senior Ranger Coetsee would have known
of the probability of this occurring, he continued his efforts to rescue
the pilot and carry him to safety.”
Oddly, in one of those bizarre coincidences, his brother in law, Senior
Ranger Willem de Beer, was awarded the MCM for his actions in saving
life in a incident with a lion, in April, 1972!

Enjoyed the article Juan. Thanks for writing the story.

Hi Juan, one small correction to your article. During the big culls which Clem led in Hwange (mostly) helicopters were not used but a single "spotter" fixed wing plane - generally a Piper Supercub. The pilot in this plane located a herd and then talked the ground team onto the herd. They closed up on the herd on foot, with the pilot talking to the point man (one point and 2 flanks) and trying to get him onto the herd and identify the matriarch. The Point man would then initiate by taking the matriarch and it would all be over in a few seconds. Clem was almost always the point man. He was a helluva guy, the original walk softly and carry a big stick type, and we were all in awe of him. More than most the end of his life was a crime - that a man who had given so much to Africa and its wildlife was treated the way he was. Great article - thank you.

Excellent thread _ thanks to all involved.

Gentlemen i need information about the guns used by Clem Coetzee any help welcomed .

THANK YOU DR DON HEATH .
Hi Juan



Clem used a double .465 for the first 4 shots and then two Draganovs after that. While he was shooting one rifle the other was being reloaded by a scout. A second scout reloaded and carried a double. Mike La Grange started using F.N. FAL’s with Horniday 220grn solids. When we captured a pile of new US M1 Garands he upgraded to 30-06. Mikes personal rifle to open the cull with was a 500 A Square. He used a .500NE before Art gave hijm the rifle and my dad made him a sensible stock ( My dad did an aprentership as a stockmaker at the end of WWII but got a scholarship to be an engineer after Korea, and he altered or made new many rifle stock as extra cash.

I have been reading a book by Michael Bromwich entitled National Parks and Wildlife Management. It is a series of historical and anecdotal accounts by individuals that served in National Parks, the Game Department and ultimately the Parks and Wildlife Department in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe from 1928 to 1990. The book talks about some of the elephant control work done by Paul Coetsee. For example, in the first week of tsetse operations in Sabi/Lundi area, Paul shot 72 elephant. On that same operation, by the time it was over the group, including Paul, had shot over a thousand elephant. This was one operation. Served in the Tracker Combat Unit during the bush war. His peers describe him as a man with few if any peers. Pity there is no biographical work about Paul Coetsee, that would be some incredible reading.

Dear Mike ,Michael Bromwich,sent a very interesting article about Paul .I have wriTten an article for Argentine magnum magazine not published yet .WWW.REVISTAMAGNUM.COM.AR
I believe nobody is closer regarding elephant hunting culling and conservation .Don Heath sent me several anectdotal accounts too .
Ill send you a mail with the article as soon it go to the press .

Thank you very much. Quite a family the Coetsee's. There has got to be a book there somewhere.