12 May 2015, 23:54
juanpozziClem 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!