Half-million for rhino conservation

DSC South Texas sets record

Lone Star outdoor newS

A half-million dollars was raised for one item at the sold-out DSC South Texas gala in San Antonio on April 1. And the winners won’t be taking a rifle or bow.

The winning bidder, Ms. Shannon Ralston and the Ralston Family Charitable Foundation, will take part with five others spending 10 days as part of a relocation experience at the Buffalo Kloof Conservancy in collaboration with East Cape Parks and the Black Rhino Range Expansion Project.

Blake Barnett, outdoor television producer and a founding member of the chapter committee, said a few years ago he approached Warne Rippon, owner of the Buffalo Kloof Conservancy in South Africa with an idea.

It was a novel approach to auction a custodianship and experience to, in part, show the rest of the world that hunters are conservationists who put their money where their mouth is, Barnett said.

Buffalo Kloof Conservancy was started in 1999 with Warne Rippon’s idea to expand small individually owned farmlands into a large reserve with free-ranging animals. Now, the area is home to a healthy population of white and black rhino, a rehabilitation journey which began in 2010.

The monies raised will establish a custo- dianship of a proven producing black rhino cow with an opportunity to take part in the next translocation of black rhino from a National Park in an area where poaching has become a heavy threat to Buffalo Kloof.

“It is through collaborations like these that we can achieve our conservation goals in protecting this critically endangered black rhino,” Rippon, who attended the event with his wife, Hannah, said. “In just over three years we have already produced seven black rhino babies.”

At the gala with 600 attendees, DSC South Texas, along with the DSC Foundation, gave the entire half-million back to Buffalo Kloof to aid in tracking devices for the rhinos that call the conservancy home. It also will go toward land and habitat expansion for the black rhino and security.

“I had no idea this auction would turn into something like this,” Barnett said. “Hunters really walk the walk.”