Rhino Hunters Can Capture Their Trophies and Preserve Rare Animals : Conservation: A veterinarian at a South African game reserve created a program that uses tranquilizer darts and computer chips.

Bob Keffen encourages wealthy tourists to shoot white rhinos in order to save them.

Keffen, chief veterinarian at Pilanesberg, has combined the use of tranquilizer darts with computer technology in a program he says will increase the thrill of a safari while preserving the rare rhinos.

Instead of firing bullets, a hunter shoots darts. While the animal is asleep, Keffen inserts a microchip into its horn for future identification and prepares it for transport to another game park that needs rhinos.

In May, Bruce Thatcher became the first of Keffen’s hunters, paying $7,000 instead of the $30,000 it costs to kill a rhino.

“I have my trophy and she will still run free in another reserve,” Thatcher, an American dentist, told Personality magazine afterward. “And let me tell you something . . . I’ve never been on such a difficult and challenging hunt.”

Because of conservation efforts in the last decade, the number of white rhinos roaming the wilds of Africa has increased from 3,841 to 4,745.

Keffen’s program at the Pilanesberg reserve, in the black homeland of Bophuthatswana, not only helps save the rhinos, but has opened up hunting to more people by slashing the cost.

Fees from the hunters, most of them Americans, pay for most of the conservation effort, including the cost of transporting rhinos to other parks.

“In the end, they found that darting a rhino is much harder than shooting it,” said Keffen, who went on Thatcher’s hunt and mixed the antidote for the tranquilizing dart.

“A lot more things can go wrong,” he said. “If you’re too close, the dart can bounce off. If you’re too far away, the dart will drop before the animal. There’s much more skill involved in the whole operation. Ultimately it’s a much better hunting experience.”

A conventional hunter can down a rhino with a high-powered rifle from up to 90 yards. With a dart-gun, the hunter has to be within 35 to 45 yards.

After the dart hits, the 3-ton animal may keep going for 10 to 15 minutes, at speeds that can reach 20 m.p.h., while the hunter tries to keep up.

Dart hunting was proposed last year at a hunting convention in the United States. Keffen, a Canadian who has been in South Africa since 1982, added the microchip and developed a working system in Pilanesberg.

One concern expressed at the convention, Keffen said, was “the marking of these rhinos: How were we going to keep the same rhino from being darted over and over again?” That’s the job of the computer chip, about the size of a rice kernel.

A scanner waved over the horn determines whether an animal has been tagged, ensuring that one hunter’s trophy is not claimed again later.

The chip also enables the park to keep track of the rhino until its death, and could deter poachers. Scanners used by customs agents would pick up a chip’s signal, indicating a hidden, contraband horn.

During the 40 minutes the rhino is down, hunters can pose for photos and take the animal’s measurements so that a model can be made back home.

South Africa has one of the continent’s best conservation programs. It increased its white rhino population from 2,500 in 1980 to 4,225 in 1990, giving it nearly 90% of all the white rhinos in Africa.

If the dart-computer chip plan is successful, Keffen said, it could be extended to black rhinos, which have been on the endangered list for years. Fewer than 3,500 are known to be in the African wilds, compared to more than 14,000 in 1980.

“What we’re worried about is that, sometime in the future, the black rhino will come off the endangered species list for whatever reason,” he said. “If it does, and if this is established as a bona fide procedure, maybe it will save those animals that might otherwise be slaughtered.”