Australian Rhino Project

Monarto Safari Park, the Zoo where the program is taking place, has a fun history. You might ask yourself, why is one of the world's largest safari parks located in South Australia?

In 1973, the South Australian government started buying up huge swaths of land from farmers, with the goal of creating a satellite city for the state capital of Adelaide. They felt Adelaide was growing too fast, and to stop it from becoming a sprawling congested mess, they wanted a discrete satellite city for the burgeoning blue and white collar industries to expand into.

That never happened. The population growth stagnated in SA, and after a long tenure the politicians who had backed the scheme finished their time in office, and the planning department responsible was abolished. This left the government with over a thousand hectares of land in the middle of nowhere, with no plans on how to use it.

So in 1982, the Planning and Environment minister announced that 1,000 hectares of Crown land would become an open range zoo, and it has been developed into one of the world's leading conservation parks.

More recently, they've gotten more funding from the government and are developing the park into a more accessible location, which overall should help the park grow and help develop their conservation efforts.

I was put on to this story by this excellent youtube video, which contains some wicked footage of 70s and 80s Australia, and dives in depth into the urban planning aspects of this story and what the government had hoped to achieve with a satellite city, equally fascinating!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RW6-pw16dg

Can we eat them then?

Let’s say they manage to create a population in Australia. With an ever so small surplus, we could take that and eat it. Prices for legal rhino burger would probably be insane, right? I mean - that and horns are why they are poached. And legal horns could be a thing then, too.

Seems like the best option for any animal’s long term survival is to become human food or amusement.

Sounds very interesting. Honestly not trying to be skeptical, the thing it reminds me of was a proposal from a scientist that Australia import elephants and rhinos to help control the spread of gamba grass. Itself imported from africa for grazing, it crowds out local plants, but maybe more pertinent these days, has an increased fire risk profile.

To me the contention with any plan, conservation or otherwise, is "be ultra careful what you bring into Australia".

Certainly not an expert, I'm sure in any case they would be very careful doing any of this, tracking etc. And I don't feel rhino's are quite as aggressive as say, hippos (authorities did not think Escobar's hippos would survive in Colombia; that turned out to be dead wrong). But I would certainly be very curious to see how introducing such a large aggressive herbivore with no natural predators would affect the area, if only because it does seem like a doable task to control the population.

I love collective nouns and am happy to add "a crash of rhinos" to my collection!

Excellent initiative!