PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. (CBS12) — CBS12 News has an inside look at how wildlife keepers at one of Palm Beach County’s animal parks traveled around the world to help African wildlife. I’m doing it.
Lion Country Safari is best known as Florida’s largest wildlife drive-thru park, home to lions, elephants, and giraffes. But what you may not know is that the money you earn from tickets is donated to wildlife conservation efforts.
There are five types of rhinos in Africa. All are at some level of risk.
To put this into perspective, at the beginning of the 20th century, an estimated 500,000 rhinos roamed the earth. Today, just under 28,000 rhinos remain in the wild. According to the International Rhinoceros Foundation:
According to the foundation, the main cause is poaching.
So these two local animal experts used their combined 30 years of experience working with rhinos to support established conservation efforts in Africa.
Lion Country’s chief rhino keeper Dan Soler and colleague Craig Vandermaid spent their first week at the Gorola Rhino Orphanage and Rehabilitation Center in northern South Africa. There they were caring for an orphan rhino whose mother had been poached.
Sorrell and Vandermaid were responsible for bottle-feeding the baby rhino and tending to its injuries. They also slowly introduced the animals to other baby rhinos to establish a normal social structure.
Usually this is something you do with your mother.
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Soler said he hopes their efforts will increase rhino populations in the future.
“As a megaphone species, rhinos are important to the environment. They are important for clearing African lands and maintaining natural environments and natural habitats. “It can have a significant impact,” Soler said. “They have a very long gestation period. It takes a long time for them to breed and give birth to calves. They give birth to one calf at a time. Even though they are being poached at this rate, The population is not replenishing at the same rate. Within the next 20 to 30 years, these rhinos may no longer exist in the wild and can only be found in human reserves like Lion Country. I may not be able to do it.”
They then spent the next week in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. There they tracked wild animals such as elephants, impalas and giraffes.
Researchers want to learn more about their behavior and whereabouts within the park. They then entered that data into a software program to track the animals’ movements throughout the year.
Soler said he hadn’t seen a single rhino there in all his time. He says this is a clear sign of poaching and ultimately vindicates their efforts to save the rhinos.
Sorrell said it was great to see first-hand how the money earned in Lion Country is actually being used to help in the field.
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