Anna Merz, who went to Kenya seeking a serene retirement but became so appalled by the slaughter of black rhinoceroses that she helped start a reserve to protect them, becoming a global leader in the fight against their extinction, died on April 4 in Melkrivier, South Africa.
She was 81. The Lewa Wildlife Conservancy is a reserve she founded. She left no immediate survivors, but more than 70 black rhinos, including one born the day she died, continue to thrive in the sanctuary that she created to protect them from poachers, who kill the animals for their horns.
As a young woman, Merz roamed the world and ended up in Ghana, where she married twice, ran an engineering firm and became active in wildlife conservation. She and her husband went to Kenya to retire, but her revulsion at seeing the carcasses of rhinos strewn about a national park, each missing its distinctive double horn, compelled her to change her plans.
She started looking for land to use as a rhino reserve and found a patron, David Craig, who with his wife, Delia, owned a vast tract in the shadow of Mount Kenya. They agreed to set aside 5,000 acres for the project, which opened in 1981 as the Ngare Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary. It has since grown to 61,000 acres through more land donations and was renamed the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in 1995.
Lewa’s success helped the black rhino population double to 4,880 over the last decade, still a far cry from the millions that once roamed Africa. Lewa is home to 10 per cent of Kenya’s black rhinos and its efforts have lent substance to the dream of returning the species to its former dominance in northern Kenya. Lewa rhinos must be regularly resettled elsewhere because the success of the breeding programme — the reserve’s numbers grow 10 per cent a year which has caused overcrowding and fights.
Merz’s example has inspired other wildlife conservation efforts and has helped make the black rhino, which is still critically endangered, a global symbol of extinction prevention. “I have met many remarkable animal specialists during my life, but none as extraordinary as Anna Merz,” Desmond Morris, the zoologist and author, wrote in the foreword to her 1991 book, ‘Rhino at the Brink of Extinction’.
“What Joy Adamson was to lions, Dian Fossey was to gorillas and Jane Goodall is to chimpanzees, Anna Merz is to rhinos.” Born Florence Ann Hepburn, she graduated from Nottingham University, studied law and travelled to exotic places before settling in Ghana. There she married Ernest Kuhn, whom she divorced in 1969 and Karl Merz, who died in 1988.
Rounding up rhinos
She and Karl Merz moved to Kenya in 1976. After securing the first 5,000 acres for the reserve, Merz built an eight-foot-high fence, then began rounding up rhinos using helicopters and stun guns. She hired more than 100 armed guards, bought a plane for surveillance and built a network of spies to inform on poachers. Poachers, also armed, sell the horns largely to Asians, who grind them for folk medicine and Arabs, who carve them to use as dagger handles. Prices for rhino horns can run higher than those for gold.
Merz herself carried a gun and knife. Deborah Gage, a conservancy official in London, wrote in an email that about an year ago, Merz heard a yelp and “went into the next-door room to find that a python had taken her favourite dog, so she grabbed her pistol, shot the python in the head and gradually unravelled it off her dog.”
At first, Merz used her own money to finance the project, a total of more than $1.5 million, but she came to rely on donations. She employed locals, built schools and medical clinics for them and helped foster the tourist industry.
In 1990, the UN Environmental Program named Merz to its Global 500 Roll. To Merz, rhinos — far from being the stupid, aggressive, ill-tempered sorts — were, in her words, beautiful and elegant. She blamed their bellicosity on their poor eyesight, leading them to charge first and ask questions later.
She found that rhinos have a sense of humour and that they communicate by altering their breathing rhythms. She read them Shakespeare to soothe them. Samia, an orphan rhino whom she raised from babyhood, even crawled into bed with Merz.
Samia would follow her around like a dog, even after leaving Merz’s care and returning to the reserve, where she had her own calf. If Merz fell, Samia would extend her tail to help her. Not realising how big she had grown, Samia once tried to sneak back into the house where she had been nursed and became jammed in the dining room door. Merz had to pour a gallon of cooking oil on her rough skin to ease her through.