[00:00:00] Speaker A: Reintroductions, pushing the boundaries of what is possible, and finding a way forward to support local communities. When done right, conservation can bring unbelievable opportunities to both people and megafauna.
Welcome to Rewadology, the nature podcast that explores the human side of conservation, travel and rewilding the planet. I am your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
Oh my gosh. I have a very exciting update episode for you all. Back in 2022, I did a special World Rhino Day episode with Mark Butcher, also known as Butch, where he shared the incredible story of how and why envelope and local communities brought back white rhinos to the hawaiian ecosystem in Zimbabwe. A few weeks ago, I received a rather awesome newsletter from envelop and immediately reached out to their team to get Butch back on the show to share something huge with all of you. I sat down with them a few days later and this is the conversation that we have. And oh, just wait until you hear the new and exciting things they have been cooking up with local communities.
But before we dive into this awesome update episode, please don't forget to give the show some love by subscribing wherever you are currently listening through your your headphones or car, wherever you're at, following on your favorite social media app, subscribing to the YouTube channel, reading and reviewing the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or purchasing a piece of swag to show others how much you love the show. And I would be super happy if you did.
Alrighty, enough formalities from me. Please enjoy this hope giving conversation with my good friend Butchenk.
Butch, I am so excited to be sitting down with you again today because I saw some very exciting news in a recent newsletter and I knew I had to get you back on because we have to talk about this and the whole community needs to know. So I'm not going to spoil it. Go ahead. What is the big news from envelop and your ngo? I need to hear it.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Hi Brooke. Thanks so much. Your enthusiasm is only second to mine.
We started our pilot project of our community rhino conservation initiative a couple of years back. We reintroduced the first rhino back into the Wangi landscape after the last one's been poached, something like 20 years ago.
And since then, really, it was a phase. One was a pilot project just to try and get it working, to find out if we could make it work. And after a year or so, we realized quickly that was working really well. And we had already opened the doors with another group of communities who said they wanted to get involved. They wanted rhino. And we built up a sanctuary for their rhino. Last year, we got approval for it, and those rhino are ready to roll. They're going to be coming our way in the next month or so. So that community there is even more excited than you and I. They've been dreaming and talking about these rhino for the past two years, and those rhino are coming, and they're having discussions about where they're going to stand to greet the rhino and who's going to be in which car to greet the rhino. And they're really excited about what it bodes for the future in terms of bringing tourism to the area, in terms of looking after the rhino and what the future holds for more rhino. It's just such a wonderful, upbeat, exciting, community based conservation story. And it's rhino, you know, so it's wonderful. Very exciting.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: So, so exciting. Yeah, yeah. When I saw that newsletter come through, I literally, out loud in my office here by myself, I said, what? It's happening? Because for anybody who didn't catch our first episode, so it was almost exactly two years ago, you and I sat down for World Rhino Day, which is coming up next month, and we were celebrating one year with, I forgot name, Tuza and Kusasa. Close.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: That's it.
That's it.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Yep. We were celebrating one year with them and just how exciting that whole beautiful story was and how, you know, community like envelope and the communities that you're partnered with brought white rhinos back to the Wenge ecosystem. Like, how a phenomenal of an accomplishment is that? So take me, let's. Let's discuss then, how did this second wave happen where you are already planning it?
What other pieces have had to come into place to get this next set of rhinos here?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: So just about. So, Brooke.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: So all these things are always a heavy lift, but what's exciting is we had, when we first set up sanctuary one, which was the sanctuary where Tuzun Kusasa are now well settled, one of the headmen of our areas, guy called him level baba level, father level, and he was there to greet those rhinos, even though they were in a place probably 20 km from his home. He said, we need to bring. We need to do the same thing in our area. And a number of his community elders, both men and women, were there, and they were really excited if they could see with their eyes quickly about what something like this might do for their communities.
The reason we have put up the sanctuary, too, where we have, is not for any ecological reasons, not for any reasons other than the community desperately wanted it. And they were first on the list. They said, we want rhino. So we said, cool, you're next. So that's why we're there. And right from then, the work started in identifying land, identifying ground. Ecologists had to now come and look at it and say, look, we think this is a good area. And they identified an area that was very suitable for white rhino. Lots of the right grass species. What we already know from phase one is we've learned so much about rhino in the Wangi landscape. Much of it is new. You know, back in the day when white rhino were there, we took a lot for granted. But we certainly got much more intense now with studying them and what they need, because we know we have to plan future reintroductions very carefully. So the new sanctuary was demarcated with approval from all of the community members, mainly coming from three different villages, and that aligned with what the colleges told us was useful. And then our cobra ranger team had to come and look at it and try and see whether they were going to be protectable there and what they could do to look after it. And once we drew that lines in the sand, we could now move ahead. And what followed from that was fences, electric fences that could contain the rhino. And importantly also is make sure that animals couldn't come into the sanctuary from the park and then use that as a stepping stone to go to the communities, because a lot of these communities don't necessarily need elephants in their fields or lions walking around, you know, their homesteads and schools. So. So that had to be done. Once that fencing was all organized, we had to build infrastructure in there, which is barrack rooms for the cobra rangers, op centers, radio networks, roads, water, electricity, wi Fi, cheapers, all the things that go there. And once we had all of that in place, then we, everybody came around, had a look. Again, we got the national parks authorities to come and look. They are the ultimate authority for rhino in our country. And they did some ground checking, actually gave us quite a few useful suggestions as to what we could do to upgrade. And then once that was all kind of ready, we could now then go back and say, okay, guys, we're ready. Communities are ready. What next?
As you know, we team up well with the folks from the Malalangui Trust, which is in the far southeast of our country. They've done a great job of looking off their rhino, got some excellent biologists and conservationists there, and it was their task now to identify a couple more rhino for us.
One of the interesting things about this whole thing is we talked about trying to set up a reintroduction which we would try to be 100% not lose any rhino at all, either through poaching or through, or through bad management or through bad translocation procedures or anything like that. So when we started the original phase one, they said, look, let's just use two bull rhino as our pilot guinea pigs in inverted commas, because obviously females are much more important to the national herd. Because technically, if you lose a male, it's a problem, yes, but if you lose a female, you're losing four rhino for the future. So we started off with those two bulls, and one of the interesting things that's come out from that is now we said, okay, for sanctuary two, what are we going to do, you know, and we're all excited, okay, we're going to bring the bull and bring some cows now and split the bulls up. Now we can start, you know, putting families together and start, you know, having rhino breeding and stuff. And after a lot of careful thought, mainly driven by the biologists and ecologists from Malangwe, they said, look, maybe the parks guys made good recommendations right at the beginning, and that was that we should start with bulls. Because if you picture a scenario where we're doing a serial translocation of rhino, okay, so we're going to do some now, do some of next year, do some the year after and the year after. So if we start with a couple of bulls and then we bring more bulls later, what can happen is we may get intraspecific mortality. So we get, if you picture the bulls that arrived last year or two years ago, Tuzu and Kusasa, right now, they're really settled in their territorial, they're on their a game, you know, they're in very good condition and obviously very keen to protect their territory, you know, so if we bring more male rhino into that environment, there's a very good chance they could get killed or driven out, you know. So we said, okay, what, probably the way to go here is to use each individual sanctuary.
We start those with the bulls, get the bulls all settled, and then one day, when we link those sanctuaries together into a larger conservancy, there will be an even playing field amongst the bulls, and now there will be natural, natural selection processes can take place for when we bring the females in. So that's where we're at right now. But again, every year, every month, we're rewriting the book in terms of how to do it and just trying to be sensible about it. We're learning day by day new stuff. But anyway, so people say, okay, so are you getting females down? We're saying, no, we're getting two more bulls. Oh, how's that? That's the reason why. Kind of, kind of interesting to see how it's unfolded and I guess maybe.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: For context, for scale, how far apart then is the enclosed sanctuary of Tuzakasa and then the enclosed sanctuary that is coming right now.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: So they're about 5 miles apartheid. They're about 5 miles separated. Okay, so what we've. And in the part of the reason now we, the concept was to have these sanctuaries set up where we introduce a small number of rhino garden with a large number of cobra ranges, small area, easy to protect. Small number rhino, easy to protect. Now, we can guarantee, as near as we can get to guarantee protection. Okay, so we're not going to lose any to poaching then. The idea is one day to link them all together and technically from sanctuary one to sanctuary two, we probably need another one in between.
So Sanctuary 2 may become sanctuary two a because we've got sanctuary one and a half, 1.5 goes, it goes between them. But like I say, this thing to try, good experience is that you can draw lines on maps, but if communities don't like those lines, you can create problems for yourself. So we really try to make this a bottom up planning process. It starts with the community. The community wants rhino fight, we'll put it there. And now our challenges to how we're going to make it work going forward. And frankly, yeah, so step two is going to be step two and we look after those rhino. The environment's a little bit different, it's a little bit more wooded, so that brings more challenges for the protection team. They've got to learn how to work with it more, frankly, there's more elephant there as well. So they've got to figure out how to protect Rhino in an environment that's got more elephant in. But it's a great learning curve for the guys. It's a great learning curve for all of us in terms of how we build this project up, because we're trying to build a project step by step by step. We have a big vision of what the future looks like, but it takes baby steps to get there. We're not trying to run before we can walk.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: That's the idea that makes sense. And will these two new rhinos also be associated with tourism?
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yes. So got all kinds of cool things going on. So we strongly believe that these rhino are not. We're not only looking after them for the sake of looking after Rhino, which is critical, but also for socioeconomic development for our communities. Okay? So they're acting as a catalyst to attract tourism into an area. And frankly, this area, this level area is. They've been bit far down the line in terms of getting tourism benefits. The school, there is just one example. The school is very run down.
It's had very little love over the years. It's a long way from our capital city. It's a long way from our provincial capital. It doesn't get much love from tourism because it's, it's a longer drive from our camps. So I'm really excited about bringing visitors and guests to come and see the new rhino in sanctuary tourism level. And of course, now, hey, we're going to stop in and let's go and see the school. Let's go and spend a little bit of money in the courier markets instead of shopping back in Victoria Falls or at Joburg duty free, or even in villages around sanctuary one. Let's spend some money here now and let's try and uplift these communities and get them going. And I'm really excited to say already we've got a donor who's really talking about fixing up teachers accommodation at the school. So I'm really excited about that too, because the teachers, they really, really struggle, you know, it's not much fun teaching at a remote school when you, when you live in a dilapidated cottage that's not really habitable, you know? So there's lots of things we're starting to change already.
We've got another donor who has offered. We've got a tough drought year that we're in right now. So there's.
People are frankly hungry, you know, there's another donor who's agreed to donate 30 tons of maize meal. Of maize meal to arrive at the same time as the rhino for the communities who have set aside the land for the rhino. So straight away their benefits are going to start from the day the rhino arrived. The very next day, the truck's going to be turning around and bringing in maize meal for families. So exciting stuff happening, linking conservation with the communities very, very closely tied.
And the rhinos do well. Community are doing well. Community doing well. The rhino do well. They feed off each other. It's fantastic.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: And are the new Cobra team then from that community as well, or are they coming from community one?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: So again, very interesting question. So what we've done is we've been hiring guys over the past two years. We needed to double out the size of our Cobra team, our Cobra Ranger team, and we've been hiring guys from those villages right by there. And they've been part of the program for the past two years. Of course, now I was talking about how the communities and community members are saying, okay, I want to be with the convoy driving the rhino in. So it's the boys from those villages and the guys from those villages are saying, I'm on the front car, I'm going to be on the truck. So exciting for them, you can imagine, to be driving through their home village with people along the dusty roads leading past their village with these. With these guys right there with that team. Real exciting.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: That is so, so exciting. Do you think that then there will be an envelope lodge coming to that area as well? Or what do you think about that? Is that long?
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Okay, so, so again, exciting. You know, a lot of these old conservation areas that we are turning into, that we're turning around. There's an old hunting camp in that area. That old hunting camp is already being developed as a tourism camp, and we're aiming at a volunteerism set up here. So not necessarily a luxury lodge, really, but we get a lot of interest from a lot of people, a lot of schools, colleges, asking about if we can do programs. A little bit difficult how you mesh that into a kind of a high end tourism lodge. So.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Level camp.
It's open and ready for business. You know, where we can bring people in to work at sanctuary, too. They can help with projects with the. Both with the rhino and the communities. We have to do a lot of mapping with grasslands species, grass species that these new white rhino are going to be utilizing. Ecologists are champing at the bit to find out what their favorite species are being. This kind of thing can get monitored by volunteerists.
They can help with opening up the new sanctuary. And then, of course, right next door we've got a level school. You know, a lot of kids there desperate for all kinds of help that people who can read and write English can help and bring to that school, you know, and help with school feeding projects, myriad projects can get involved in. So we're excited about the volunteerism space. It's not a space that we've. That we've marketed. It's certainly a space that we've worked in, but it's not a space we marketed. So, looking forward to that. Really excited about that. That's another component to do with sanctuary two.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Wow, I did not know that. That is so exciting. So tell me more about this camp then.
How many people can be there at one time. I mean, can you say a price point or is that how to go direct to you? Or. I'm just thinking somebody listening would be like, they're. Their wheels are turning right now, but.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so then that's. Thank you, Brooke. That's why. That's why I love. I love telling the story and thank you for giving us the opportunity to tell the story. So we're setting it up right now. It's got. It's got six accommodation units, and those accommodation units would typically have two people in them. But, hey, there's nothing to say that, you know, a group of younger people, maybe three guys or three girls, can't want to share a room together. You know what I mean?
Price point, I'm not sure, but certainly in $150, $150 a day, $180 a day price point, which is where sort of similar. We've seen similar programs in our country. Emiri is a great example. They've got a wonderful rhino program and they do a lot of volunteerism. There's kind of price point where they are. So we can certainly link up with them and partner with them.
So, yeah, that's the area wins. We're talking thousand dollar a night safaris here. We're talking stuff that people who eat hamburgers can afford.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Because that's definitely been a tough thing to overcome, having 1ft in both spaces.
Me who I do this, I talk to people that are doing the actual conservation work on the ground and those that want to support those, and then also having a foot in high end conservation, luxury travel. And it's like, oh, there's definitely a disconnect between the two. There just is.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: But, you know, Brooke, I can see an itinerary where we might have some sort of high net worth. Individuals go to some of the luxury camps and then come and spend a couple of nights atom level, you know, where they can be in a little bit less luxurious space. But it's not much different to going backpacking in the mountains or whatever kind of thing you guys might do where you're from, you know. So a couple of days at. At a camp like that might be great fun as part of an itinerary and perhaps a little bit out of the usual comfort zone. But, hey, they're still gonna have a warm bed, they've still got, you know, cool drinks at night and have a hot shower and perfectly comfortable and clean and safe and healthy. So might be a fun place to spend a couple of days, particularly if you're traveling with family.
I could picture a mom and dad wanting to bring some teenage kids to a place like that just to take them to see something different. So that would work for the multi gen marketplace as well, I believe.
Or certainly something to add on. So it's something to consider. We need to think about how we market safaris differently, that it's not just focused, in my opinion, only on thread count of the sheets on the beds.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And I've definitely seen a trend towards that. Even people who can't afford the higher end luxury, they're wanting more experiences. Cause they're starting to realize what their dollar actually means and how good it can do and like, yeah, and if you can spend. Yeah. Even if they can't afford the 1000, $502,000, you know, the normal going rate in Botswana anymore, which is just getting ridiculously priced, it's like. Or you can spend, you know, a fraction of that and have an unbelievable experiences that changes you as a person. And I feel like more people are starting to want that. You know, there's always going to be the people that want the high end luxury. And you know what? That's great. I would much rather have them spending that money on a safari than, you know, buying a bag of some sort at some high end store. So I'm not judging either industry at all. That all has its place. But I'm very excited to hear about this voluntary. You just got my wheels turning a lot since I didn't know this existed.
I don't know. I'm gonna. I'm gonna have to talk to some friends. Maybe I could get a group to come out because that would be fun. You do it.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: I'd love it.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Especially if there's something specific that you need. If there's, like, a particular work that you need, maybe we'll talk about that. Sorry, we're going off rant. Just for anybody who didn't realize this was a last minute conversation that I literally messaged butch. I'm like, this is the most exciting thing. Let's sit down and have a conversation and see where it goes. So, yeah. I did not know that you are starting this camp there. That's very, very exciting.
So what other aspects of this new reintroduction? Reintroduction 2.0 that we should know about.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Brooke? I don't know.
There's lots of interesting facets. One of the things that's flowed straight on with 2.0 is as people in the communities around neighboring on 2.0 have said, okay, we want to get involved here. We like all kinds of things to do with this. There's this fence that might, that acts as some kind of this rhino fence, even though it's put up for rhinos helping to protect our villages and our crops and things. So we've had a lot of community members from nearby coming to say, well, you know, what about the fence? You know, how do we do this stuff? And interestingly, we had some real, real good meetings over the past month or two and one of them came down to something that kind of took me back to when I was a younger ranger. There's this existential argument continuously between wildlife and cattle, and it happens all over Africa, it's happened, happens all over North America, happens all over Europe, all over the world. And what happens in some of those areas next door is people are saying, well, if we bring rhino in here, that's going to compete with our cattle. And then you fence, you make a rhino sanctuary and now there's no grazing for our cattle. And yes and no. And you kind of hear them and you say, okay, personally, I'm not a cattle man, and personally I think we should be, we should have rhino on our land. And personally, I think we can do more with rhino than we can with cattle. But that's my opinion. My opinion doesn't really matter what matters, opinion of the communities, you know? And if there are people in those communities who feel that way, we have to think about how do we address them? We can't just tell them, no, you're wrong, because they are entitled to their beliefs as much as I'm entitled to mine or anybody's entitled to this. So suddenly we start thinking and saying, well, maybe there's a space there for sanctuary, number three, being rhino and a cattle grazing scheme. So suddenly we're starting to talk like.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: A dual purpose land.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
And that kind of thing certainly happens elsewhere. I know there's a lot of commercial ranchers, farmers in South Africa, Kenya, elsewhere, who have wildlife and cattle on the same land, and they get the benefits of both.
And certainly there could be benefits that derive from rhino and cattle together. And if that's what that community wants to go, well, that's kind of an exciting, exciting development for the future. So suddenly we're not in competition with the cattle boys, but now the cattle boys are working together with us.
So now it just comes down to deciding, okay, what are going to be the stocking rates, you know? And this is again where some ecologists from Malalang were just relishing working with them because they say, okay, how do we solve this problem. This is a new problem we haven't considered. But to every problem, there's a solution. We've got to find solutions or we're going to lose our wildlife. So that may be a solution as well. For that area I spoke about between sanctuary one and sanctuary two, you know, that sanctuary 1.5, there's something that might become interesting. So there's all kinds of really, really interesting developments and things we need to tackle and step by step, look at it, think about it, and then find a sensible solution and move forward. So that's one of them that's really exciting.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: That reminds me a lot when I was in Tanzania and, like, the Ngorogo conservancy area, where the Maasai still live their traditional lives right beside one of the most famous parks in East Africa, you know, the crater. So, um, and they have tremendous benefit from there. And they are. I mean, I. I saw their herds, like, you know, met the people, like, that's exactly how their lives still run. So that would be very interesting. And to know that it has been done in other parts of the world and successfully is very exciting, too. So that's cool. That is fantastic to hear. And for those that might not have heard the first episode, just to take this up a higher level, how many planned reintroduction areas are currently mapped out? So, I guess, what is the scale of the project as a whole if all things work out?
[00:27:00] Speaker B: So this is the thing. How long is a piece of string? So when we started, we said, we don't want to draw anything on a map yet, because it has to come from the community. If the community see us drawing things on map, they say, well, here come a bunch of you wildlife guys coming and taking our land away. Again, that's the wrong starting point for any community based wildlife projects. We more or less said, let's do one and let that be a pilot project for people to come and look at. And from the day the rhino arrived at sanctuary number one, sanctuary number two, villages all said, hey, we want in. So there was a perfect demonstration of the effectiveness of that approach. And already we've got people from either side now saying, hey, we also want to be involved. So conceptually, maybe we have four or five sanctuaries, each with a couple of rhino in each, doing well, being protected by a set of cobra rangers who now learn their skills over a period of time, along with support from ecologists and I, tourism operators like ourselves, working with the next door villagers who are now being incentivized to become involved with it and earning benefits from it. And now suddenly, maybe now becomes the next step, is the time to link it together. So is that number four? Is it six? Is it three? I'm not sure.
Hypothetically five.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Hypothetically, five. Okay, that's what I remember from our last conversation and when you came to Denver and gave that great talk.
So I think the other aspect of this that I would love to hear any updates on, if there are any, is what about the government level or Huangi National park itself? How is that conversation going? Is there a conversation going? What is that?
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Okay, so one of the key things we said right from the beginning is that the reintroduction of first rhino would be a catalyst. And it's a catalyst for all kinds of things. One is socioeconomic development for communities, but one is a catalyst, people, to say, okay, well, maybe we can bring rhino back into the Wendy landscape. And I know there's lots of parks, people are coming and looking at this and you can see people looking at it. There's NGO's and donors are saying, okay, well, look at all this big national park right next to us here, you know, but again, I mean, I can't, I can't talk for them, but I know they're looking and I know they're thinking and that's what we want. You know, let's think about. So suddenly the communities are putting land up for Rino. Okay, maybe let's have some of the government agencies put some land up for rhino. And what about, hey, some of the NGO's, let's think about funding this. And what about some of the NGO's? Let's think about supporting national parks. Wange is very, very underfunded, so maybe some of the NGO's can start supporting the park better. And on the back of that we get the rhino going. There's all kinds of, all kinds of interesting discussions happening. So at many levels we had our minister of environment opened the project even though it had been open for two years, but he kind of formally opened it and cut the ribbon, as it were, earlier this year in February or March. So that was very cool. You know, we had the minister of environment there and communities came out and I can't tell you how excited they were for kind of a high level minister to come down and come down to their remote village and say, hey, look, I like this project. We support it as government and we support what you guys are doing and we're thankful to you as community members for kind of letting this thing drive. So straight away it was, wow, how cool is this. So, it's exciting. So, yes, government's looking at it. Government's loving the project.
Fingers crossed. So far, so good. And where the future is, I don't want to be, I don't want to jump ahead, you know, and start promising things that are, that are going to be too far ahead to promise. But it's certainly on our radar, and it's certainly on a lot of people's radar.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: Sometimes it just takes that one brave soul or that one brave community to have this big, hairy, audacious goal is Ben Bressler of Nethab would say, and sometimes you got to go and be that pioneer and look what's happening now. I mean, even getting the government involved, well, like, you know, interested and looking and you're seeing that actually, this is possible. We do have the resources. We do have dedicated people. We do have cobras. Like, we have the things. Cause we, they see it now. Oh, my gosh. It's so exciting. I'm just getting all excited. I'm not even there.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: You know, what, you know, what follows on and there's. And there's lots of aspects. So one of the things we've been working hard with and, you know, Hannah, one of my colleagues, we've been pushing hard. So obviously, we're training these cobra Rangers and that kind of military train because it's really important. We know when the bad boys come to get the runner, there's some really bad guys out there, and most of them are ex military types. You know, they're very, very bad, very well trained, motivated, skilled at, at their craft kind of people. But so one of the things we've been saying is we're getting masses of data. We're getting masses of data both from the rhino every 15 minutes, Cobra Rangers radio and a new set of data where they are, what they're doing. We get data from all the community members who are talking to us about, hey, people who are in amongst the communities. There's a stranger here. What's a stranger's name? What's a stranger up to? Oh, it's just strangers visiting a friend. Okay, cool. Okay. Is a stranger linked anything? Is he a bad guy? We're getting.
We need to start monitoring. As these areas get more and more, we need to be using computers more and more. We need to be using trap cameras, camera traps. We need to be using perhaps some live, live camera CCTV feeds. And suddenly we find we have a desperate need for people who can drive computers a little bit better. Okay. And people who are a little bit better educated perhaps, than all my Cobra ranges. Some of them are well educated, some of them less so. We choose them for other reasons than their academic skills. But suddenly when we go looking around, we see the young people in our communities.
There's a ratio of about three to one. And it might be two to one, but somewhere between two to one and three to one that are going to tertiary education, going to colleges, going to universities, going to stuff like that, or girls. So we've got girls coming out of our high schools that are communities who are working harder.
Whatever the reason is, maybe they'll focus less on soccer. I don't know what it is, but they're doing better at it. So suddenly we say, okay, what about, let's start looking for some of these ladies and let's. We can teach them how to run and shoot and do all that kind of stuff. But we're looking for better educated computer literate and they can start running our, that, that wing of it. So I'm out there looking funding right now. I need, we're looking for funding for our Cobra Ranger IT team who are going to be ladies moly, because they are the ones with those skills. And now we can incorporate them in. So that's another exciting concept. And I know several young ladies from this community with sanctuary too, have approached me saying, I want to be a Cobra ranger. I want to be a Cobra ranger, saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want you to be too. You know, but it takes, it just takes money and. But I know it'll come. I know it's coming. I know it's coming. I'm excited about what that leaks as well.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Oh, that is so exciting. Yeah.
To know as me and myself being a woman, to know that there's. Now it's being identified as another way to incorporate everybody, all aspects of the community, both genders can be a part of. This project was just, oh, I don't know, Butch. This just makes me so excited.
I was happy the first time when I met you and knew all about Tuza and Casasa. We were put in touch by Tad and everything that has happened since then. And I'm already just scheming. I'm like, I might come to Zimbabwe and I might be able to bring some friends.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: Well, we've got a new camp waiting.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. Because I. While I was thinking maybe we could end at one of the nicer envelope lodges after we've put in our blood, sweat and tears. But I don't want to be on nice safari all the time. I want to go get my hands dirty, you know, and most people in my circle also wants to get their hands dirty and then maybe end with a nice sundowner somewhere at the end of the trip.
But butch, I'm blown away. Oh, one last really important question. When are the two new rhinos coming? When are they going to be sanctuary two?
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Okay, so we're aiming for September and we're aiming for early September 1. Of the things, there's a heck of a lot of moving parts.
The most important, which is the rhino and the rhino's health. So our two rhino have been, have been captured. They're already in holding bombers at Malangui and they're just making sure they get on. There's no post capture trauma with them being getting used to people because obviously they're coming from an environment where they much fewer people to a place where there are more people. So they've got to be more used to it. So we are letting the actual date get driven by those rhino. But it's early September.
God will.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Inshallah.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: That is so close. That is so close. You must be like so excited and so nervous at the same time.
Yeah, because we are sitting down. What day is it? It is August 6, and I will release this episode pretty soon, in the next week or two. So yeah, you'll have to keep us updated. And I would love to see videos and posts and photos and everything and just keep the community updated, all of our communities updated on your exciting, exciting news.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: Excellent. Thanks so much, Brooke. Thank you.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible story, stories, insights and knowledge shared in this episode. To learn more about what you heard, be sure to check out the show
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