Dr Ian Player was a globally recognised wildlife pioneer credited with saving the Southern African white rhino. Often riding bareback, he pioneered techniques to dart and immobilise rhinos, helping their numbers recover from just 437 individuals in the 1950s. In a fireside chat, eco-conservationist Paul Gardiner pays tribute to Player’s legendary work, sharing never-before-seen footage and an interview where Player describes how he helped to figure out how to dart and immobilise rhinos who often woke up too quickly after an antidote. The discussion also includes an interview with golf legend Gary Player, Ian’s brother, who was inspired by his sibling’s determination. Gardiner reveals Player conceived the Dusi canoe marathon while in Italy during the Second World War, an event he won twice. Gardiner credits Ian Player as an inspiration for the Shamwari Game Reserve and Gardiner’s own ecotourism work, including bringing a Vietnamese pop star to South Africa to raise rhino poaching awareness.
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Remembering Ian Player, the ‘bare-back cowboy’ who saved the southern white rhino – Paul Gardiner
Dr Ian Player was a globally recognised wildlife pioneer credited with saving the Southern African white rhino. Often riding bareback, he pioneered techniques to dart and immobilise rhinos, helping their numbers recover from just 437 individuals in the 1950s. In a fireside chat with Biznews, eco-conservationist Paul Gardiner pays tribute to Player’s legendary work, sharing never-before-seen footage and an interview where Player describes how he helped to figure out how to dart and immobilise rhinos who often woke up too quickly after an antidote. The discussion also includes an interview with golf legend Gary Player, Ian’s brother, who was inspired by his sibling’s determination. Gardiner reveals Player conceived the Dusi canoe marathon while in Italy during the Second World War, an event he won twice. Gardiner credits Ian Player as an inspiration for the Shamwari Game Reserve and Gardiner’s own ecotourism work, including bringing a Vietnamese pop star to South Africa to raise rhino poaching awareness. – Linda van Tilburg
Edited Transcript of the interview:
Linda van Tilburg (00:00.14)
I am Linda van Tilburg and with me today is Paul Gardiner. Today, we are going to talk about Dr Ian Player. Dr Ian Player is best known for leading Operation Rhino, which rescued the southern white rhino from the brink of extinction. Dr Player had a profound influence on Adrian Gardiner, who Paul’s father, who established the Shamwari Game Reserve in early 90s. Paul will also share a never-before-seen interview he conducted with Ian before his passing, where Ian recounts the story of Operation Rhino, and as well as, and this is a nice one for Biznews, a recent interview with his father and golf legend Gary Player, who is, of course, Ian’s brother. Hi, Paul!
Paul Gardiner (00:00:21)
Good to see you again, Linda, and thank you for having me yet again on the show.
Linda van Tilburg (00:01:00)
Well, thank you for having me in your BOMA. So, Ian has credited with saving the white rhino. So, what were the key innovations and strategies that made that such a success?
Paul Gardiner (00:01:08)
Before you even kick off with that, I’m going to just tell you, we’re talking about a fascinating man here because one of the key things that I was told when I first met him was that a famous film by John Wayne called HATARI was themed around a lot of the capture of wildlife when they were young men. I mean, there’s even a bit of Hollywood in here. There’s the Duzi canoe marathon, which I’m going to tell you a little bit about. There’s the relationship with his brother, Gary. I mean, two legends.
Speaker 1 (01:35.232)
So, it’s a remarkable story and I just want to say how thrilled I am to be able to actually tell this to your listeners because he influenced my dad’s life hugely, mine as well. it’s an honour to be able to speak about him, you know, 10 years on.
Linda van Tilburg (00:01:50)
And you had this fortunate opportunity of interviewing him. What were your key takeaways from that interview?
Paul Gardiner (00:02:00)
I mean it was an amazing, I will never forget that day in my life. I said to Ian, I’d really like to just capture your story of Operation Rhino on camera, you know, and let’s put it in the archive and we’ll use it one day and here we are using it, so it’s exciting for me. But it was a very special day. We sat there on his small holding under a tree, and I just rattled off a few questions and he just told me the whole story. It was fascinating.
The fun moments in that conversation were: Ian had a mentor called Magqubu Ntombela. So, he was a Zulu. And he was an inspiration to Ian because Ian was a guide, game guide, and obviously got more entrenched in the conservation side of Umfolozi. But he had this Zulu gentleman that followed him around everywhere. And he was older than Ian, but he taught Ian everything about nature, the spiritual side of nature, the tracking of animals, how animals think.
He taught him all about the Zulu nation. He had a particular bird that was his favourite bird. In Xhosa or Zulu, you call it the iNhlekabafazi . It is the wood hoepoe and they all get together and they chuckled away and if you translate iNhlekabafazi, it means the cackling woman. So, this was his bird.
But while we’re in conversation, we’re talking about how the Far East is decimating the rhinos, this bird starts chirping away in the tree and looks up and he says he’s listening to us and he’s agreeing with what we’re talking about. So, it was a very special moment. So, there’s a very deep, deep connection with Ian and nature and wilderness and community.
Linda van Tilburg (00:04:12)
So, getting Operation Rhino off the ground probably wasn’t without its challenges?
Paul Gardiner (00:04:15)
We talk about Operation Rhino and I’m going to take you back a little bit. If you go back to the late 1800s, so the 1890s, the white rhino had supposedly been extinct. The settlers had cleared the land for agriculture. They were already starting to trade in the horn. You had poachers that would arrive and, you know, just clear the land for meat. So, by the late 1800s, they thought, OK, this animal is gone and bearing in mind. Probably, 50 years prior, were hundreds of thousands of them in Southern Africa.
Ian Player (04:18.03)
In the 1890s the white rhino was thought to be extinct and then man who was hunting down at the junction of the White and the Black Umfolozi River, he shot two rhino and to the astonishment they turned out to be white rhino and this led to a huge outcry in what was then the colony of Natal. And the governor was pressured to declare the first game reserve.
And they were, in fact, the very first game reserves in Africa. They were Umfolozi, Hluhluwe and Lake St. Lucia were the very first game reserve in Africa and they came about because of the white rhino. So, we owe the white rhino a huge debt of thanks. Without the white rhino, they wouldn’t have been the parks. Without the parks, this country would have suffered, the world would have suffered.
Paul Gardiner (00:05:47)
So, the penny dropped, they thought, okay, well these things aren’t extinct. So, let’s send in a team and they discovered 50 and there were 50 left in South Africa in the 1890s. By the 1930s, the numbers grew to 100. Then I know Ian Player came onto the scene in the 50s, they did a survey, and they counted 437. And then by 1962, there were about 600. And so that’s the history of how they started to recover. But Ian was petrified that there would be an outbreak of some disease or poachers arrive and they discover these animals and just wipe them out over a period of a couple of months.
Ian Player (00:06:25)
The problem was becoming more obvious that we would have to do something because of the government policies of the day. People were being pushed off the farms and into the edges of the reserves. I was very much afraid that… I was the warden in charge of Umfolozi at that time. I was very much afraid that a cow with anthrax could come into the park and that could have wiped out the water.
I went to the board and said, you know, we would, I thought the time had come that we better start to put them back to where they had once been and the director, Colonel Vincent, was very much on my side to do that, but the board as a whole was not in favour for very good reasons. They said that if we move the white rhino out, then we were likely to lose the park and that was certainly a great fear.
And you can imagine, I was in what about, I’m 30 years old, and you’ve got the responsibility of a very, very, very endangered animal on your hands, and you don’t want to go down in history as having been responsible for the extinction. So, eventually we persuaded the board, and that then led to Operation Rhino, but it’s one thing to decide you’re going to move them, then you’re going to how you’re going to do it. That’s another story.
Paul Gardiner (00:08:40)
They also had to figure out how to dart rhino because they didn’t have the drugs. had been some guys up in Kenya that had been testing the drugs on rhino, and they’d been darting buffalo and elephant but the drugs that they had to use for rhino was very different. So, there was a particular vet, Dr Harthoorn, he was Dutch but had been working in Africa and he came down and so together with Ian and the team they mastered the art of darting rhino.
Video Narrator (00:09:24)
Will it work? A question uppermost in everybody’s mind. Dr Harthoorn has found that drugs which immobilise elephants and black rhino adversely affect the white rhino. Tension mounts as the dart is filled with the costly drugs. Three basic ingredients make up the injection. The first is an opiate, which will cause the animal to lie down. The second, an amnesiac, which will blank out the memory of capture. And the third, a tranquiliser.
This combination will ensure that the animal will not panic, feel fear or suffer in any way. Injecting the mixture is another tricky problem, ingeniously solved in the Palmer capture gun which uses compressed gas to fire the drug-loaded dart syringe. On impact, a chemically activated plunger in the dart neatly completes the injection.
Paul Gardiner (00:10:05)
There was a lot of trial and error because they lost a lot of rhinos to this experiment.
Ian Player (00:10:30_
One of them, which just promptly killed the rhino. And then another one which knocked the rhino down. But if you weren’t on it within a few minutes and giving it an antidote, it died. But then again, it’s easy to talk about giving an antidote. The only place you can give the antidote to a rhino is in the air. And then the moment the antidote goes in the rhino stands up and so quite a few of us took some pretty bad falls.
Paul Gardiner (00:10:42)
I often refer to Ian Player and his team as the cowboys of South Africa. I mean you would see them barebacking through the thorn-infested Umfolozi chasing rhinos.
Ian Player (00:12:38)
Then we had to build bomas and I had gone to Uganda at Toni Harthoorn’s invitation to meet with the game up there and I learned from Ken Randall and O’Connell and others on how to build crates and how to build bomas.
Paul (00:12:56)
They would translocate them to other parts of southern Africa and when they arrived there, they had to develop these boma, these enclosures. We were in a boma here and we’ve modified it for a barbecue or a braai today. But boma were built so that the game could relax there for a month, tame right down, acclimatise and then get released into the wild. So, they had to figure out all these different phases. It wasn’t just the drugs, it was the boma and disease control, all these different things had to be infected into the translocation.
And then they took it a step further because Ian wasn’t satisfied with just translocating them to other parts of southern Africa. I they took some to Angola, they were all wiped out. They took some to Mozambique, they were all wiped out. Took some to Zimbabwe, they were eventually all wiped out. He wanted to be super cautious.
Ian Player (00:13:42)
We needed to restock our own areas first and then having done that then restock the other areas in South Africa where they used to be and then as insurance because at that time South Africa was still in a very, very dicey position, it had blown up and we’d seen what happened in the rest of Africa. The first thing that happened when there was trouble was the game was killed.
I persuaded them that we should really start to sell them to accredited zoos as well. I approached the board and said, let me go overseas because in 1964 I’d been to America and seen all these safari parks developing. So, I knew that there was a market and that they were much bigger than the normal zoo.
And after quite a lengthy bureaucratic struggle, I succeeded in persuading them to let me go. And I first went to England where I sold twenty to the London Zoological Society. And then went to America where I sold twenty to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. And then down to Orange County where I sold 50 and at the end of a couple of months, I’d sold something like 300. And then I felt, well, you my job is really done now because we’ve got them safe in southern Africa and they also, there’s a population outside.
Paul Gardiner (00:15:28)
So, he dispersed the gene. The gene pool was now around the world. These were almost like little banks for the rhino and if there was ever a crisis, at least you could tap into those. So, that’s part of the legacy.
Linda van Tilburg (00:15:43)
So, these strategies, do they endure because illegal purchasing is continuing unabated?
Paul Gardiner (15:46.892)
The poaching crisis got so far out of hand today. It all kind of kicked off in the early 2000s, probably around 2007, the first real poaching started. We believe that it was, if you think where China was around that period, they were about to host the Olympic games, was a lot of foreign investment pouring into the country. They were just exploding in terms of wealth and and middle class had emerged and everything else. And as soon as you had this wealth, the rhino horn is not just seen as a cure for diseases or an aphrodisiac or whatever else, it’s very aspirational to exactly a status symbol. And so, as there was this wealth accumulation, there was a greater demand for the horn across that area, Vietnam being another culprit. that’s been the root of the cause, and it just spiralled out of control. So, sadly for Ian, in his later years, he saw what was happening and it was just very sad for him to see all his legacy crumbling beneath him.
Ian Player (00:16:55)
Rhino horn having no medicinal value that might be so. Although it has been proved that the horn can cure a headache, but an aspirin can do that too, a lot quicker and more efficiently probably. then in Vietnam where there is now a belief that Rhino horn cures cancer.
Somebody just came to see me the other day, just been there to one of the cancer hospitals and outside them are stores that are selling rhino horn. I don’t see when you have beliefs that are 3,000 years old that you’re just going to wipe them off the slate. You might as well try to tell the Christians not to believe in Christ. So, I don’t think for one moment that doesn’t mean to say that one must not try to, and I’m sure that there is a body of opinion in China which realizes that it is of no practical medicine or value and would try to educate. I’m certain that in the medical profession that that would be the case.
But you’re dealing with close to a billion people and you don’t wipe out beliefs that are thousands of years old in a day. So, I think that must be taken into consideration. I think one has got to look at it in a practical and unsentimental point of view and look at it as to how, what is the best way to ensure that the rhino survive.
Linda van Tilburg (00:18:50)
And Ian of course has this amazing brother known for legendary golfer Gary Player and your dad had the opportunity to sit down with him so what came out of that?
Paul Gardiner (00:19:00)
Gary visited our large founders lodge a few weeks ago. I persuaded Dad and Gary to do a little interview, not so much about Gary’s life or Dad’s life, but the influence that Gary’s brother had on him and Gary’s brother had on my father. And so there’s a few lovely moments of them discussing that because, I mean, these are two remarkable brothers. Gary, as you’ve just said, is a legend in terms of the golf world just promoting our country in a good light over the many decades and just being an absolute champion and Ian, the saviour of our rhino, the founder of the Dusi Canoe Marathon and everything else. It’s lovely conversation of how this great man influenced both their lives.
Gary Player (00:19:48)
In the Bible it says honour thy mother and thy father and it goes further. You’ve got to honour your brother and your sister, your family or the best friends you have in your life. And I was blessed to have a brother that I just loved. It’s very seldom you find two brothers that are world champions in their respective jobs. But my brother, he was very influential in my life because I was a lot younger, and I vividly remember running with him and Booysens and La Rochelle, poor suburbs that we were brought up in and we were doing a mile and I got three quarters of the way and I sat down I said I can’t go on and he grabbed me by the arm there was a little bit of sand there and he write the word can’t in sand and I put C-A-N-T and then he rubbed out the T he said now what do you have there now I can and you know that stuck in my mind.
Obviously to become a world champion you’ve got to have a fierce determination, you’ve got to believe in yourself, you’ve got to enjoy adversity, and the message came through very clearly. But he always showed such an interest in me, and I tried to reciprocate and show an interest in him and so we had as brothers a most wonderful, wonderful association. I mean what nature, my brother always said to me, what nature teaches you is the greatest lesson in your life
Adrian Gardiner (00:21:13)
I always believe that Ian is the Attenborough of Africa. He saved the white rhino from extinction. And you know, I was coming in for a hell of a lot of criticism here when I started putting these farms together. Everybody said this guy was mad. I’m a great believer in endorsements and there was one person that I had to get to.
Paul Gardiner (00:21:33)
Dad had struggled to get to Ian Player. He had heard about this man from KwaZulu- Natal, this legend, this man who’d saved the rhino from extinction. And dad, being dad, is super persistent eventually tracked him down. There before cell phones and he got him on the phone and said, listen, please, I want you to come to see my little project in the Eastern Cape.
And he flew in. said, listen, I’ll spend some time with you. Let’s go through to your reserve, it’s only an hour’s drive away, show me around and then I need to push on to Cape Town. So, that’s where it all happened. Shamwari looked awful in those days. You can imagine all those lands along the river had been ploughed up.
There was red dust storms, no animals and then this guy with this vision wanting to rewild it was introduced to Ian and Ian took one look at this and he obviously thought there was something here, he could see dad’s vision and while everybody else was mocking him and saying he isn’t going to make it, Ian stood up for him and said you actually got to put your head down and make this happen and so that gave dad the energy to pursue his dream.
Adrian Gardiner (22:41.582)
What it was 30 years ago was a mess and to think that he would with his experience put his name to something like that that was a mess and support me to make sure it was a success and believe me you know he introduced me to people like Sir John Aspinall, Sir Laurens van der Post, you know all these guys, great people that also took a great interest in what we were doing.
Paul Gardiner (00:23:13)
Thanks to Ian. If Ian hadn’t endorsed what we are doing in those early days, Shamwari may never have existed today. With dad’s entrepreneurship and Ian’s conservation backing, it became what it is today. It’s an incredible reserve. We no longer own it, always like to make that clear. We did sell it, but it remains and it’s in good hands today. The Dubai government own it today. We’ve got a little patch right next door, Founders Lodge, and we can still go and visit it, which is amazing.
Linda van Tilburg (00:23:42)
You mentioned the Dusi in the beginning. Who knew that Ian Player was behind that?
Paul Gardiner (00:23:50)
The Dusi Canoe Marathon, I didn’t know this until I met the man, and I mean it’s a legendary canoe marathon in our country and it runs sort of from Pietermaritzburg down to Durban, it’s about 120 kilometres and it was dreamt up by Ian when he was sitting in Italy in the Second World War. So, he got a group of guys, there were only eight I think in the first race and off they went and of course Ian won it and he won it in two consecutive years and then he says he retired.
But he won it actually having been bitten by a snake on one of the trips. Clearly, he recovered. But he was a tough, tough old boy, I must say. And the Dusi canoe marathon is what it is today. One of the most famous canoe marathons in the world.
Linda van Tilburg (00:24:32)
So, Paul from the lessons you learned from Ian Player, what do you take into the projects that you now undertake?
Paul Gardiner (00:24:36.93)
Something that I grew up with at a very young age, but now at my ripe old age, I’ve been privileged enough to travel to many parts of the world and to many wilderness areas of the world. So, I can see the opportunity to take that ecotourism DNA to other parts of the world, not just Africa. We’re busy with stuff in Bahrain now where we’re trying to rewild an island and create a whole ecotourism project around that.
I would never have had that opportunity, and I’ve got the foresight now, knowing full well that if you really accept and acknowledge the power of wildlife and community and everything else and you bring it into a tourism realm, it can really turn into a profitable business but you’re protecting nature at the same time, and I think that’s incredibly powerful.
My journey with my running channel on YouTube, Natural Born Runners, is another little piece of inspiration, guess. Again, getting out into wilderness in my running shoes and just going to explore these beautiful landscapes and to look for opportunities for ecotourism.
I’ll finish with a really nice story. Again, through the network that Ian helped us build of celebrities and powerful people, I was introduced to a friend of mine who’s very passionate about rewilding Scotland. He wants to bring back the bears and the wolves to the Highlands of Scotland, create his own game reserve out there, and I fully endorse it. I think it’s wonderful.
But he introduced me to a friend of his who is married to, a pop star from Vietnam. And Vietnam is a big consumer of rhino horn. So, she said, well, I want to turn this around and try and persuade people not to do this in Vietnam and I’ll take that into my music world.
She’s like the Celine Dion of Vietnam. She’s big. And so, I met them in Prague of all places. I spent the evening with her and her husband, and we spoke about this, and I showed her some real graphical pictures of the horrors of perching. Then I persuaded her to come to South Africa
Ian Players Foundation, the Wilderness Foundation, took her in and a fellow singer called Than Bui, the two of them, and her name was Thu Minh, and they both came down and they were immersed into the underworld of poaching and they darted a rhino with the crew there and they got to touch and feel and really live and breathe rhino poaching and conservation.
So, they went back to Vietnam and their idea was to go to all the private schools, because only about 12 very well-known private schools, and to appeal to the kids in a competition, fly the winners of that competition down to South Africa, let them go on one of Ian’s wilderness trails, understand wilderness foundation, understand rhino poaching, go back to Vietnam, present to the school kids, and then that message filters up to the parents who are the consumers, because it’s an aspirational good, so only those families could really afford it.
We believe that that’s had a real impact, and that there is a drop in the usage of rhino horn in that particular part of the world. So, it’s those sorts of initiatives that we hope that Ian will spark with many other people around the world. It certainly did it for me.
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