Save Valley Conservancy

Buying live elephants at the price of dead ones

In the drought of 1991 and 1992 the wildlife department was culling elephants in Gonarezhou, and the ranchers to the north were selling their cattle for a fraction of what they were worth. Clive Stockil, then chairman of the new conservancy, made Parks an odd offer. The ranchers would pay what the department expected to make from the skin, meat and ivory of a culled elephant, and take the animal alive instead. Parks said yes. The ranchers went out and raised the money, and the capture teams, after a slow start taking elephants one at a time, worked out how to capture and move a whole family group together. Nobody had done that before.

Cattle country that ate its own game

It helps to know how empty this land had become. By 1925 there were already 23,000 head of cattle on the three big ranches, Devuli, Angus and Humani. In the 1970s the wildlife department itself shot out the buffalo and most of the elephants, the buffalo because they carry foot-and-mouth and the elephants because they flattened the fences. Then the bush war came and rustlers took the herd from 24,000 in 1975 to about 5,000 in 1979. Sable, roan, tsessebe, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest and reedbuck all vanished from the valley, and some of them have never come back; the walking safari that crosses Chishakwe still lists roan, tsessebe and hartebeest as animals you will not find. Chishakwe’s old Ranch House and Hunter’s House are left over from those Devuli days.

Roger Whittall on Humani was one of the first to try wildlife instead, putting in waterbuck, giraffe, nyala and white rhino. Buffalo were the hard sell. The vets would only allow them once every cow was gone and a double fence, 350 km on each line, ran right round the outside. That was finished in March 1995, and the buffalo came in after it.

Gladys, Diesel and the plane that listens for them

Rhino here are not anonymous. In October 2009 Susie Ellis of the International Rhino Foundation flew out in a two-seater with the pilot Raoul du Toit and wrote up the day. Du Toit flew at 600 to 700 feet with aerials on the wings, tuned to one animal’s transmitter at a time, and flew tighter, lower circles over the signal until the rhino showed. On the ground the conservancy’s rhino monitors (ten of them then) logged every sighting by ear notch and GPS. That day they found Gladys and her calf, Ruth, Fideya with a bull nobody could identify, Sarah, Alice, Goliath and one called Diesel, who had been moved several times and kept going back to unsafe ground. That day he was right by a settlement.

A US embassy cable from that year put Save Valley’s rhino growth at 8 to 10 per cent a year and said the conservancy held about a fifth of the country’s rhinos. Shots had been heard a few days before Ellis arrived, and the scouts were reading the poachers by their work: one gang cut the horn off in a V, the other chopped it off without taking any of the skull. The wire snare is the duller daily threat. One visitor, writing for the Zimbabwean travel site Nzira, watched government, conservancy and private vets spend almost an hour cutting one out of a black rhino bull’s leg.

Ten lions, and not enough cousins

Under the cattle there were maybe five to ten lions left. Some walked up from Malilangwe to the south, and in 2005 ten more were let go, though nobody kept a record of where those ten came from. By 2016 there were more than 200. The catch showed up in their DNA. A 2018 study, with Rosemary Groom of the African Wildlife Conservation Fund at Chishakwe Ranch among the authors, found the Save Valley lions the least diverse of the three Lowveld populations, with signs of inbreeding, and suggested bringing in unrelated males from Gonarezhou. One walking group that crossed Chishakwe wrote that they heard lion every night and every morning, though the cats are harder to see when you move about by day.

The painted dogs came back on their own in 1992. When Alistair Pole started the Lowveld Wild Dog Project in 1996 there were 36 to follow. Disease has knocked them since: a southern pack lost three dogs to something that looked like rabies in 2005 and then disappeared, and rabies took three packs next door in 2007.

The year the ranches were handed out

The fast-track land reform reached the conservancy too. By December 2002 settlers had taken five ranches outright and parts of three more, a third of the conservancy, and about 80 km of the double fence had been pulled down. By the late 2000s at least 40 people had been killed by wild animals in or near Save Valley. The bigger fight came later. A US embassy cable of 2009 reported that 10 of the 22 properties had been allocated indigenous partners and that owners were to swap their title deeds for 25-year leases. The names that came up were a minister, MPs, army generals and the Masvingo governor, and in 2012 the new partners were given hunting permits and quotas. Later reporting placed them on ranches including Humani and Senuko 2. Tourism Minister Walter Mzembi warned that the row could spoil Zimbabwe’s hosting of the UN tourism general assembly the next year. Mugabe told the officials to get out in September 2012. In August 2014 the Mail and Guardian reported that they were still there.

The elephants have done better than anyone. The 2025 aerial survey counted at least 2,550, against the 533 brought in during the drought, and a plan to move some across the border to Mozambique stalled on politics. Ask your guide which ranch you are on and who holds it now. In this valley the answer has changed more than once.