As another beautiful blood-orange African sunrise began to evaporate the low-lying mist, a solitary whitewashed brick building emerged in the distance. As we drew ever closer, other components of the farm hove into view. There were half a dozen buildings, all uniform in shape, single-storey brick sheds with tin-sheeted roofs. Each structure was about 10 metres wide by 20 metres long. From previous visits to other crocodile farms, I knew these to be the enclosures where the hatchlings were kept in batches of several thousand, arranged by age from the egg to two years old. Then there were a dozen similar-sized concrete pits, each containing a dam of water and a basking area, which contained the three-to-five-year-olds, this time in batches by size of a few hundred. The final structure was one large enclosure, about the size of a football pitch, with two dams surrounded by a large, grassy embankment. It was within this enclosure that the breeding males and females were kept, 120 in total, all fully grown specimens, ranging from 3 to nearly 5 metres in length. The boundary to this enclosure was a 1-metre-high concrete wall surmounted by 50 cm of chain-link fence. The two large dams were separated by the feeding gangway, which protruded halfway into the enclosure. This gangway was accessed through a locked gate and was a continuation of the surrounding concrete wall, though without the chain-link fence on top. I imagined the carnage of feeding time as the workers threw meat at the sea of snapping jaws.
The one noticeable element to the adult enclosure was that it was very much designed to keep the crocodiles in, rather than to keep humans out. There was no electric fencing, no double fencing, no reinforced fencing, and no barbed wire; there was no security guard, and only a couple of dilapidated signs reading ‘WARNING! CROCODILES! TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN!’ If someone were ever stupid enough to climb over the fencing, then good luck to them – that was the implication. This was not a mass of health and safety regulations like you’d find in Britain, Europe or America. This was Africa: a healthy fear and common sense were safety enough.
From the 1950s to the early 1970s, crocodilians the world over were extensively exploited, predominantly for their skin to fuel the leather industry, leading many species to the brink of extinction, including the African Nile crocodile. In 1975 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was enacted to regulate the trade in wild species, and many countries, including South Africa, adopted legislation to protect crocodilians and increase their global numbers.
With demand for crocodile skin and meat still as high as ever, crocodile farming became a way to reduce pressure on the wild population from illegal poaching, while restocking those populations by releasing juvenile crocodiles into the wild. So successful has this proved that many crocodile species have been taken off the endangered list. The initiative has demonstrated how a voracious human desire for animal products can be sustained while also protecting the very species that fuels it. The success of this concept means that it is often cited as a model for protecting other species, such as the rhinoceros. It would be nice to think that demand for such products could be stemmed, but the reality is that once humanity gains a taste for something, it is extremely slow to surrender it, and for many species that are being unsustainably exploited for a product, time is sadly running out.
We disembarked from the minibus, taking a moment to stretch muscles stiffened by the drive. Derik, having driven separately, was already at the boot of his car getting his equipment together when the owner of the farm came to greet us. Piet was a tall, broad-set man in his early fifties, wearing khaki shorts, a checked short-sleeved cotton shirt and a camo baseball cap. Addressing Derik initially in Afrikaans, he then turned to greet us in the warm, welcoming and friendly way to which South Africa had accustomed us. He briefly described his crocodile farm, and the reason for the animal’s relocation, then gratefully explained how necessary it was to have a team of people for this job. The crocodile in question was about fifty years old, and for many years had been the farm’s primary breeding stock, so the owner was keen to bring in a new gene pool and was therefore selling him to another crocodile farm.
The first step in the process would be to lasso a rope around the crocodile’s upper jaw. He would instinctively clamp down on this and start fighting the restraint. This was where our extra manpower was vital, since in a tug-of-war battle, 700 kg of prehistoric cunning would attempt to gain the predatory advantage by taking to the water, where the immense muscle power of his tail could be used to maximum effect. Conversely, our own objective was to keep him on land to maintain our modest advantage and allow Derik the opportunity to sedate him.
Crocodilian anaesthesia is still something of a mystery, since many drugs that work well in mammals, and are effective in other reptiles, are unpredictable or ineffectual in crocodiles. The doses required are often so large it makes them impractical to use. The induction time is at least five times longer than in mammals, but then the drug persists in the circulation for days, and sometimes longer than the reversal agent, which means a crocodile can re-anaesthetize the day after a procedure, a phenomenon known as ‘renarcotization’. So an owner can drain a dam of water on the day of a procedure, then refill it the following morning, only to find his crocodiles have drowned in the afternoon because they have renarcotized.
One class of drugs that does work effectively, and within predictable parameters, are the paralytic agents, the required doses of which are also practical and manageable. However, these drugs are solely muscle relaxants rather than anaesthetic agents, so are not suitable for any procedure that will cause pain, but are ideal for a job limited to an animal’s capture, transport and release. Gallamine was the preferred drug, since it relaxes the skeletal muscles well, but has no effect on the muscles that control breathing, which therefore promised a safe working environment for us without endangering the crocodile’s life. Furthermore, with the animal safely relocated, there would be no need to administer a reversal agent: the drug would wear off naturally after a few hours, and then the crocodile would be fully functional again.
Once injected, it would take about fifteen minutes for the Gallamine to take effect, and then we could claim control of the situation. The immense strength of the crocodile’s masseter (chewing) muscles – giving him 3,700 psi-worth of crushing power through the arcade of his eighty teeth – would be tamed by the Gallamine and then rendered ineffective by tightly taping his jaw closed. The 700 kg of raw, unfathomable muscular power would become nothing more than a limpless weight, and so one of the animal kingdom’s most effective killing machines would be temporarily tamed enough to be securely craned onto a truck, safely transported and subsequently released into his new home. That was the simple plan, anyway, though one, as with all wildlife work, fraught with a plethora of potential dangers.
As we strolled from the parked vehicles, equipped with all we would need for the task, we got our first detailed viewing of the adult enclosure. The dams were a murky brown colour, making it impossible to see what lay beneath, but a few crocodiles were visible just above the surface, though by far the majority of the inhabitants occupied the dusty, grassy bank, basking in the heat of the early morning sun. Stretched in every direction was a sea of the biggest crocodiles I had ever seen in my life, their dun, murky green bodies starkly contrasting against the sandy, rubicund soil on which they lay. Some were poised to enter the water, others were tucked against the concrete boundary wall; some had their mouths wide open, exposing every one of their gleaming white teeth, others had their jaws tightly closed; some faced the water, others the wall. The one thing that united them all was their absolutely motionless form, their glassy green eyes inert. It was easy to imagine that what I was seeing was a collection of statues, and yet, given even the slightest stimulus, their reaction would be lightning swift, and deadly.