Another poacher has been killed while trying to commit a serious crime.
Nature once again took matters into her own hands when a rhino poacher was killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions last week in South Africa's Kruger National Park.
The Times Live reports the incident happened on April 1. The poacher and four other men are believed to have been targeting rhinos in the park when one of them was killed by an elephant. The other men carried the body to a roadway in the Crocodile Bridge Section where it could be found and then left the park.
The poachers informed the man's family of his fate after they left the park. The family subsequently contacted park rangers for help in recovering the body. But when rangers and police finally located the man's remains three days later on April 4, there wasn't much left to recover. They found only a human skull and a pair of pants. The rest of the poacher's body is believed to have been eaten by lions.
While the search efforts for the poacher's body were ongoing, authorities arrested the other four, who will now have to await their time in court on trespassing and poaching charges. Two .375 rifles and ammunition were seized in the course of the investigation.
Authorities are using the incident to underscore the dangers of Kruger National Park, which has been in a seemingly never-ending war with poachers for years now.
"Entering Kruger National Park illegally and on foot is not wise, it holds many dangers and this incident is evidence of that," the park's Managing Executive Glenn Phillips said in a press release.
Surprisingly enough, the executive also expressed condolences to the poacher's family. "It is very sad to see the daughters of the deceased mourning the loss of their farther, and worse still, only being able to recover very little of his remains," Phillips said in the release.
Meanwhile, the Internet showed almost no sympathy for the poacher as the story quickly went viral. This incident and the reactions to it are remarkably similar to a group of poachers who trespassed in the country's Sibuya Game Reserve last year, only to all be killed when they wandered into a pride of lions in the dark of night.
In that incident, authorities found very little left of the poachers. And what was left was strewn over a wide area. The only reason they were able to estimate the number of poachers at three was because that's how many pairs of shoes were located on the scene.
One can only hope that with at least two incidents like this in a year's time, other potential poachers will start rethinking their life of crime before they go into wild places on the African landscape. The rhino poaching crisis could use a break.
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and General Outdoor Youtube Channels.
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