Strides made with hefty sentences and fines for criminals endangering game rangers and animals. When Jimmy Mashopane of Winterveld, north of Pretoria, was arrested for shooting, killing and mutilating nine white rhino in a Free State game reserve, taking 14 horns estimated at more than R500,000, veteran prosecutor Antoinette Ferreira threw the book at him. That one of the rhino was a month away from giving birth "only enhances one's sense of abomination", judge Phillip Loubser said. It is clear from "the heartbreaking photographs of the carcasses of the slain rhinos - that the accused had attacked the poor animals viciously and without any sympathy or mercy - The furrows dug by two of the rhinos in their death throes bears witness to the suffering they had been exposed to." Mashopane was jailed in 2020 on six counts for an effective 24 years. That and many sentences like it in recent years, ranging up to 38 years at the dedicated wildlife crimes court in Skukuza in the Kruger National Park, fired shots across the bows of the armed trafficking syndicates, who put the lives of so many animals and game rangers at risk. At a workshop in Johannesburg last week, convened by US-based rule of law initiative the Attorney-General Alliance Africa alongside pan-African research and publishing outfit Good Governance Africa, prosecutors and conservationists spelt out how combating trafficking in fauna and flora is evolving. Wildlife crime is now viewed as SA's fourth-highest priority crime, with most offences centred on the trafficking of rhino, elephant, lion and pangolin products, succulent plants and cycads, as well as abalone. Financial Crime News estimated in 2020 that the sub-Saharan illegal wildlife trafficking trade was worth $2bn a year - with SA the main hotspot.