Jaco Muller, who turned his son’s idea into 197 rhino births, dies

In 2022, poachers in Namibia had taken 14 white rhinos from private farms in six weeks, so farm owners started removing their horns. That can take away the incentive to hunt the animals, because poachers want the horns. One cow had a horn 34 inches long. Jaco Muller, an antelope breeder, said he was nearly in tears when it was removed. “It is such a magnificent animal,” he said at the time. “But for the animal’s sake, it is for the best.” For Muller, the sight of a dehorned rhino was preferable to finding a dead one. The idea for breeding rhinos came from his son, then 15, as a school project. In 2010, Muller converted the family’s breeding operation into what became the Rhino Momma Project in Namibia’s Kunene region.