Now, a South African retiree in Australia is spearheading an effort to airlift 80 rhinos from his homeland to the land Down Under. The idea, Ray Dearlove says, is to create an “insurance population” that can breed in peace, far from poachers — and guarantee the species’ survival if slaughter causes their extinction in the African wild.

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“I don’t want my grandchildren only to see rhinos in picture books or some sad specimens in a zoo. The thing is to see them in the wild,” Dearlove, 67, founder of the Australian Rhino Project, said in a phone interview. Now, he added, “I don’t think there’s too many places in South Africa or Africa which are safe for rhinos.”

Founder of The Australian Rhino Project, Ray Dearlove, has swapped real estate for rhinos. Formerly a Woy Woy Peninsula… Posted by The Australian Rhino Project sponsored by Investec on Thursday, March 17, 2016

The statistics make that pretty clear. More than 1,338 rhinos were killed in Africa last year, which is the highest number since a wave of poaching began in 2008, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Of those, 1,175 were killed in South Africa, home to about 80 percent of the continent’s rhinos.

Poachers in Africa have slaughtered nearly 6,000 rhinos since 2008, and some conservationists warn that the 25,000 or so remaining wild rhinos could be gone within a decade.

Enter Dearlove, whose upbringing in northeastern South Africa included regular trips to the wildlife wonderland of Kruger National Park. He later moved to Australia, as many South Africans do — it’s an emigration trend known in South Africa as “Packing for Perth” — and worked for years as an IT sales executive.

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Three years ago, he said, a friend in South Africa called his attention to the country’s rhino-poaching problem. Soon, Dearlove made his life’s mission to resettle rhino refugees in Oz.

“I spend every waking minute of the day on rhinos,” said Dearlove, who called the animals the “closest thing that you and I will ever see to a dinosaur. … And it’s so big, and it’s so defenseless, and it’s so vulnerable.”

Australia, Dearlove argues, is a good place to protect rhinos. It has strict border controls, relatively little poverty and corruption, and no known threat from poaching. He says scientist advisers have deemed the habitat suitable, particularly for white rhinos. The Australian and South African governments have agreed to the plan “in principle,” he said, although the project still has some hurdles to clear, including Australian approval of a facility outside Johannesburg where the rhinos will be quarantined before their departure.

The first six rhino refugees are from a private game reserve, and they now live in a “safe haven” whose location Dearlove does not want to mention because the animals are, essentially, in hiding. Their owner once had 12 rhinos, Dearlove said, but poachers killed three and then another three.

If it all goes as planned, the rhinos will be dart-captured, transported to the quarantine facility in South Africa, taken to the airport and then flown out on a nonstop freight flight in early August (Dearlove said rhinos, which can weigh 5,000 pounds, are too big to get through the doors on a jumbo jet). Once in Australia, they will again be quarantined, then taken to a safari park. The cost, park-to-park: About $70,000 per animal, funding that Dearlove said has come from donations and his own pockets.

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The idea is that all 80 rhinos will live together in a safari park in Australia. But not forever, Dearlove said: Australia and the rhinos will have a “foster relationship,” he said, and eventually the animals will be repatriated.

“I know and everyone knows that this is not the answer. Rhinos belong in Africa,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is just one small strategy in a really complex issue.”