 I'm good, I'm good. So we're going to talk to you this evening about rhinos and inverted rhino translocation. So going back a bit, the aim of the exercise was to try and move rhinos from a core area and a very remote part of them in the beer to an even more remote area. And the terrain and the situation was such that we really were going to struggle by vehicles. So we looked at another way which we could move them easily, quickly and safely and came up with the idea of moving them under a helicopter. Yeah, I mean what we decided was probably the best thing is just to turn them upside down and pick them up by their feet. And you know, being vets and thinking back to our training and our experience, it made sense. You know, the legs can take a lot. I mean usually of course they're standing on the legs or running on the legs rather than being hung by the legs. But the legs are tough. Yeah, we've got that experience of having to pull calves out where you have a tough carving at the stoke here and a few start folk pulling on the front legs of a calf, pull it out and inevitably, you know, within a few minutes the calf stands up and off it goes. So, you know, the legs of animals can take a remarkable amount of, you know, of force being applied without problems. But obviously we felt that it was, you know, good to try and do a bit of science and it sounded like it should work. So in the end we went to our mates in Cornell and we started a few years earlier and we ended up looking at positional physiology and we came up with this contraption here where we were looking at expiring gases, particularly CO2 and we were studying CO2 and oxygenation of the animal in various positions. But if I remember correctly, we then sort of jumped ahead and we actually went ahead and did the translocation. This was when we actually moved I think 16 rhinos from the northwest of the country even further north and west. And we came up with a couple of techniques at that stage. This was the sled which we looked at as one option. Just talk us through that one bit. Well, just a mini sledge. So you can see it's just got a steel frame. It's got an aluminium platform. It's just enough for the body and the head. It doesn't support the legs. And basically we felt some animals, particularly older animals, animals heavily pregnant, animals in poor condition, should it be necessary to move them. This would give the animal more support. This would be maybe a safer option. I'm very pleased we did this. It worked well. It's a good option. In the end it probably wasn't necessary, but it's lovely to have this option. It worked well. That mini sledge can be broken down and easily fits in the back of the helicopter. So it's a good one. Perhaps at this stage I should bring in the fact that we did have tremendous assistance from a number of folk. If I remember correctly, the B2 Goldmine were actually the ones who helped make the sled. Quite a clever piece of construction. And then when we actually got to turning the runners upside down and slinging them under the helicopter, of course we did use a big old Huey helicopter from the old Vietnam days. It's been a piece of kit and we had the American Millennium Challenge Fund that kindly supported us significantly. But of course it was the Ministry of Environment and Tourism that picked up the big tab and they covered all the staff and all the basic equipment. But we did then sling these runners. Here's one of the runners. That was the sort of typical position you picked it up in. You can see there the head cover which was important. Important to get a nice tight fitting head cover. That was a mutton cloth. So they didn't see and at the same time their ears are plugged so they can't hear. And they held in that position pretty well. Those, they were lifting ropes if I remember, lifting slings. Endless round or yep and polyester slings. Nice and soft and relatively comfortable for the legs. And for that period of time didn't seem to do any harm to the legs. It must have been a bit of restriction or blood flow. But from what we could see no serious damage by using the polyester and endless round slings. And there we are. There we are with a beautiful picture of the old Huey carrying the rhino at the end of about a 60 foot strop of rope with a steel end flying across the the the Dermara plains. And really quite a sight. Quite an impressive picture. It was always interesting with the landing. The aim was to get the guys with the mattress underneath the rhino. So the chopper came in at a hover and it was a bit of a guessing game. But usually we got it just about right. And there we are with one rhino coming down onto a mattress. As you can imagine, I mean, you know, we're comfortable lifting the animals by their feet. The rhino is not made to be resting on their spine or coming down on the spine. So we felt, we felt strongly about particularly in the sort of stony hard terrain, but having a nice soft landing for the animal. And so we dash around with the mattress and slip it under there and under the spine. And yep, it worked well. And I felt good about it. It was the right thing to do. I'm sure the rhino would have been okay if we hadn't done it, but it definitely was the right thing to do. And here we see the sort of video. There's the chopper taking off. It has to move up vertically. And it's then got, I think the rhino, I think we've sort of going up to about 800 kilos or a ton of rhino and picking it up pretty gently. If I, yeah, what we're actually doing is we're actually knocking them down in the field, picking them up and then moving them for a short distance, 15 to 20 minutes across to a road where we loaded them into a crate. And then we moved them for 100, 150 kilometers by crate before we then knocked them down again, and then took them from there into the release site. So it was a sort of double helicopter sling with a road trip in between. There you can see the rhino going up into the inverted position. It worked well, Pete. It worked very well. Yep. So we had two, you know, very inaccessible areas to recover and to release. And the distance between them was just too far to do them the whole way with the helicopter. Besides, we didn't have that sort of money. So it worked well, you know, get them out where we could have them close to a road, drive them and then fly them up into the hills and do the release. And it worked extremely well. I was chuffed. And, you know, the animals were only, what was it, altogether, probably from capture to release, probably about six, seven hours. Something like that. Yep. And these were not stressed animals. They settled in well. They generally stayed in the area, found the water. Yep, it worked very well. And that's the one rhino in his new home? I have to say there was a certain leap of faith in us doing it. A few eyeballs almost popped out when we started picking up by their feet. But off we did 102. Yeah, everyone was very much on board. And then like all good science, having done the job, we then went back and tried to figure out what we'd done. So this is actually a video clip of us now doing the research. This is on top of the Waterboat Plateau Park. Here we immobilized 24 rhino, two groups, one in the lateral, one in the inverted position. This was the team that was there. There's the good Dr. Robin Gleed putting on the CO2 collection system. It was pretty hot at that time. We had quite a lot of folk there. Yep. No, 100%. And yeah, we had a great team, perfect place to do it. Good animals. Yep. And it all came together very nicely. What was interesting, we were measuring CO2 and the oxygenation, the SPO2. And we found in the end that in fact the preferred position marginally was the inverted position. The CO2 was lower, the oxygenation was somewhat higher. So bit surprisingly, we found inverted was even better than the lateral, although both were compromised. Yeah, certainly from a respiratory physiological point of view, it was a better position. I think there were other reasons why it would be uncomfortable to have them too long hanging by their feet. But the respiration, the blood gases were good. And I think that was the main thing. And it was basically because of the work that we did, that in the end we feel that that's going to become a standard technique and we can use it in the future. I understand it's also been used for elephants and other species. 100%. Yep, yep. It's certainly revolutionized rhino translocation, black and white rhino translocation. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not going to be used for the Asian rhino, I suspect for hippo. And besides definitely some of the other species like the ruminants, but also probably most important of all, it's absolutely revolutionized elephant translocation. This is now the technique to pick them up, stick them on the back of a vehicle and translocate elephant. Occasionally elephant have been actually flown a reasonable distance, but generally it's just using a crane to lift them up and stick them on the back of a vehicle. So yep, it's turned out to be good. But I think the important thing is taking an idea, just progressing intelligently, checking it out with animals which were less valuable than black rhino. And then going back and doing some good, getting some scientists in and really seeing that it really was a sand technique and the physiology made sense. And we have a lot of people to thank, a lot of people involved, a lot of hard work. Pete, thanks very much and thanks for chatting. Thank you. Cheers.