Jaco Muller, who turned his 15-year-old son’s idea into 197 rhino births, has died

Sept. 29, 2026 5:59 PM PT

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.

Muller believed that breeding more white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum), keeping them secure enough to reproduce, and then replenishing populations across Africa could help save the species. So he built a breeding program with a rhino-custodianship farm and the nonprofit Help Our Rhinos Now, or Horn.

The first calf was born in 2013; by 2025, the project had become one of Namibia’s larger privately run rhino-breeding operations.

Kifaru Lodge, which Muller opened in 2018, brought in money from tourists to help cover security and rhino care.

Muller also supported legalizing the trade in rhino horn. His argument was that prohibition let criminals collect the profits while farm owners and conservation groups paid for security. He compared harvesting horn to shearing sheep: The animal would survive, the horn would grow back and a regulated market might finance protection.

“Right now, only poachers make money from horns,” he said in 2025.

That was, and remains, a controversial argument. Opponents question whether a legal trade would enable laundering of poached rhino horns or increase demand. For Muller, the case came from the economics of a breeding program: horns were valuable, and protecting the animals was expensive.

He believed rhinos needed populations outside Namibia as well. In a controversial move in 2024, 42 white rhinos from Kifaru Lodge were exported to Texas. He cited the Arabian oryx, which survived through captive breeding and reintroduction, as an example.

Muller often used a gyrocopter, which is something like a helicopter but has different physics, to survey the reserve from the air, looking for signs of intrusion and checking on rhinos across the property. On Sept. 19, Muller, 53, was killed when the gyrocopter crashed while he was monitoring rhinos and wildfire flare-ups near Outjo.

By then, the school-project idea had become a herd of rhinos: The project had recorded 197 births since its first calf arrived in 2013.

Butler is the founder of Mongabay, an independent news organization focused on nature.