R 120 000 donated for Rhino Conservation at Linton Park

Linton Park Estate near Wellington in the Cape Winelands in South Africa made a substantial donation to the Rhinos Without Borders (RWB) campaign for rhino conservation for the second year running – in co-operation with local Hugo Rust Primary School with their own fundraising drive.

With International Rhino Day being celebrated on Friday 22nd September, cheques amounting to R 120 000 – an amount more than double that of last year - was handed during a special occasion on the estate to guest-of-honour Francois Peenz, CEO of Africa Foundation and Steering Committee Member of RWB.

Linton Park, with a Cape founder’s history dating back to 1699, is part of the multinational Camellia plc. business group with its head office in London. Camellia bought Linton Park in 1995 and started with an extensive restoration programme reinstating the estate to its former glory.

Linton Park’s Commercial Director, Herman le Roux, explained: “At Linton Park we fully endorse Camellia’s global philosophy of environment and nature conservation wherever possible. In view of the fact that we have a sensitive and threatened ecosystem on the estate that is a distinctively rare South African type of veld – historically and commonly known as Renosterveld – we decided to commit ourselves to conservation on a wider scale and also specifically to rhino preservation as part of South Africa’s unique cultural heritage.”

He added: “We came to realise that the continued existence of the rhino on the African continent and also in our country is unfortunately seriously jeopardised and very much under financial pressure. Linton Park can again make this donation due to the growing sales of the estate’s ’Rhino’ wine range during the past financial year. Our donation was accumulated by one rand per bottle going to the rhino conservation fund. We received wonderful support from the public, the media and the trade and we wish to thank them all for making our donation possible. This enabled us to increase our donation of R 50 000 in 2016 to R 92 000 this year.”

Mr Le Roux concluded by pointing out that it was noticeable that Linton Park’s Rhino range was receiving more and more interest and support from the international wine trade who could also identify with the cause of rhino conservation here in South Africa.

Support from local Hugo Rust Primary School in Wellington with its 600 pupils have since 2016 joined forces with Linton Park in the fight to save rhinos when they donated R 5 000. This year the school again through various imaginative fundraising initiatives – including a range of colourful hand-produced rhino icons by the pupils – attracted wide public interest and support. A final and quite unexpected increased amount of R 27 000 was finally counted.

At the Linton Park event Ronel Saayman, project leader and teacher at Hugo Rust Primary, accompanied by four of the school’s senior pupils, handed the school’s donation to Francois Peenz. She emphasised that her school was proud to put its full support behind this proud joint Wellington initiative to save the rhino from extinction.

Compiled by Hatch Communication