60 Minutes - 7/22/2018: Pelican Bay, Vast, Airlift

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

Oprah Winfrey visits California's Pelican Bay State Prison -- where she reports on the use of solitary confinement. There's a conservative effort to protect rhinos from poachers -- who are being targeted for their horns. Lara Logan introduces us to South African rancher John Hume -- who has his own way of savings the rhinos. After 28 years in space, the Hubble Space Telescope is sending back some of its most beautiful and revealing images from across the vast universe. Bill Whitaker reports.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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hearing pelican bay prison is the most notorious state penitentiary in America. Known as a supermax, some prisoners are cut off from nearly all human contact. But what has been accepted prison practice is starting to change across America. Your mind becomes diseased and you start to accept the abnormal as normal. You must know that there are a lot of people who do not care that you're in isolation 5 years, 10 years, 24 years, because you've got it coming. Every year, NASA gives us a gift, dramatic new discoveries from our universe

provided by the Hubble Telescope. From the infinite black canvas, we get an awe-inspiring light show of stars, deep space, the stuff of creation, and things we have never seen before from our very own solar system. I believe Hubble has been the single most transformative scientific instrument that we've ever built. A team in South Africa have engineered a bold way to help one of the continent's most endangered animals. And when we heard about it, we had to see it for ourselves. Take one 1,400-pound black rhino.

A young female. Two veterinarians. Three game-capture specialists. A 52-year-old helicopter. And you get this. Look at that! A solution that seems to defy the laws of gravity. I'm Steve Croft.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Oprah Winfrey. I'm Lara Logan. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4.

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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. California's Pelican Bay Prison is the most notorious state penitentiary in America. Designed and built as a supermax facility, it's been used for nearly 30 years to lock away inmates considered the most dangerous. Pelican Bay's security housing unit, known as the SHU, is solitary confinement by another name, and inmates and their advocates have long denounced it as state-sanctioned torture. The people who run California's prisons defended their approach for decades, but as we first reported last October, they are now at the center of a reform movement that is dramatically reducing the use of solitary confinement across the country and at Pelican Bay. Hi there. Nice to meet you. I'm Oprah. I'm Aaron. I know who you are. Oh, hi, Aaron.

On the other side of that steel mesh, inmate Aaron Franklin is serving part of his 50 years to life sentence. What did you get 50 years to life for? For murder. Murder. It was the murder of a fellow gang member in San Diego. But crimes you commit on the outside don't get you sent to the Pelican Bay Shoe. It is reserved for offenses committed once you're in prison. Why were you brought here? Can you tell me?

Just a little misunderstanding on the R. That little misunderstanding was an attack on another inmate with a weapon, and it earned him a year in solitary confinement. Franklin is in what's known as a shoe pod, eight tiny cells, four up and four down, all facing the same blank wall across the way. It was created to break me mentally, physically, and spiritually. Danny Murillo, Troy Williams, and Steve Cifra all went to prison as teenagers.

They were sent to the Pelican Bay ShU for what happened after they were behind bars. Steve spit on a prison guard. Troy was part of a riot at another facility. And Danny was accused of being in a prison gang. Do you remember the first day you pulled up to the SHU, taking that long bus ride, getting off the bus, and seeing the place? It's a big white building with a small little door. My imagination was a human slaughterhouse.

People just going into a human slaughterhouse. What did you think, Steve? It was a modern-day dungeon. I had never seen anything like it. The message is, you're not getting out of here. The message is, you're screwed. All three ultimately did get out of the shoe and out of prison. I think the feeling on the part of a lot of folks is that you committed a crime regardless of what age you were.

You got locked up. You deserve to be there. Can you tell me why we should care? We are, most of us, going to be getting out. And it would behoove the public to begin to facilitate a healing, you know. And the healing can start with, you know, a basic dignity in how we're treated. Here inside the Pelican Bay shoe, an inmate would spend up to 22 and a half hours a day in this cell, which is basically the size of a small parking space. It's like a windowless box with a sink and a toilet. Not just four days at a time, sometimes years and even decades at a time in this room alone.

Most days, the only time a prisoner leaves his cell is to go to the yard, a slightly less tiny concrete box at the end of the pod for 90 minutes of exercise. So this is it. This is the yard. This is the extent of the yard? Yes, this is it. This is the yard. This is the extent of the yard? Yes, this is it. Yeah, okay. Well, I wouldn't exactly call it a yard. We visited the yard with Scott Kernan, who runs the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. So it would just be the inmate alone out here? Correct. On the rare occasions that an inmate leaves his pod, he first has to

strip, push his clothes through a slot to be searched, then put his hands through the same slot to be cuffed. This is the only time a shoe prisoner is ever touched by another human being. They do hard time here in the SHU. Time here is like hard time in no other prison. When Mike Wallace visited Pelican Bay for 60 Minutes in 1993, prisons across the country had embraced solitary confinement as a tool to combat violence inside their walls. There was a building boom in Supermax facilities,

and Pelican Bay was a model. The state of California that runs it proudly proclaims it's the wave of the future, designed to isolate prisoners who they insist are out of control, too violent, too unpredictable to be housed with the run-of-the-mill murderers and rapists. At its peak in the 90s, Corrections Secretary Scott Kernan says Pelican Bay's SHU held almost 2,000 prisoners. During that period of time, I witnessed multiple murders, multiple stabbings, lives changed irreparably. Inmates stabbing each other, stabbing corrections officers, stabbing... All of it.

Almost all of that violence, Kernan says, was and still is caused by powerful race-based prison gangs. So the gangs rule in prison? They do. The gangs rule. In an effort to break that rule, California identified gang leaders and enforcers and sent them to Pelican Bay. So the idea was to bring them here and have them in isolation. Have them in isolation and deter their communication, and it worked. So if any inmate was validated as a gang member, he could be held here indefinitely for years or decades? Yes. 24 years, five months, and six days I was there. Clyde Jackson was sent to prison at age 17 for

kidnapping, rape, robbery, and attempted murder. But it was gang ties that got him sent to Pelican Bay. Well, I was sent to Pelican Bay, shoot, because I was labeled as a validated gang member of the black guerrilla family. The design was complete isolation. One of the first things they said to me was, I am struggling to maintain my sanity and I don't know how to do it. Craig Haney is a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz whose studies of Pelican Bay shoe inmate have become central to arguments against the widespread use of solitary confinement. So what was the most striking result

of your findings in 1992 after that first study? That vast numbers of prisoners were traumatized by the experience. They were suffering, they were living in pain, and many of them were being psychologically damaged by the conditions of their confinement at much higher levels than even I anticipated. Your mind becomes diseased and you start to accept the abnormal as normal. You must know that there are a lot of people who do not care that you're in isolation five years, ten years, twenty-four years. What does it matter that conditions are bad?

Because you've got it coming. Well, there's prison and then there's prison, right? The judge sentenced me to prison. He didn't sentence me to an underground prison. But wasn't the logic that it was a serious and valid response to a very real and dangerous wave of violence from gang members. There was no reason to believe that that place was going to effectively address the gang problem that was growing in California and witness the fact that it hasn't.

Pelican Bay and places like it in California have been in operation now for many, many years, decades. We have the worst prison gang problem in the United States. So it clearly was not a solution. You might expect Correction Secretary Scott Kernan to flatly reject that assertion. He doesn't. That was a policy that was intended to save lives and make prisons safer across the system. It was a mistake in retrospect as we look back. But you said earlier it worked.

It did work. It worked in reducing crime in the general prison population. Yes. Why did it not work? It didn't work because of the impact on the offenders. I'm sure you've heard that statement from Justice Anthony Kennedy who says solitary confinement drives men mad. Does it? I think it does. Remember, that's not some human rights campaigner saying that. He runs the prison

system. Does that make you feel any better that there's an acknowledgement from the state that it was a mistake? It doesn't make me happy. I've still been tortured. Makes you feel like you've been experimented on, really. There was plenty of evidence early on that this was a failed experiment, that it was hurting people. Pressure for change really began to build in 2011 when SHU inmates organized a series of hunger strikes to draw attention to their plight. They also filed a class action lawsuit

challenging the use of solitary confinement. Fearing it might lose the suit, the state negotiated a settlement with prisoner plaintiffs in 2015. California agreed to stop holding inmates in solitary for indefinite terms and to stop sending them to the SHU simply for having gang ties. Now that the settlement has happened and the reforms have taken place, what is the difference in the SHU now versus then? The SHU facility that we are doing this interview on is empty. We emptied the SHUs out. California SHUs now hold 80% fewer inmates than just a few years ago.

Only people like Aaron Franklin, whom we met earlier, are still sent to the shoe for specific infractions and limited terms. I think across the nation, people are looking at how we house restricted offenders and are making changes to that policy. So if Pelican Bay was once a model for the widespread use of solitary confinement, it's now so empty that Scott Kernan is converting shoe pods to minimum security units. So now we can take these off, right? Because we're going to a minimum security unit. Yes. So where there's less fear of being stabbed. Oh, this is very different. Wow.

All the cell doors are open in the converted pods and prisoners can move around freely. Did you ever think that would happen? No. No, I thought, you know, I was under the mindset that Pelican Bay would be there for an eternity. After his own eternity in the Pelican Bay shoe, 24 years, Clyde Jackson is now in the general population at Solano State Prison near Sacramento. What was it like the first time you were taken out of the shoe and able to experience the environment? Well, Ms. Winfrey, to be honest with you, I was dizzy. It's like being born again. At Solano, Jackson has immersed himself in the rehabilitation programs

that are now the focus of California's prison system. The state has gone from lock them up to fix them up. I'm 54 years old. I'm finally in a position to get my GED. And so you're taking advantage of everything you can. Everything I can, I missed in the past. So tell me, do you have hope now? Yes. There are many who would say, why does an inmate deserve hope? Because they are here because of a crime that they committed and inevitably took some form of hope away from somebody. Over 90% of these inmates will complete their sentence and they'll come back out to the communities.

Do you want somebody with no hope that's involved themselves in criminal activities, doing dope, stabbing people? Or would you want a guy that comes out that has an AA degree, has a justice sentence abuse program, has went to domestic violence classes? What would you want as a taxpayer and a citizen of this state? How has your own personal perception of what it means to be an inmate, a prisoner, how has that changed?

When I first came in, that person was the enemy. Now, 35 years later, I don't view the inmates as my enemy. They're people. They're all coming out to be our neighbors. Why wouldn't we spend the resources and create an environment where when they come out, they're better people than when they got here. I just think it makes all the sense in the world. It's common sense. Aaron Franklin, the inmate we met through the bars of the Pelican Bay Shoe at the beginning

of our story, was returned to the general prison population late last year. But then he attacked a corrections officer and is now back in solitary confinement. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s,

including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. When we look up at the stars,

it's humbling to realize we're only getting a peek at what's up there. That way beyond what's visible to the naked eye lie wondrous galaxies. We never knew existed until the Hubble space telescope for 28 years. Since it was launched, Hubble has been sending us stunning images of the vast heavens. As we first told you in October, astronauts have repeatedly upgraded Hubble over the years, making its discoveries increasingly dramatic.

Tonight, we'll take you back up to Hubble and billions of light-years beyond to see some of its latest, most spectacular revelations. NASA celebrates Hubble's birthday each year by giving us a gift, a new, breathtaking view of our universe. The latest birthday card? This elegant swirl of galaxies

dancing in tandem deep in space. Last year, this bubble of stellar gases floating among the stars like a diaphanous cosmic jellyfish. Hubble has shown us radiant, rose-shaped galaxies stretching across deep space, and dramatic, towering clouds of gas teeming with the stuff of creation. Stars are born here. Year after year, in the infinite black canvas overhead, Hubble paints an ever-expanding picture of our universe,

an awe-inspiring light show for us to admire and for scientists to study. I believe Hubble has been the single most transformative scientific instrument that we've ever built. Most transformative, says NASA astrophysicist Amber Strawn, because Hubble keeps improving our understanding of the universe. She showed us what Hubble discovered after staring for days into what seemed to be an empty black patch, a deep, dark void in outer space. The original Hubble Deep Field is located just above the Big Dipper. It's a part of the sky that most people are familiar with. It's a blank piece of sky. So just nothing in here, just darkness. Nothing at all, complete darkness. And then when we look at it with Hubble,

what we see is thousands of galaxies. Not just stars, galaxies. Galaxies outside of our own, something we never imagined. Is it that Hubble just stares into that dark spot until the light penetrates and reveals itself? That's exactly what happens. It's sometimes many, many, many days of just staring at one part of the sky and allowing the photons to collect on your detector. And this is what's revealed. And this is what's revealed. But Hubble was just warming up.

That was 23 years ago. Since then, Hubble has stared deeper and longer into space with enhanced equipment. In this particular image, there are 10,000 galaxies. So every single point of light is an individual galaxy, its own little island universe. And so this is a real visualization of the distances of these galaxies. So sort of like 3D. 3D, like we're flying through. So we can make these images 3D because we know how far away the galaxies are.

What Hubble has essentially given us is the size of the universe. Hubble has taught us that the universe is filled with hundreds of billions of other galaxies. And now the latest analysis of Hubble's data reveals there could be more than 2 trillion galaxies, ten times more than previously thought. Typical galaxies, like our Milky Way, have 100 billion stars. That means the total number of stars, or suns out there, is 2 followed by 23 zeros.

That's called 200 sextillion. To get some sense of how many stars that is, we went to Adam Rees, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on Hubble. This is more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand on the beach. On Earth. On all the beaches on Earth. And Hubble has shown us this? It has. In many cases, it has allowed us to see what some of the most distant galaxies look like and how many stars were in them, and we've been able to add it all up.

Hubble has been called a time machine, that it looks back in time. What has been the most astounding part of that for you? I study explosions of stars called supernovae. It's like fireworks. It's only visible for a short period of time, in this case, a few weeks. And that light has been traveling to us for 10 billion years. It began its journey when the Earth wasn't even here. And over those 10 billion years, our planet formed, life developed. We built a Hubble Space Telescope. We opened the aperture door. And in the last one billionth of one percent of that journey that the light made, we opened the door just in time to catch it. Hubble almost didn't catch anything. The first pictures it sent back were blurry because of a microscopic flaw in the mirror.

The space agency launched a daring mission to fix it. Astronauts have made five trips to Hubble to repair and upgrade its equipment. Hey, John, you can open the thermal cover. John Grunsfeld, known as the Hubble repairman, flew three of those missions to a telescope the size of a school bus orbiting 300 miles above Earth. Just about anything that we can easily change and upgrade and fix has been fixed. The workings of the telescope, all of that has been transformed.

Yep. It is like a new telescope. On your last mission, you come out of the airlock, and you've got this big smile on your face. I thought, you know, I can't imagine anywhere I'd rather be than outside the space shuttle in my space suit next to the Hubble Space Telescope. I was just so happy. Hubble has changed what we know about the universe, its structure, evolution, its age, 13.8 billion years.

Hubble showed us the marvel and majesty of stars being born. This is a region of gas and dust that's turning up new baby stars. And now we've learned with Hubble not only stars, but also baby planet systems. Most of these stars have planets going around them? Most stars actually do have planets. When I was a kid, we only knew the planets inside our solar system. And now we know that the planets are absolutely everywhere. Astronomer Heidi Hamel specializes in Hubble's work within our solar system. With the telescope, she saw huge fragments of a comet slam into Jupiter, creating giant impacts.

When I first heard that a comet was going to hit Jupiter, my reaction was, eh, so what? Jupiter is huge. C comets are small. And so when I saw the first impact site and it was huge and dark, I was flabbergasted. This is where the comet has smacked into the planet at such a high velocity that it's caused an explosion the equivalent of many, many millions of atomic bombs. The Earth is the size of that ring. And so if this event had happened on Earth... We're gone. Yeah, we call that a biosphere-changing event,

which basically means we'd be gone. Hubble orbits high outside Earth's atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks. Beyond Earth's protective layer, Hubble's ultraviolet camera can spot dazzling displays like this glowing halo on top of Jupiter. Up in the northern hemisphere, what you're seeing is the glowing aurorae.

An aurora happens when the planet's magnetic field has charged particles that interact with the upper atmosphere. What you're seeing there is actually charged particles from the sun. They get swept up in Jupiter's strong magnetic field, and then it's mirrored in that shimmering that you see inside the auroral oval. And you would not be able to see that with an Earth telescope? You could never see those aurora because our atmosphere has an ozone layer that absorbs the ultraviolet light. Hubble also found a similar blue hue at the bottom of Saturn.

The telescope's most iconic picture is this, the Pillars of Creation, a stellar breeding place. Amber Strawn showed us what a difference Hubble's upgraded infrared camera made just three years ago. Stars are born inside these dust clouds, and this is going to give you a clue on why infrared is so important. It's because in infrared light, what you see is the stars inside. You see the stars inside. Shining through. How big is this cloud area?

Top to bottom, these pillars are about 10 light years, which is about 60 trillion miles. 60 trillion miles. Space is big. Big and miraculous, with constant celestial regeneration. Strawn calls this the everything picture, because you can see old stars blowing up and new stars forming. Anytime you see these sort of dark, cloudy regions, you can imagine that there are stars being born inside there.

Where are the dying stars? And the dying stars, we think that this one could explode any day, literally, or it could be a thousand years from now, but near, near term in astronomy times, any day, right? So big stars, when they die, they explode and send their contents into the surrounding universe. And these contents are what seed future stars and future planets and help to seed life, ultimately. The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones was literally forged inside of a star that ended its life like this. So we are all stardust. We literally are stardust.

We are viscerally made of the stars. One of the things I think is remarkable about this image is it shows you how colorful the universe is. This looks like contemporary art. This is a very tightly bound group of stars. And what you see here is about 100,000 stars. This was one of the first images that Hubble's new camera installed in 2009. This was one of the first images it took. Blue stars are the youngest and hottest.

White and yellow stars, like our sun, are midlife, while red stars are the oldest and coolest. What a beautiful view. John Grunsfeld has a cool claim to fame. He's the last human to touch Hubble. He gave it a farewell pat. Hubble was planned to live for 15 years. It's now been 27. How much longer can Hubble go? I'm reasonably confident it will continue another three to five years. That means, for a while at least, Hubble will work in tandem with its successor,

the much larger James Webb Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021. Webb should be able to detect light from the very earliest galaxies. The farthest back Hubble can see is this red blob, a galaxy from 400 million years after the Big Bang. Webb should take us much closer to the beginning of time. So the James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to see the first stars and galaxies that were formed in the universe. So we're going to see the snapshot of when stars started, when galaxies started, the very first moments of the universe. And my bet, there's going to be some big surprises.

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for.

Public Mobile. Different is calling. How do you save a prehistoric-looking animal that's ornery, exotic, and weighs around a ton, especially when it lives in places that are hard to get to. That the rhinoceros is in trouble is not a new story. For years, they've been crowded out of their habitats and hunted for their distinctive horns. In the last 10 years, the poaching has gotten so bad in South Africa, where most of them live, that the rhino there are under almost daily attack. As we first told you last December, a team of veterinarians, pilots, and game capture

specialists are trying a different way to help the most endangered type of South African rhino, the black rhino. Their solution seems to defy the laws of gravity. And when we heard about it, we had to see it for ourselves. Take one 1,400-pound black rhino who's been darted and sedated. A young female, probably about six or seven years old. Two veterinarians. With black rhino, lots of things can go wrong. Three game capture specialists.

So now we're putting these straps on the feet. Four leg straps. A 52-year-old Huey helicopter and its pilot add a potentially lethal 130-foot chain. Keep an eye on that chain. I'm always worried about it swinging into someone's face. And you get this. Yeah.

Look at that. Wow. I never thought I was seeing it. This feat of engineering, aerodynamics, and conservation has been choreographed by Jacques Flamand, a veterinarian who's moving these rhino to save them. Why did you start flying the rhinos, transporting them by helicopter instead of by road or other means? Some of these rhino are in very inaccessible parts of the reserve.

And this method of airlifting them provided us with an opportunity. I immediately thought that this is the solution to our problem. Getting them out of rugged, mountainous or thick forested areas where vehicles cannot go in. With more than a hundred square miles of mountains and ravines, the Atala Game Reserve fits that description. When we joined Flamond and his team, they were searching the impossible terrain for three rhino they'd selected for relocation, part of his plan to protect them from poachers and increase their numbers. Why did you choose the black rhino to focus on?

Well, I didn't choose it. It chose itself because it's in trouble. So how many black rhino were there in the country when you began? There were about 2,500 black rhino in South Africa when we started the project. That was 15 years ago. The black rhino was a critically endangered species. To get the numbers up, Flamond started the Black Rhino Range Expansion Project with the help of the World Wildlife Fund. The idea was to take a small number of rhino from government parks and settle them in new

places, mostly on private land where they would breed and create new populations. So you got the word out to people? We got the word out that we were looking for land for black rhino. And, well, it's worked amazingly. So those 20 black rhino, or however many, get put all together onto a new block of land and are left to breed. And we wanted to put 20 because that's a genetically viable number. Flamand's team captured the rhino by darting them,

then driving trucks in to pick them up. But when they ran out of road, they turned to the skies. I mean, it's spectacular and unbelievable and also slightly distressing at the same time. It's sort of everything. You really have to put your mind at rest that that animal physiologically is not being harmed in any way. Dave Cooper has been the chief veterinarian for KwaZulu-Natal Parks for 22 years.

He says the rhino are usually in the air for less than 10 minutes and fully sedated the entire time. It looks as if the animals are really uncomfortable but we've done our homework. We didn't just do this and see if it was going to work. We hung Reiner up upside down with cranes and sat and monitored their vitals. I'm talking about sophisticated kind of equipment. Didn't you volunteer to hang yourself upside down from the helicopter? I did but the pilots wouldn't let me. We've had some of the vets want to be hung upside down and try that. They've told me that anything that can walk on its feet can hang by its feet. Pilot Tosh Ross and Dave Cooper have been working together from the beginning. Ross told us the Huey helicopter he's flying for this can haul two tons, more than enough

to lift a black rhino. But you've done how many now? This will be 198. So almost 200 and you've lost none. Yeah, if we do see today, then it'll be 200. What's the most difficult part? Putting it down. Putting it down gently. So you don't hurt the animal?

Yeah, it's not... It's so easy, everyone will be doing it. We saw just how difficult it can be as Tash Ross struggled to land the first rhino. He got it down safe and unhurt on the second try. Vet Dave Cooper was already up in another smaller helicopter looking for the next rhino. Here they go. Here they are. He prepped darts for his tranquilizer gun with a dose strong enough to knock the animal out for 30 minutes.

The first dart didn't fully pierce the inch-thick skin. Three minutes later, his second shot stuck. They tracked the rhino till it dropped. We were right behind them in the Huey with Jacques Flamand and the game capture team. I see the rhino down. How many minutes do you have now to get that rhino? We've got a minute of time. As soon as we landed, it was a race to get to the sedated animal.

Dave Cooper's priority, removing the tranquilizer dart and treating the wound with an antibiotic. I darted in once here. Yeah. The dart just went in and out. So I immediately had to put another one in. Uh-huh. So that's the first thing you do is cover the eyes?

Yeah, that's right, because that stops them. So is this a male or female? No, this is a male. He's young and has many years of breeding ahead of him. Exactly what they need. They ID'd him from notches in his ears. Most rhino in the KwaZulu-Natal parks are marked this way. Is that him breathing?

That's him breathing. Wow. It's lovely, big, deep breath. I'm happy with that. The game capture team cleared a path to above. The helicopter's now going to come. Yeah. And we're going to hitch up those four steps to the central hook. Tosh Ross maneuvered in the chain.

And swept the rhino away. It took them less than 16 minutes. For Dave Cooper, it's a small victory every time. I have tears in my eyes. Because? They mean a lot to me. As a vet, I mean, you're the one that gets called out when the poachers have been there and they've hacked off the horn and the animal's bleeding. Is that very difficult for you?

Yes. There's so much negativity around rhino at the moment with all the poaching that to be involved in something like this is what lifts you and keeps you positive about things. This is what Cooper and Flamond are seeing more and more. When the program started in 2003, three or four black rhino were being killed a year. Now we're into the hundreds for this province alone this year.

So why is that? Well, because there is that stupid demand for rhino horn, which has absolutely no medicinal value, sadly. Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same substance as human fingernails. Yet in countries like China and Vietnam, people believe it can cure hangovers and increase virility. Private game parts are drowning in security costs.

Most remove the horns to deter poachers. But it's worth so much, more per ounce than gold or cocaine, that every place there's rhino is a target. Some people have even got rid of their rhinos because they've become a liability on their own properties. And a financial burden. A very huge financial burden. But we still, fortunately, have some very committed, passionate people who want to get more black rhino. That commitment is shared by the game capture team. Vuzi and Shangazi told us the poachers threatened their lives and their livelihood.

We feed our children with this job. If the rhinos were never here... Then you would have no job. If the rhinos never came here... Then you would have no job. Yes. So these animals mean a lot to you. It's important to us. Very important. To our lives. So important.

Moving the rhino this way is expensive. With Tosh Ross volunteering his services, it still costs about $100,000 to lift 20 rhino. He'll have to come in over the trucks. He's prepping now. Jacques Flamand joined his team at the landing zone. They were preparing for their final delivery. Tash Ross eased his cargo down.

The next part, the dehorning, was hard to watch. I know you do it to save the rhino, but it still seems like horrible. It's painless. There are no nerve endings or blood supply to the horn directly. Don't they need their horn? They do to defend themselves, but it's a toss-up. You know, it's predators versus poachers. Who do we protect them from most?

Poachers at the moment, I'd say. After some prodding, the groggy female was loaded into a crate. She still had a road trip ahead of her to a holding area. Blamond will keep her there until he's captured enough rhino to relocate as a group. What is that like for you? It's great. It's great. I mean, one always feels sad removing them from their existing homes, but it's for a good cause. It's to start a new breeding population. Eight weeks later, they were released. For security, we can't tell you exactly where, but it's a well-guarded reserve in another part of the country.

Jacques Flamand said there are now about 200 more black rhino in South Africa than when he started his program. Not as many as he wanted, but at a time of relentless poaching, there's no simple road to success. Here's one sign of success we can report on since our story first aired. This baby. You can see it through the bush, standing next to its mother. It was born into that newly transplanted group of black rhino. 50 seasons of 60 Minutes. Tonight, a story from 1969, when Harry Reasoner went to France to look at a weekend cottage up for sale by its elderly owners. It was a cottage inhabited by history. She had once been an American divorcee.

He had once been King of England, Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor. Here's a picture of you and your father and my brother. How old were you then when you became king? Forty-two. And you were king for? Ten months. Is that long enough to be king? No.

If you had not abdicated, how would that have changed history, do you think? As a constitutional monarch, I don't believe it would have changed it at all. I might have tried to exert some, say, advice or pressure to try and avoid the Second World War, that it was very unlikely that I should have succeeded. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.