Reproduced from ZimEye
(To read the article on the Zimeye website, either click on the above image or go to www.zimeye.net/2025/12/16/saving-zimbabwes-rhinos-the-world-transformation-movements-breakthrough-understanding-of-human-behaviour-makes-it-possible/.)
Zimeye’s 16 December 2025 article ‘Saving Zimbabwe’s Rhinos: The World Transformation Movement’s Breakthrough Understanding of Human Behaviour Makes It Possible’, by Sharon Jessop:
I have run thousands of kilometres across South Africa to raise money and awareness for rhino conservation. I have stood at the carcasses of animals I fought to protect and felt the same helpless rage that many Zimbabweans feel today when another black rhino is gunned down for its horn. In the past year we have seen an eight-year-old bull dehorned in Save Valley Conservancy, a 22-year-old male named Gomo killed and stripped of its horns in under fifteen minutes at Imire, and many more lost despite armed guards and dehorning programmes. These are not just statistics; they are living symbols of a crisis that no fence, drone or harsher sentence has yet managed to stop.
Recently I discovered the work of the World Transformation Movement—the organisation founded to promote Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the ‘human condition’—and the truth finally clicked into place. Griffith gave me the scientific explanation for why people can behave so destructively—and why my lifelong belief that we humans are not bad was, in fact, absolutely right.
After studying Griffith’s explanation, the late Dr Ian Player—the legendary South African conservationist who saved the southern white rhino from extinction and founded the Wilderness Leadership School—wrote: ‘I believe Griffith is on to getting answers to much that has puzzled and bewildered humanity for a long time.’
Griffith’s explanation, presented most succinctly in the video ‘THE Interview’ and comprehensively in his book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, is that human destructiveness is not evidence of an inherently flawed species. It is the outcome of a two-million-year psychological conflict between our original instincts and our emerging conscious mind. Our instincts in effect criticised our conscious mind’s experiments in self-management, which caused our conscious mind to become insecure and defensive. We became angry, egocentric and alienated; and part of that anger included domination of and brutality towards the natural world—including the slaughter of the last wild rhinos and so many other species.
What changed everything for me is that once this conflict is explained and understood, the insecurity begins to lift. The aggression subsides. The need to destroy what is innocent and beautiful starts to fade. In short: the cure for poaching is not only more guards and bigger fences—it is understanding ourselves. As Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, said, FREEDOM ‘presents the 11th hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species!’ Professor Scott D. Churchill, who chaired the Psychology Department at the University of Dallas, similarly affirmed, ‘FREEDOM is the book all humans need to read for our collective wellbeing.’
Jeremy Griffith launching FREEDOM
at the Royal Geographical Society in London, 2016
So today, when I read of another rhino lost in Zimbabwe or South Africa, I still react with anger, but underneath I now have a deep compassion for our species and hope for our future—because there is now a dignifying, scientific explanation for why people do terrible things. They are not evil; they are distressed. And because the distress can at last be understood, it can be healed.
Zimbabwe is home to the second-largest population of critically endangered black rhinos on earth. Armed patrols, community projects and dehorning are essential, but they will never be enough while the deeper psychological insecurity in us humans remains unaddressed. Real, lasting protection will come only when enough of us grasp this redeeming understanding of our behaviour and the anger inside us begins to lift.
I still run for rhinos. I always will. But I now know the longest distance any of us has to cover is the journey from insecurity to understanding.
For anyone who cares about Zimbabwe’s rhinos and wants to explore the World Transformation Movement’s redeeming understanding of the human condition, start with the free video “THE Interview” at www.humancondition.com. More about my work is at https://www.sharonjessop.com.
Sharon Jessop is the founder of the World Transformation Movement Centre in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a rhino conservationist, keynote powerhouse, TEDx speaker, ultra-endurance athlete, serial entrepreneur, and former TV host.
