Rise of the Rhino

Driving over a rise in the road, Leon stops suddenly. A massive Cape buffalo with testicles the size of a human head stands blocking our route little more than a car length away. Covered in flies and glistening with fresh mud, it stares us down – and wins. We watch in fascination as it looks at us for a minute, then slowly swaggers off the road and disappears into the underbrush.

We’re here during the summer rainy season. Finding animals when the foliage is flourishing and there are lots of watering holes can be more challenging than in the winter or dry season, when plants thin out and watering holes shrink. “You can just park at one of the few holes and sit and wait for the different animals to converge,” says Leon. “In the rainy season, you’ll see fewer animals, but the bonus is that, when you do see them, they are often with their babies.” Leon hits the clutch and we drive off with hopes high that we will not only see a rhino, but one with its calf.

There are five rhino species in all: the Indian, Javan and Sumatran from Asia, and the black and white rhino from Africa. Despite the relative comeback of the white rhino, and programs that have helped the Indian population grow from just 600 animals in 1975 to almost 3,000 today, conservationists warn that as a group, rhinos are still among the world’s most threatened animals. The Asian population, says the World Wildlife Fund, is “distressingly small” and massive efforts are needed to keep extinction at bay. And with just an estimated 3,600 black rhinos still roaming the grasslands and savannahs of Africa, they too remain on the critically endangered list. Estimates for the total number of rhinos remaining worldwide range from 10,000 to 19,000, but in either case, it’s a fraction of what their numbers were as recently as the 1970s.

As with most animal species, the decrease is mostly the result of human interference. Ironically, the white rhino’s near annihilation a century ago is the reason for the profoundly different fortunes of the two African species. When its then-meager population was being herded onto protective reserves, especially in South Africa, where conservation practices were providing conditions suitable for breeding, the black was left to fend off hunters and poachers on its own, mostly in eastern, central and southern Africa.

The rhino’s horn is the problem. It is highly valued in certain parts of the world for medicinal and cultural reasons, and has been for a very long time. According to Bagheera, an educational website about endangered species, in the 5th century B.C,. rhino horn was thought capable of rendering some poisons harmless. In Borneo, people used to hang a rhino’s tail in the room where a woman was giving birth, believing it would ease labour pains. And even today there’s a big market in the Far East, China especially, for powdered horn because many people think it can reduce fever and offset illnesses like epilepsy and AIDS.

Even so, the black rhino population seemed to be holding relatively steady. Then in the 1970s, their numbers suddenly started to plummet. They had become surprise victims of the decade’s infamous energy crisis. Rhino horn had long been prized for handles for the jambiya, a curved dagger that is a symbol of wealth and epitomizes manhood in Yemen. With the Middle East afloat in petrol dollars thanks to soaring oil prices, growing numbers of young men suddenly had the means to afford rhino horn. It remains a highly coveted material.

Although international trade in rhino horn is now banned, the law of supply and demand makes it extremely profitable on the black market. Reliable figures on illegally traded goods can be notoriously hard to come by, but in 1990, two horns from a single black rhino fetched a reported $50,000 US. It’s a huge incentive to poaching. The majority of Africa’s remaining black and white rhinos are located in the southern African countries of Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. And now they too are coming under increasing pressure to satisfy the illegal trade in rhino horn.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.