Rise of the Rhino

Unlike most horns, rhino horn is not made of bone or ivory. It grows out from the skin, not from the skull, and is actually comprised of matted hair-like fibres called keratin. And like hair, it keeps growing – about 10 centimetres every year, in fact. Knowing this, conservation officials set up official programs to cut the horns off in the hope that they’d also be removing the main reason for killing the animals. “Safe de-horning was a solution to the poaching problem,” says Leon. “But the authorities found that if poachers tracked a rhino for several days and found it didn’t have a horn, they would kill it anyway, so that they wouldn’t mistakenly track it again.”

“Shit,” I shout, as we round another corner and a massive elephant the size of which I never new existed lumbers 10 feet away. It looks intimidatingly in our direction with its huge ears flapping and continues walking without missing a beat. Back in the early 1980s, Hluhluwe’s elephant population was very low; at the same time, Kruger Park had a lot of young orphaned ones. Sending Kruger’s surplus to Hluhluwe seemed a logical step, but it has had unintended consequences. In the late 1990s, conservationists discovered that young male elephants were killing both black and white rhinos in the park, about 40 in total.

Researchers attributed the unusual behaviour to musth, the state of increased aggression in male elephants which is linked to reproduction – sort of what happens to male dogs when female ones are in heat. Musth, caused by increased levels of sex hormones in their blood, can last in mature males for up to three to five months every year. But bull elephants normally enter musth gradually, only reaching full musth around the age of 30. But with no older bulls around to establish a hierarchy and show them how to behave, the orphaned males of Hluhluwe were experiencing full musth as early as 18. “So not only does the rhino face increasing pressure from poaching, now with some of them de-horned, they also faced aggressive elephants,” says Leon. “It [was] a difficult situation.”

We drive for another 10 minutes and finally see moving shapes in the distance that resemble what we are after. Our guide slows down and drives as quietly as one can with a Land Cruiser on a bumpy gravel dirt road to get us as close as safely possible to the rhinos. “They have great hearing, but terrible eyesight, we need to be quiet,” says Leon. “If we get too close, it might charge and that’s not good.” He stops and we sit in captivated silence. “It looks like a family,” says a member of our group. Two large older white rhinos and a younger rhino lazily munch on grass less than 10 metres away. Although they seem to be ignoring us, the constant swivel of their ears from front to back to side suggests otherwise. The younger rhino, a teenager, stays close to the other two.

The grassy plain behind them stretches until it reaches rolling hills. Time seems to drift, and after a while Leon steers away and we head toward the park’s main entrance gate. Tomorrow we head to Cape Town to climb Table Mountain, but if it was up to me I’d just stay here.

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