Rhinos In The Wild

The Rhino in History and Culture


The rhino in history and culture


In the middle of the 17th century, a man digging in a field in south-east England unearthed some strange bones. Word spread that the remains of a "sea monster" had been found. They were later identified as part of the skeleton of a prehistoric rhinoceros, which had roamed the forested hills and swamps of Britain.

Contrary to popular belief, the rhinoceros originally existed in Europe, as well as in Africa and Asia. Powder from the rhino horn was widely used in European and traditional Chinese medicine. It was also used to make elaborate ceremonial cups in China and India; rhino skin was used for shields in India and as armour in China; its blood served as human tonic and its urine as medicine in India and Nepal.

Yet, in spite of its wide usage around the world, when Europeans penetrated Asia and Africa in recent times, rhinos were still common throughout most of their traditional ranges. The greater one-horned rhino was found as far west as the Khyber Pass, which links the Indian subcontinent with Afghanistan, and along the floodplain at the foot of the Himalayas to Assam, 2,000 km to the east.

Javan and Sumatran rhinos ranged from eastern India through south-east Asia to the islands which bear their names. While the Javan rhino inhabited the lowlands, the Sumatran rhino preferred hilly terrain.

In Africa, the white and black rhinos shared the woodlands and savannahs south of the Sahara. But, in modern times, the white rhino has existed in separate populations, recognized as distinct sub-species, in southern Africa, and from northern Zaire, through the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Uganda to the Nile. The two species must have numbered hundreds of thousands.

Like other wildlife, rhinos were exploited by people, for meat and particularly for their horns. Unlike the horns of cattle, goats, sheep, deer, and antelopes, which grow from the skull and have bony cores, rhino horn is formed of keratin and gelatin, which grow from the skin of the nose in an agglutinated mass mounted on a corrugated mound of nasal bone. If cut off the horns grow again.



EVOLUTION OF THE RHINO

Five species of rhino exist today - the white (or square-lipped) and black (or hooked lip) rhinos in Africa, each with two horns, and Sumatran (hairy and two-horned), and the greater (Indian) one-horned and lesser one-horned, or Javan, rhinos in Asia. All still have a prehistoric look with their great bulk, rugged features and their distinctive prominent horns. But their ancestor, who lived 50 million years ago in the Oligocene, looked more like a miniature horse and had a flat, hornless head.

The first traces of horned rhinos were found in North America, where they lived between 25 and 40 million years ago. In later periods, horned species were found in Eurasia, some with two horns placed side by side, and others with single or multiple horns in a variety of shapes.

The Sumatran rhino, the smallest of today's rhinos, is considered a descendent of the prehistoric woolly rhinoceros, depicted in Stone Age cave drawings in Europe and of which complete carcasses have been found in Siberian permafrost.

Relatives of the woolly rhinoceros are believed to have moved into Africa and evolved into the two present species. The white rhinoceros is not white in colour: the name is probably a corruption of the Dutch "wijd" for "wide", which describes its lips. Weighing up to 3.5 tonnes, the white rhino is second only to the African bush elephant in the scale of land mammals. It is a grazer and lives in social groups. The black (actually grey) rhinoceros has a prehensile upper lip, which serves like a miniature elephant trunk when the rhino browses on bushes. Like the rhinos in Asia it is solitary.



RECENT HISTORY OF RHINOS

In 1970, black rhinos may have numbered 65,000 in sub-Saharan Africa, the most numerous of all five rhino species. When the first scientific population estimate was made in 1980, the number was put at 14,000-15,000. By the time of the last overall estimate in 1993, there were only 2,550. No black rhinos probably survive in Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda, while Angola, Cameroun, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia are near to losing their last rhinos.

The story of the white rhino, however, shows that dedicated efforts can be successful in saving a species from the brink of extinction. Feared extinct by the 1890s, the rediscovery of some Southern white rhinos in the Hluhluwe area of Natal in South Africa was followed by intensive conservation efforts, resulting in a present-day African population of 6,752, over 94% of which are in South Africa. The northern white rhino, estimated to number about 1,000 in 1980, was reduced to 15 animals, confined to Za•re's Garamba National Park. Today the northern white rhino number has more than doubled thanks to a major effort by WWF.

Early in this century, it was said that only a dozen greater one-horned rhinos survived in Kaziranga, in north-eastern India. Kaziranga was protected from 1908 and, despite fluctuations in early years, the population grew to its present 1,200. Rhinos also survive in other reserves, notably Manas, Orang, and Jaldapara. However, poaching is still a problem. In 1986, rhinos from Assam were translocated to Dudhwa National Park near India's border with south-western Nepal.

In Nepal, greater one-horned rhinos were numerous in the swampy regions of the terai near the Indian border, but as land reclamation became possible after the Second World War, many rhinos were killed, leaving only 80 to 100 rhinos in the Chitwan valley in 1968, where a national park was established in 1973. Poaching was brought under control, and under army guard the rhinos have increased to over 450.

Records of Sumatran and Javan rhinos are poor because both live secretively in dense forests, where they are seldom sighted. Widespread slaughter for their horn, as well as fragmentation of their habitat, reduced the Javan to fewer than 30 in Ujung Kulon after the end of World War II.

By mid century, Sumatran rhinos were scattered. Be-tween 425 and 800 were estimated to be in Sumatra in the early 1980s, with lesser numbers in peninsular Malaysia, and Sabah, Sarawak, and Kalimantan in Borneo. Poaching has continued and the Sumatran rhino population is now thought to total 450-800 overall (the broad range of figures reflects the difficulty of counting these discreet forest dwellers).


Population distribution map for the rhino

Source: International Wildlife Trade: Whose Business Is It ?
Sarah Fitzgerald, WWF



Back to the previous page

Copyright 1996, The World Wide Fund For Nature