A Vision For The TigerA Vision For The Tiger From The Director's Desk

Preface

A Wildlife Tragedy

The Insatiable Demand for Horn

WWF's Response to the Crisis

The Early Years: 1961-1970

The 1970s and

The 1980s: Capture and Consolidation

The 1990s: Cautious Optimism

What We Have Learned

Challenges for the Future

Box 1

Box 2

Table 1

Acknowledgements
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A Wildlife Tragedy

RhinoThe decline of Africa's rhinos is one of the greatest wildlife tragedies of our time. Early explorers reported an abundance of rhinos in Africa's savannas. It was not until the advent of the modern rifle and the push by European settlers into Africa's interior that the precipitous decline of rhino populations began. Count Teleki, on his expedition to discover lakes Rudolph and Stephanie (now lakes Turkana and Chamo) in the 1880s, noted in his log that he shot no fewer than 79 rhinos; the record for a single day being 4.

At the turn of the 20th century, Africa's savannas may still have harboured as many as one million black rhinos. Sport hunting and land clearance were major factors in the black rhino's decline during the first half of this century. In South Africa, for example, the black rhino had almost disappeared by the 1930s, with only 110 animals surviving in game reserves. Throughout eastern Africa, thousands of black rhinos were shot by game control officers as vermin, or to make way for agricultural schemes. In the space of just three decades, from the late 1950s, Africa lost more than 95 per cent of an estimated population of 100,000 black rhinos. Today, only about 2,600 animals remain, the great majority confined to closely-guarded areas in eastern and Southern Africa (see Table 1).

The white or square-lipped rhino, Africa's other rhino species, suffered a different past. Two distinct races are recognized - northern and southern (see Box 1). The northern white rhino formerly occurred in the grasslands of north-central Africa, from Chad and northern Central African Republic (CAR), through the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaïre) to Sudan and Uganda. In their book, Run Rhino Run, Esmond and Chryssee Martin chronicle the slaughter for profit of thousands of northern white rhino by French hunters in the Lake Chad region between 1927 and 1931. Now numbering around 25 individuals, the only remaining wild population is in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Garamba National Park.

In the face of colonization, the southern race of the white rhino suffered an earlier decline than either the black or northern white subspecies. It was almost extinct 100 years ago, with less than 100 individuals surviving, mainly in South Africa's Umfolozi Game Reserve. Thanks to successful conservation efforts during the past century, the southern white rhino is now relatively secure, with over 7,900 individuals in South Africa, and smaller populations in Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (see Table 1). The remarkable recovery of this species is a conservation success story that throws out a beacon of hope in an otherwise disastrous century for African rhinos.



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