ÑOne of the things that people who don't know any thing about white rhinoceroses find most interesting about them is their colour.
It isn't white.
Not even remotely. It's a rather handsome dark grey. Not even a sort of pale grey that might arguably pass as an off-white, just plain dark grey.
ÑPeople therefore assume that zoologists are either perverse or colour-blind, but it's not that, it's that they're illiterate. 'White' is a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word 'weit' meaning 'wide', and it refers to the animal's mouth, which is wider than that of the black rhino. By one of those lucky chances the white rhino is in fact a very slightly lighter shade of dark grey than the black rhino.
ÑIf the white rhino had actually been darker than the black rhino people would just get cross, which would be a pity since there are many better things to get cross about regarding the white rhino than its colour, such as what happens to its horns.
There is a widespread myth about what people want rhino horns for - in fact two myths. The first myth is that ground rhino horn is an aphrodisiac.
ÑThis, I think it's safe to say, is just what it appears to be - superstition. It has little to do with any known medical fact, and probably a lot to do with the fact that a rhino's horn is a big sticky-up hard thing.
The second myth is that anyone actually believes the first myth.
It was probably the invention of a journalist, or at best a misunderstanding.
ÑIt's easy to see where the idea came from when you consider the variety of things that the Chinese, for example, believe to be aphrodisiacs, which include the brain of a monkey, the tongue of a sparrow, the human placenta, the penis of a white horse, rabbit hair from old brushes, and the dried sexual parts of a male tiger soaked in a bottle of European brandy for six months.
ÑA big sticky-up hard thing like a rhinoceros horn would seem to be a natural for such a list, though it's perhaps harder to understand, in this context, why grinding the thing down would be such an attractive idea. The fact is that there is no actual evidence to suggest that the Chinese do believe rhino horn to be an aphrodisiac.
ÑThe only people who do believe it are people who've read somewhere that other people believe it, and are ready and willing to believe anything they hear that they like the sound of.
There is no known trade in rhino horn for the purposes of aphrodisia. (This, like most things, is no longer strictly true.
ÑIt is now known that there are a couple of people in Northern India who use it, but they only do it to annoy.)
Some horn is used in traditional medicine in the Far East, but a major part of the trade in rhino horn is caused by something much more absurd, and it's this: fashion. Dagger handles made of rhinoceros horn are an extremely fashionable item of male jewellery in the Yemen. That's it: costume jewellery.
Ñ Let's see the effect of this fashion.
Northern white rhinos were unknown to the western world until their discovery in 1903. At the time, there were enormous numbers of them in five different countries: Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and Zaire.
ÑBut their discovery spelt disaster, because unfortunately for the northern white rhino it has two horns - which makes it doubly attractive to poachers. The front one, the longest, averages two feet in length; the world record-holder had an incredible horn six feet long and, sadly, was worth some US$5,000.
Ñ By 1980, all but 1,000 had been killed by poachers. There were still no serious efforts to protect them and, five years later, the population reached an all-time low of just thirteen animals, all living in Garamba National Park. The animal was on the verge of extinction.
Ñ Until 1984, Garamba's 5,000 square kilometres were under the protection of a small number of staff. These staff were untrained, often unpaid, had no vehicles and no equipment. If a poacher wanted to kill a rhino, all he had to do was turn up.
ÑEven local Zairois occasionally killed the rhinos, to fashion small pieces of horn into rings which they believed would protect them against poison and harmful people. But most of the horn was taken by heavily-armed Sudanese poachers. It was taken back to Sudan and, from there, entered the illegal international marketplace.
Ñ The situation in Garamba has improved dramatically since then, with the rehabilitation project which began in 1984. There is now a total of 246 trained staff, with eleven vehicles, a light aircraft, permanent guard posts throughout the park and mobile patrols all in radio contact with one another.
ÑTwo rhinos poached in May 1984, immediately after the rehabilitation work began, were the last to be killed in the park. The poacher was caught and imprisoned, but later allowed to escape. Attitudes have changed so much now that it is unlikely he would be allowed to escape again. Other species are still poached, but intensive protection over the past five years has at last begun to have an effect.
ÑIn fact, there have been a number of rhino births and the population now stands at a slightly better twenty-two.
Twenty-two.
An astounding feature of the situation is this: the eventual value of a rhino horn, by the time it has been shipped out of Africa and fashioned into a piece of tasteless costume jewellery for some rich young Yemeni to strut around and pull girls with, is thousands of US dollars.
ÑBut the poacher himself, the man who goes into the park and risks his life to shoot the actual rhino which all of this time, effort and money is going into protecting, will get about ten or twelve or fifteen dollars for the horn. So the difference between life or death for one of the rarest and most magnificent animals in the world is actually about twelve dollars.
Ñ It's easy to ask - in fact I asked this - why not simply pay the poachers more not to kill the animals? The answer, of course, is very simple. If one person offers a poacher, say, twenty-five dollars not to shoot an animal, and then someone else offers him twelve dollars to shoot it, the poacher is liable to see that he can now earn thirty-seven dollars from the same animal.
ÑWhile the horns continue to command the amount of money they do, there is always going to be an incentive for someone to go and earn that money. So the question really is this. How do you persuade a young Yemeni that a rhino horn dagger is not a symbol of your manhood but a signal of the fact that you need such a symbol?
Ñ Recently, there have been two separate, though unconfirmed, sightings of northern white rhinos in Southern National Park, Sudan. But the current political situation there means that very little can be done about them and, effectively, the only animals with any chance of survival have been restricted to Garamba since the nineteen-eighties.
ÑThey are still in a precarious position, but there is one ray of hope: experience with the southern white rhino.
Northern white rhinos and southern white rhinos belong to the same species but their populations have been separated for such a long time that they have evolved a range of ecological and behavioural differences.
ÑMore importantly, the genetic differences are so great that scientists consider them to be separate sub-species and, consequently, believe they have lived apart for more than two million years. Nowadays, they are permanently separated by a thousand miles of African rain forest, woodland and savannah.
Ñ Without experience, the two animals are virtually impossible to tell apart - though the northern generally holds its head higher than its southern counterpart and their body proportions are also rather different.
At the time of its discovery, the northern white was by far the commoner of the two.
ÑThe southern white had been discovered nearly a century earlier but, by 1882, it was considered to be extinct. Then, at the turn of the century, a small population of about eleven animals was discovered in Umfolozi, Zululand. All the stops were pulled out to save them from extinction and, by the mid-sixties, their number had increased to about five hundred.
ÑIt was enough to begin translocating individuals to other parks and reserves and to other countries. There are now more than 5,000 southern rhinos throughout southern Africa, and they are out of immediate danger.
The point is that we are not too late to save the northern white rhino from extinction.
