Then & Now: African Rhinos
Top photograph by Kermit Roosevelt. Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Bottom photograph by Brent Stirton.
Then:
In 1910, hunter-naturalist (and former President)
Theodore Roosevelt embarked on a historic trip to Africa and came back
with some 14,000 specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. “The
rhinoceroses were not as interesting as the elephants, because they were
not as intelligent. After we had completed our collections of
rhinoceroses it became quite a problem how to avoid them and get the
other things we wanted,” Roosevelt described in the January 1911 article
of National Geographic magazine. “It is amusing to realize how
soon we got to accepting our difficulties with rhinos as a matter of
course. Here in civilization if you asked a man to kindly go down and
scare off a rhinoceros for you, the man would look at you with a certain
surprise: in Africa it was a matter-of-course incident. When near a
rhino there is always a chance that he will charge, whether through
stupidity, or fright, or anger. The trouble is that one never knows
whether he will or will not charge him.”
In 2012, National Geographic magazine
featured rangers in Africa who are protecting rhinos from poachers
seeking horns. This tame northern white rhino, dehorned to deter
poachers, grazes under the watch of rangers from Kenya's Ol Pejeta
Conservancy. It is one of only seven known survivors in the subspecies.
Transferred along with three other northern whites from a zoo in the
Czech Republic, the rhinos, which had not produced offspring in
captivity, were brought to the wild in a last-ditch effort to breed them
back from the brink of extinction. (Related: "Rhino Wars")
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