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| Game scouts found this black rhino bull wandering Zimbabwe’s Savé Valley Conservancy after poachers shot it several times and hacked off both its horns. Veterinarians had to euthanize the animal because its shattered shoulder couldn’t support its weight. In the past six years poachers have killed more than a thousand African rhinos for their horns, which are smuggled to Asia for use in traditional medicines. Photo: Brent Stirton |
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| In a café in Vietnam, a woman grinds a piece of rhino horn. By adding a little water and rubbing the horn over the dish’s sandpaper-like bottom, she creates a solution that many Asians believe is a super-vitamin and a cure for various maladies. Few scientific studies have been conducted on rhino horn’s medicinal benefits, and the results have been inconclusive. Since taking it, she says, “I don’t feel my kidney stones.” Photo: Brent Stirton |
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| A decomposing rhino with its horns cut off lies where it was strangled in a poacher’s wire snare on a private game reserve not far from Kruger National Park in South Africa. Rangers staked out the site, but when the poacher didn’t return, reserve officials removed the horns. Photo: Brent Stirton |
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| A white rhino cow (at left) grazes with a bull that has become her companion after a poaching attack in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Using a helicopter, a gang tracked her and her four-week-old calf, shot her with a tranquilizer dart, and cut off her horns with a chain saw. Rangers found her a week later, searching for her calf, which had died, probably of starvation and dehydration. Photo: Brent Stirton |
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| Blindfolded and tranquilized, a black rhino is airlifted in a ten-minute helicopter ride from South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province to a waiting truck that will deliver it to a new home some 900 miles away. Designed to extricate the animals gently from difficult terrain, the airlifts are part of an effort to relocate endangered black rhinos to areas better suited to increasing their numbers as well as their range. Photo: Green Renaissance/WWF |
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| After a hunt on a private game farm, a slab of rhino meat hangs in cold storage. Photo: Brent Stirton |
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| The anesthetized rhino is left to wake in a field after the dehorning procedure. Photo: Brent Stirton |
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| Dehorned to deter poachers, a tame northern white rhino, one of only seven of the subspecies known to survive, grazes under the watch of rangers from Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. 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. Photo: Brent Stirton |
”Human beings are so ungrateful: we deplete natural resources, destroy nature, and are close to making the world itself unlivable – all for our personal gain. Behind our actions lies the delusion that we are the owners of the world and have no responsibilities towards the creatures and plants that share it with us” – Gratitude [book]
The photos are not of rhinos from NEPAL, however Nepal has in the past few years seen an increase in the poaching of the endagered one-horned rhino existing in the country.
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| An eight-pound rhino horn like this one can reap up to $360,000 on the black market. Photo: Brent Stirton |
How can human beings be so cruel?? The horn is their pride and we strip them off it.
🙁
The accident of finding this post has breietgnhd my day
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