Teenage Youth: Elephant and Human Parallels

Teenagers rebel against parental controls, right?

Well, most in human societies they do, to some extent at least. It is all a matter of degree.  At the mildest end of the scale they may stay out a tad later than an imposed curfew time or chitchat, text or tweet about parents.  I grew a beard. It did not last long because it was truly an eyesore, tricoloured (red, white and brown) and straggly.

At the other end of the scale things can get pretty ugly. Gang warfare, extreme violence, even murder.

A report in the Los Angeles Times of Dec 16 last year, passed on to me by my daughter, who has a teenager of her own, made me dive into my memory banks as she reminded me of its parallel to things I had witnessed in elephant society.

It was titled Michigan study: Fewer men around? Expect more youth violence. Of course I had a look at the links and was struck by the fact that the author’s name was Daniel Kruger. He was quoted by the Times as follows:

A new study that zeroed in on a single city in Michigan found that where men are scarce, youth were more likely to commit assaults.

“Male scarcity is actually a driver of conditions,"... "It’s the most powerful predictor.”

Dr. Kruger is a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the study, originally published in the Journal of Community Psychology. Other media outlets picked up the story and there are similar studies reported elsewhere.

None of these studies picked up on the great similarity they have to events in elephant society that I first learned about in South Africa in 1997. I was with my wife on a study leave from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine  and by sheer chance, or maybe an alignment of the planets we were visiting a former student and friend, Bob Keffen. Bob had been determined to work as a wildlife vet in Africa even before he graduated. He had had to settle for a job as a park ranger and was employed in Pilansberg NP. He managed to wangle an invitation for me to sit in on a meeting about a major elephant problem.

The problem was all to do with teenage elephants and the lack of big bulls in the population (sounds like Dr. Kruger's study in Michigan).

In the 1970s and 80s elephant numbers had grown out of proportion to the capacity of the Kruger NP, South Africa’s largest, to feed them and the park’s vegetation was taking a hammering. 

A cull, this one in Rwanda in 1975. The young went to the Akagera NP

It was thought that a humane way of dealing with problem in park was to cull adults, capture juveniles and transfer them to other locations. 

 Pilansberg had been one such destination and several young elephants, all under the age of ten, had been shipped there. At first all seemed well and of course the new animals drew plenty of tourists. It was not only the elephants that were new. Plenty of rhino, mostly white rhino, had been taken there as well.

The elephants grew up, but of course had no parental guidance and a complete loss of social and family history.

Such history is vital to elephant society and it comes as no surprise, after the work of Joyce Poole and others like Cynthia Moss, that events in Pilansberg did not follow the normal path.

Male elephants reach sexual maturity at about age 17 but get little chance to breed until they are much older. Their most aggressive activities take place during musth, when testosterone levels go sky high and various externally visible changes rake place. Secretions from the pre-orbital gland drip down the side of their faces and a green secretion drips from the penile sheath. Before she had worked out what was happening Dr. Poole had even called it “Green Penis Syndrome.”  

In a moving speech at the 22^nd AnnualElephant Managers Workshop Dr. Poole said Young males coming into musth for the first time… are unsure of their new selves, apparent slaves to their raging hormones.

In “normal” elephant society mature bulls, that can detect the smell of a female in heat from up to 10 km away, will quickly suppress any musth tendencies in these teenagers. Dr. Poole saw this happen as quickly as twenty minutes after an encounter.  

In Pilansberg there were no big bulls to control the youngsters, and the females had no chance of doing so, not even if they formed coalition groups and talked to one another in their subsonic language.  By their late teens the bulls were larger and heavier than any female, even the few rescued from circuses that had arrived as adults.

In the early 90s some strange things began to happen. White rhinos were found dead, and without doubt elephants had attacked many of them.   

A rhino that survived attack, but has a serious hole in his shoulder

Trampling around the kill site, footprints and most compelling of all, large holes in the sides of the rhinos that can only have been created by tusks.

Then the evidence chain became absolutely certain when rangers in helicopters saw single male elephants chasing rhinos. There is even photographic evidence of one such encounter. An unnamed tour bus operator watched as an elephant encountered a rhino and attacked it. 

Into the river

First encounter

In this series of photos to you can see the attack and its outcome, which had a happier ending than many as the rhino escaped. 

 

Unwilling partner. Escape maybe?

Made it! Not all were so lucky

The photos were shared with me by one of Bob Keffen’s ranger colleagues, Gus Van Dyk. The quality is not great, but they were taken with a small camera and then I got copies of what were probably already copies.

In all, during the period 1992-96 some 49 rhino deaths could be attributed to elephant aggression. When known culprits were identified they were shot, and periods of lull in rhino deaths followed.

Of course this does not answer the question of why? Why rhinos? One can only speculate, but one possible explanation is that the young males, like young males of many species, were going through puberty, or had just gone through it, and were looking for some sex. The only thing they recognized as being about the right size and that were standing around were the rhino. On top of that the Joyce Poole phrase about them being apparent slaves to their raging hormones during musth may have played a role.

In human terms there was one terrible ending when a musth elephant attacked a parked vehicle and the family’s father was killed. Two male elephants were culled after that incident. You can read many more details here in an article published in 2001 in the South African wildlife journal Koedoe.

My participation in the meeting with Dr. Poole, Bob and other park staff was minimal, although one ranger did ask about the possibility of elephant castration. On this subject I was able to tell them that the process took a long time and was quite complicated because an elephant’s testes lie inside the abdomen, close to the kidneys and are difficult to reach because of the animal’s sheer size. As far as I know the first such surgery was performed by my friend and colleague Dr. Murray Fowler  and took about three hours. Everyone at the table realized at once that this was not an option in Pilansberg.

It was very soon obvious that Joyce Poole had the solution. She urged the park authorities to bring in a few mature bulls, that she called “super bulls” to suppress the juveniles quickly and create a more normal breeding environment for the entire elephant and rhino societies. The obvious place to source them was the Kruger NP.

Elephant boma with lots of power

It was also obvious that she had made this suggestion quite some time ahead of the meeting because after lunch we were taken out to see the newly built pen into which these super bulls would be placed. It was tiny, perhaps only 40 metres on a side, but fully rigged with several high voltage lines, each on a different circuit. As Gus explained, “we have to teach them to respect fences, which they have never had to do in the Kruger.”

"Super bulls" solved the problem, but created some new ones.

Bob later told me that the results were a resounding success, with one interesting wrinkle. The big bulls soon changed the vegetation in the park as they knocked down and ripped up trees.

I wonder how many readers of this post have spotted the odd coincidence of the name of the park in Africa where the elephants were sourced and the name of the lead author of the report about the human youth problems in Michigan. Both are Kruger.

Stories about Moose and a Wildlife Vet in Africa in British Columbia

We have just finished up another storytelling and book tour. Eight libraries, one sporting goods store and a wind-up at the University of Northern British Columbia. All  in 7 days. I tried to find a map to show all the communities, but could not quite manage it. 

This one shows 8 of the 10 spots. I added Granisle and Fraser Lake and each place has an italicized number, showing the order of the events.

We started in McBride where the folks enjoy decorating anything you can think of, including their fire hydrants. Why not?  Our total distance on the road, including the leg from home was just over 4500 km.

Fraser Lake, after the session. Thanks

Miake Ellott and me outside the Houston store

Just as in our trip to Yukon I offered one of two sets of stories, with pictures. Either A Wildlife Vet in Africa or Of Moose and Men Around the World. This time there was a split. The folks in Granisle, (at the very top left-hand corner of the map) and Houston went with the moose set. Everyone else chose Africa. In only one case, for the students at UNBC, did I know ahead of time which one it would be.

The odd tea break was an essential element

We had a great reunion Williams Lake with one of the students who joined Jo and me in Uganda. Dr. Ross Hawkes practices there and we reminisced a bout a whole bunch of things after the talk. 

Ross (the redhead 2nd from left back row) classmates & Ugandan students 2007

It was Ross and his class-mate Kevin Oomah who came up with the novel, some would say crazy, idea of subjecting themselves to a full bikini-wax hair strip of the hair above their waists in order to raise money for the schools that we have supported in Uganda over the years. In 50 minutes their generous “donation” generated $1800 !  I had not known, until Ross delved into his files, that there was video evidence of this event. If he and Kevin will allow it I would like to show that in a future post.

Most of our audiences were adult, but in Quesnel we had a surprise. A group of home-schooled children and their parents showed up. They were the only audience – the session was set for 10.00 am and it would have been tough for adults to get away from work. This meant that I had to change on the fly and luckily this was not too difficult. After telling them a little about my background, I began with stories about my own experiences with giraffes, which gave me the entry into the folk story about why giraffes are so tall. 

A couple more folk stories, with the little ones involved and with grins, and we had a happy crowd. I ended with a food-chain account of why hippos are so important for the health of the great lakes of Africa. This one resonated with one of the older boys who happens to be studying the food-chain right now! 

After the Quesnel set we needed a lunch break. Luckily we found a local bakery, and had soup like your mother made it. Yum!

Philippe Henry's snap of the audience before the start

The largest crowd was at Prince George’s University of Northern British Columbia, where student Gabrielle Aubertin and faculty member Philippe Henry had done a fine job of getting the news out. I told stories about work with rhinos, lions, elephants and a run-in with safari ants. The stories were for an adult audience, but included two folk tales. The first was about why wild dog’s wife got very sick and why they now hunt in packs, the second about the hippos again. I used two famous quotes. 

The first from one R. Maugham in 1914, which one might think was being recycled for the attitude of some towards wolves a hundred years on. Here it is:

"Let us consider for a moment that abomination - that blot upon the many interesting wild things - the murderous Wild Dog.  It will be an excellent day for African game and its preservation when means can be devised for its complete extermination."

The other from David MacDonald of Oxford University which sums up my own thinking.

“To nominate one sight as the most beautiful I have seen might, in a world filled with natural marvels, be considered disingenuous. Yet, of images jostling for supremacy in my memory, it is hard to better the bounding forms of African wild dogs, skiffing like golden pebbles across a sea of sunburnt grass at dusk.”

I was delighted with the reactions from the folks, which came on FB. 

Gabrielle wrote “Thank you for the great talk, I have only received positive comments, so I think everyone enjoyed it. How could they not. I thought it was a great mix of facts to stimulate the scientist brain, of beautiful images that would make anyone dream of having career like your and it was also funny!"

Philippe wrote:  “I kept getting comments in the hallway yesterday: beautifully told stories with real value for the conservation of our living world, thanks again for taking the long trip here:)

Elephant and rhino poaching update

If the reports are accurate hundreds or rhino and thousands of elephants have been poached this year, never mind the numbers from previous years. It has become difficult to keep up with the amount of traffic about rhino and elephant poaching on various social media sites and in on-line newspapers. On the one hand there are the announcements about famous people who have come out in support of anti-poaching efforts.

They include a United Nations story that China’s top film star, Li Bingbing has stepped up in support of her countryman Yao Ming. To assist in these efforts the Chinese media have been asked to back the war on poaching  Of course these two are trying to influence things that take place in the world’s major consuming country, where stunningly beautiful ivory carvings have been created for centuries and where an increasingly affluent and growing middle class can afford to make expensive purchases.

A YouTube video featuring Vietnamese singer My Linh is an attempt to raise awareness of the ‘Say NO to rhino horn” in her country.

The Secretary General of the United Nations has come out with a strongly worded statement calling poaching a “grave menace.” 

A MailOnline article about Prince Charles and Prince William has a strong personal link for me.

Most folks are aware that William proposed to his wife Katherine in Kenya. Many know that the actual words were spoken high on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya under the shadow of a flat-topped minor peak named Rutundu at an altitude of 3311 metres (about 10,200 feet). We used to be able to see Rutundu from our living room window and I once walked up to the table lands on the shoulders of the mountain to the nearby at Lake Alice at the foot of a sister flat peak called Ithanguni.

image from

 bks.beyondkenyasafaris.com

But this was before the days when the lakes were stocked with trout by a wealthy Scadinavian who flew them in by helicopter. Nowadays the site has become an upmarket tourist destination and has rustic log cabins for guests.

Bald and one tooth missing at right. Rugby days with Mt. Kenya!

I have an even stronger link to this story as the Royal couple had been staying with a mutual friend Ian Craig at his home on Lewa Downs, which was one of my client cattle ranches for the best part of ten years. In those days Ian’s parents David and Delia ran the ranch and Ian played alongside me in pale blue strip of the Mt. Kenya rugby club as a hard-hitting open side wing forward.

Since then the ranch has become a major wildlife conservancy and is home to many rhino as well as other species, including the Grevy's zebra, which is another endagnered species.

 

Grevy's (at right) and Burchell's zebra near Lewa. Photo by Dick Neal.

Sadly the rhino there are being targeted and a recent report told of the coordinated killing of four animals on a full moon night at Lewa and three other well-known parks. 

Although these famous folk, like many of us around the world are horrified by the destruction of these iconic creatures I do wonder if the high profile and greatly increased attention is not driving the other side of the equation. If anti-poaching efforts are gaining momentum, are the bad guys grabbing what they can before the effort becomes too risky? There has been a continued increase in the rate of rhino poaching. The latest figures state that 381 have been taken in 154 days. On that trajectory the numbers for 2013 will exceed the 688 of 2012.

Two US businessmen (Vinh Chung “Jimmy” Kha and Felix Kha) were recently jailed and fined for trafficking in rhino horn.     

Of course, as I have suggested before, the poaching for a commodity (I choose the word deliberately as that is what some see it as) is not a one-sided story. A recent FB post suggests that trading in LEGAL horn derived from one of the many South African game ranches should be allowed. Johan Kurver has argued that the cost of preventing and policing poaching makes no sense when ranched rhino could provide a good income and tax base. You can follow the rhino conversation on Facebook.

Two more stories (among many) about the twin threats. The Kenya parliament has just passed an emergency bill upping the punishment for wildlife trafficking by a huge amount. Previous fines might have been as much as USD 480, a tiny proportion of the value of a single rhino horn and no sort of deterrent. Now fines may be as much as $120,000 with a 15-year jail term as well. The most striking thing about this amendment is that the vote was not unanimous. There was one quiet “nay” but nobody seems to have reported who made that call. Was that parliamentarian somehow involved in the illegal trade?

The Kenya cabinet were reacting to a country-wide upsurge in publicity that included protest marches and a well managed campaign led by people like Paula Kahumbu, who has been very active in blogs, on Facebook and Twitter on this issue.

Even a very young elephant has some ivory

On the other side it would seem that in Tanzania some thing different and ugly is taking place. Some reports claim that about 10,000 elephants a year are being poached (yes, ten thousand). Of course this form or poaching is indiscriminate. Entire families are being taken out, adults, infants and everything in between. It seems that high-placed officials and even the military are implicated. David Smith, writing on the economicsof the wildlife trade states that “More than a third of all elephant tusks seized by law enforcement last year came from Tanzania, with neighbouring Kenya a close second.” This is particularly striking in light of the interview with a senior Tanzanian minister carried out by Aidan Hartley  The minister claimed no knowledge of the problem. There can only be one of two explanations for his words, neither of them pretty. Incompetence or Collusion.

Rhino anti poaching efforts

Photo on Facebook. Not credited to a spcific photogrpher, but not mine.

Followers of this blog site should not think that the rhino and elephant slaughter going on in Africa has stopped. It may well be getting worse, and nobody is suggesting that the situation is improving. There has not been an actual quote of numbers of either species taken in the last month or so, but the last figure I read indicated that rhino were dying at the hands of poachers at a rate of slightly over two a day. One educated guess states that the mid-April figure is 200 animals this year.  Of course these are just two of the most charismatic of the charismatic megafauna that are under threat across Africa.

So, what has been happening on the anti-poaching front and on the protection and consumption end of the rhino horn chain? I’ll take a closer look at the ivory part of the story soon.

On April 4th there was an on line report in the Guardian from the David Smith about an alternative attempt to curtail the trade by inserting potent poisons and a pink dye into the horns of living rhino. This was only occurring in one private game reserve, the Sabi Sand, which, on its eastern border abuts the world-famous Kruger National Park.

The Sabi Sand Game Reserve is injecting non-lethal chemical mixtures into rhino's horns.           Photograph: David Smith/Sabi Sand Game Reserve

This was picked up by the Smithsonian on line magazine.

As the horn itself is inert and grows upwards at a steady rate this poses no risk to the rhino (other than the risks involved in immobilization). Of course, as the horn is worn down by rubbing the poison and dye will only reside in the top parts.

“Consumers of the powdered horn in Asia risk becoming seriously ill from ingesting a so-called medicinal product, which is now contaminated with a non-lethal chemical package," said Andrew Parker, chief executive of the Sabi Sand Wildtuin Association, a group of private landowners in Mpumalanga province.

Apparently the insertion of the poison is not illegal, and those closest to the issue, like Tom Milliken of the wildlife trade monitoring network called TRAFFIC was reported as saying “it could act as a deterrent in areas where it is highly publicised but "is impractical in situations involving free-ranging animals in large areas, places like Kruger national park with 20,000 sq km. Thus, like dehorning, it probably has the effect of displacing poaching intensity to other areas, not stopping it altogether."

I have suggested before in this blog series that the whole surge in rhino horn “medical” properties is being driven by snake oil salesmen out to make a buck (lots of bucks) and the consequences be damned. If such a person was to see the pink dye there would be little to stop him or her from either countering the dye colour or selling it on as “special.” It would need a major media campaign in Vietnam to make people, aware of what is happening. I’m not betting my house on that.

Another fascinating little report came to me from a Linkedin post by Amber Dyson. She had spent 3 months in Vietnam in 2012 with the Endangered Asian Species Trust which is an organization that funds the Dao Tien Rescue Centre in Southern Vietnam. 

She wrote "I was in Vietnam carrying out research for my MSc dissertation on the use of animals in traditional medicine. Rhino horn was by far the most valued and the most desired though incredibly hard to source especially after the extinction of rhinos in Vietnam earlier that year."

She reported about a man who purchased some horn because he had cancer. The horn did not help (of course), but his status in the community rose markedly because he had been able to get hold of such a precious commodity. It had cost him the equivalent of three years salary!

Two Sides to the Rhino Horn Trade

There are two sides to every question, right? Of course it is an old cliché, but one would think that when it comes to rhino horn trade the answer would be an emphatic NO WAY!

Well, as far as some members of the South African Game Farmers Association are concerned there are indeed two sides.

As we wait for the CITES decision on the ivory trade the situation with rhino poaching has continued to deteriorate.

Here is a summary of some facts as outlined by noted rhino expert Dr. Pete Morkel about recent developments in South Africa.

"South Africa has lost another 24 rhino since last week," the CEO of SA National Parks (SANParks) David Mabunda said in a statement.

"The Kruger National Park remains the hardest hit, with 15 rhino being poached for their horn since 20 February 2013."

According to the latest statistics by SANParks the Kruger National Park has had 107 poaching since the beginning of the year. Across South Africa 146 have been poached so far this year, which brought the total to 1,595 over the past four years. Each year the number of poached animals rises. And at over two animals per day in 2013 the trend is likely to continue. 

To those of us outside South Africa this horror story can be simply stopped, or at least curtailed by simple strokes of the several pens. If CITES would ban all forms of rhino horn trade and then help importing countries to enforce the ban, the trade would dwindle. The major importers are in Asia, with Vietnam leading the way, but Korea and China are well in the mix.

Vietnam and South Africa have signed an MOU, but as has been pointed out, MOUs are probably not even worth the paper they are written on if the parties have no intention of honouring them.

I have written before about the snake oil sales pitch in Vietnam and the claim that the stuff (merely keratin) is a cure for cancer. A ridiculous new claim has arisen. Derek Mead has written that rhino horn is now being used as party drug to cure hangovers.

Mead has picked up on a Global Post article of August 2012  headlined Forget cocaine: Rhino horn is the new drug of status. 

Picture of a woman grinding rhino horn in a specially designed bowl was on Mead's post, but no photographer is named.

Erin Conway-Smith, the author of that article states that “Tom Milliken, a rhino expert with TRAFFIC who has worked extensively in Asia and Africa, said that in Vietnam, offering your friends rhino horn at a party has become a fashionable way to show wealth and status.”

She goes on: “The TRAFFIC report describes the disturbing phenomenon of “rhino horn touts” stalking the corridors at hospitals, seeking out desperate patients with cancer.”

Sounds to me like a new form of the much-despised ambulance-chasing lawyer.

One Vietnamese news website described rhino horn wine as “the alcoholic drink of millionaires.”

Mead has another thought-provoking post on the Motherboard site. In this one he is relating his own direct experience when he logged into an underground message board in “search of rhinoceros horn.” He was soon offered some. He reported that some vendors have even used Facebook to make sales! The price of horn is now in the $90,000 per kg range.

This black rhino bull was found wandering Zimbabwe's Savé Valley Conservancy after poachers shot it several times and hacked off both its horns. Veterinarians euthanized the animal because its shattered shoulder could no longer support its weight.  In the past six years poachers have killed more than a thousand African rhinos for their treasured horns. Photograph by Brent Stirton / National Geographic

It would seem that this is a simple issue. Stop the slaughter, stop the trade. Amazingly there is another side to this story, and it has gone under the radar.

Despite the carnage, which has escalated since the cancer cure claim emerged in Vietnam, the numbers of white rhino are on the increase. This is because the South African game farming industry has done a good job of caring for them and that they have bred successfully.

White rhino in Meru National Park, Kenya.

A hundred years ago there were fewer than twenty southern white rhino left anywhere. Their recovery from the brink is generally attributed to two men. One was Frederick Vaughan-Kirby, a hunter turned park ranger. The other was Ian Player, brother of the golfer Gary, who was involved in early translocation efforts that have led to the species being found in 17 different countries and many other areas of Africa.  There are several thousand world-wide, but most of them are in South Africa.

Some members of the South African Game Farmers Association see the possible legal sale of rhino horn as a real opportunity for income, especially at today’s prices. They stress legal.

Rhino immobilization is not difficult. Since the days when I immobilized about 150 of them for translocation the techniques and drug regimes have improved. In the hands of experienced veterinarians losses are minimal. It really would be no problem to dehorn rhinos every two or three years (rhino horn grows continuously, just like fingernails) and take the harvested product into the market.

We should accept (albeit heartily dislike) the fact that rhino horn is now considered a commodity in the orient, and that major organized crime syndicates are involved in the trade. If legal trade were permitted it might take the pressure off the free-ranging animals in parks.

However, Dr. Morkel thinks that “legal sale would be a fiasco.”  

There is no doubt that wealthy rhino owners would become even wealthier if this happens, but Dr. Morkel thinks this may be a pipe-dream for the rest. As he put it to me the wealthy ones "will probably have the resources to protect their rhino but as for the rhino in the smaller SA private reserves, SA government parks/reserves and other African and Asian range states I have serious doubts whether legal trade will do them any favours. Legal trade can only work if there is tight control and that just does not exist in the range states or consumer countries. There is also this myth that all this money will come flowing straight back into rhino security. They are dreaming. It did not happen with the money from the legal sale of ivory so why should it be any different with rhino horn?"

On the other hand here is a model for the legalization thinking. Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933 in the USA. It failed.

As I said, two sides.

Indian Rhino: Conservation and Poaching Threats

The news about rhinos in India is less depressing than the stories coming out of Africa. Most of the country’s rhinos live in the north-east state of Assam and are held in relatively small national parks that lie along the Bramapuhtra river.

The range of the Indian Rhino, aka the Greater one-Horned Rhinoceros once covered a vast swath of land that stretched across what is known as the Indo-Gangetic plain. 

As this map, taken from a Wiki site shows with the tiny reddish dots, they are now confined to protected populations in Nepal, Bhutan and India’s state of Assam, where about two-thirds of the total number of about 3000 live (claims vary, but not by more than10%).

In an interesting historical note by one RC Beavan of the Bengal Survey the status of this creature was nicely summed up, albeit in 1865, in a journal called the Intellectual Observer. 

He wrote that it “has been driven by the progress of civilization further and further from the haunts of men, until now it is to be found only in the dense untrodden jungles which skirt the base of the Eastern Himalayas, and the branches of that chain which penetrate Assam.”  

I was particularly struck by his spelling of the name of the major river of the region. He called it the Burrampooter.

Of the many images of this live armoured tank available I chose this belligerent-looking character, a photo taken by Yathin S. Krishnappa and available on a Creative Commons  site.  

While poaching is definitely a threat, a surprising cause of mortality comes from the river. Every year it floods in spring when the snows of the Himalayas melt and many rhinos drown before they can leave the riparian swamps and head for the hills.

In a short NDTV news clip video dated 28 Sept 2012 titled FLOODS, POACHING KAZARINGA’S DOUBLE TROUBLE the recent poaching of three rhinos in two days was compared the drowning of some 700 animals in a previous flood seasons. It may be that 700 is a cumulative number, but that is not clear in the news clip. But flooding is very definitely a problem. A recent (Jan 2013) DW report talks of the death of 50 rhinos and also mentions that 30 of them drowned in 2012.

One of the stranger elements of that same NDTV news clip is that the face of a poached rhino, presumably with its horn chopped off, has been blurred as if it were the genital regions of a human.   

More disconcerting than this ultimate homage to the PC world is that two of the rhinos were still alive. This implies that someone immobilized them.  A vet? Maybe. It would not be the first time, as members of our profession have been implicated in some such activities in South Africa. Sad.

In a January 2011 report in the online Save the Rhino magazine the numbers are reported to have “recovered from fewer than 200 animals in the early 1990s to more than 2,850 today.”

The story goes on to relate how translocations from nearby parks is helping to spread the load.

“The translocations are the backbone of the ambitious Indian Rhino Vision (IRV) 2020 – a partnership among the government of Assam, the International Rhino Foundation, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Bodoland Territorial Council, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – that aims to attain a population of 3,000 wild rhinos in seven of Assam's protected areas by the year 2020.”

If you have time you can watch a twenty-minute Youtube video that tells the same story of the rhino and the translocations from Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary and the nearby Kazaringa National Park. Pobitora is really tiny, in rhino terms. It covers only 39 square kilometres and something obviously had to be done. The video is a compilation of previous shorter posts, the first translocation having taken place in 2008.

In that same DW report there is mention that in Kazaringa NP, home to over 90% of the state’s rhinos they “lost 18 animals to poachers last year. Another four were killed in the Pobitora, Orang and Manas national parks.”

As far as the rhinos in Bhutan and Nepal are concerned the animal is not safe in either country. A report in an on-line news letter called Green Fudge dated 24 June 2010 there is an account of the poaching of 24 rhinos in the preceding eleven months. These came from a population of about 400 animals.

Are the reported different poaching rates in Africa and the Indian sub-continent real or imagined? 

It is impossible to tell from local websites and reports, but there is one possible explanation. 

As I wrote in my Rhino Poaching and Possible Solutions blog of Jan 3^rd there is one major difference. In some Indian parks there are two field staff per square kilometre. In parts of Africa a single ranger is expected to patrol thirty-three square km!

Better news about rhinos – I hope.

-->Folks maybe fed up with a series of gloom and doom stories about rhinos and the devastation that human greed is creating among them.  I have come across recent posts that shed a much more positive perspective, but sadly not about African rhinos. In December an online magazine called Global Animal carried a story about rhino in Indonesia.

We know that in 2012 the Javan (or Sunda) rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus) in Vietnam was declared extinct, but according to Lauren Mellela of Global Animal the situation in Indonesia has happier components. The article has an embedded video showing several cow-calf pairs of this species caught on remote sensor cameras in Ujung Kulon National Park. Apparently some 35 different individuals have been filmed or identified. The video is just under 3 minutes in length and is worth a look-see, especially if you have never seen this species. There are few, if any in zoos, anywhere. They bear some resemblance to the Indian one-horned species.

Sumatran rhino at the Molucca zoo. (Note the site of the sawn-off horns)

The Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) is the only Asian one with two horns. It is also the smallest and the hairiest one of all five remaining species. I saw what was probably the first one captured in modern times in the Molucca Zoo in Malaysia in 1985 and was even able to give some medical advice and arrange for some much-needed antibiotics to be delivered to the zoo vet.

Since then a few more have been captured and some success with captive breeding has occurred. In this video a male calf is shown being born in a conservation centre in Indonesia. It is reported to be only the fourth time that such a captive birth has occurred.

As reported in this National Geographic article there are thought to be fewer than 400 members of this species left, so any breeding successes are a positive sign,

FINGERS CROSSED.