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White Rhino And Calf

The Guardian UK reports: “The committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (C.I.T.E.S.) warned last year that rhino poaching had reached an all-time high. The CITES conference in Geneva in July 2009 heard that Asia’s economic expansion had fueled the market in rhino horns. The horns are also used in the Middle East to make handles for ornamental daggers. Cites said demand for them had begun to soar in recent years. In the five years up to 2005, an average of only 36 rhinos had been killed each year.”


Whatever makes you passionate or pissed, take some action. Today.
 

The Hunters
It goes something like this…The hunter is fumbling with the dosage of tranquilizer he is trying to load into a dart, but need to be cautious.
Tranquilizer is expensive, but soon he will have plenty of money, and better too much of the drug than too little.
Waking up is not part of the plan, so there is no such thing as an overdose…or if there is such a thing, it’s just not a worry of yours.
More toublesome is getting this loaded and into the high powered rifle, in the dark with only your headlamp..
and the helicopter banking, throwing you off balance. It is a short helicopter ride–to where the animals were seen grazing this afternoon, just a few trees around and lots of shrub, but it is July, high winter, so most of the the grass has died and there are wide open plains abound
Besides, the elephants have taken down so many of the tall trees it makes tracking much easier

The spotters take only a few seconds more to find her now, almost exactly where she was. Her calf is only a couple of yards away from her side, and both are spooked now from the rotor blades in your 'copter.
They try to run a bit, but of course their lumbering gate is like slow motion, and the baby can only go a few steps at a time.
He takes aim, and it is like shooting fish in a barrel. The dart lands clean in her side, just below the shoulder
it’s a good shot, so the pilot pulls back a bit and finds a spot to land a few hundred feet away.
By the time the copter is down, so is the rhino. It takes less than seven minutes for her to fall into unconsciousness.
It is not graceful. She stumbles against the lethal dose of drugs  pumped into her, struggling to try and protect her calf...
She is a beauty.

The Buyer
The horn will fetch a great price sold to those who supply the demand for Chinese medicine–rhinoceros horn is in incredible demand for impotent men. You thought Viagra was going to gut the market, but no, rhino horn still pays handsomely.

The last female white rhino in a South African park was slaughtered by poachers last week, for her horn. Her horn was cut from her face by a chainsaw and she was left to bleed to death.
Her orphaned baby was found the next day and transferred to a nearby estate where it joined two other orphaned rhino calves.
It is only mid-July and more than 200 endangered rhinos have been killed this year by poachers
They were killed for their horns
Horns that Chinese men (and other consumers of Chinese medicine) think will help them with a lack of virility.

This last rhino cow was nine years old and a new mother.



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