Last Chance to See

taking part in military maneuvers in which we were giving air cover to some monstrous cavalry hurtling across the plain.
    Shouting above the noise in the cockpit, we asked Charles if it didn’t worry the rhino having us flying so close to them.
    “Not half as much as it worries you,” he said. “No, it doesn’t bother them at all really. A rhino isn’t scared of anything very much and is only really interested in what things smell like. We fly down low over them pretty regularly to get a good look at them, identify them, see what they’re up to, check that they’re healthy, and so on. We know themall pretty well, and we’d know if they were upset about anything.”
    I was struck again by something that was becoming a truism on these travels, that seeing animals such as these in a zoo was absolutely no preparation for seeing them in the wild—great beasts moving through seemingly limitless space, utterly the masters of their own world.
    Or almost the masters. The next rhino we found, a mile or so farther on, was engaged in a standoff with a hyena. The hyena was circling warily around the rhino while the rhino peered at it myopically over its lowered horns. A rhino’s eyesight is not particularly acute, and if it wants to get a good look at something, it will tend to look at it first with one eye and then with the other—its eyes are on either side of its skull and it can’t see straight ahead. Charles pointed out as we flew over that this rhino had had problems with hyenas before: half of its tail was missing.
    By now I was beginning to feel seriously airsick and we started to head back. The purpose of the trip was just to find out where the rhinos were, and out of a total wild population of twenty-two rhinos, we had seen altogether eight. Tomorrow we would set out overland to see if we could get close to one on ground level.
    One of the things that people who don’t know anything 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. People 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. If 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. This, 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. It’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. A 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 the Chinese do believe rhino horn to be an aphrodisiac. The 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. It is now known that there are a couple of people in Northern India who use it, but they do it only to annoy.)
    Some horn is used