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Killed at scale for a horn made of the same protein as a fingernail.
The horn is keratin. It has no pharmacological property that a hoof or a fingernail does not, and the entire poaching economy rests on that misunderstanding — at prices per kilogram that have at times exceeded gold. The response in several reserves is dehorning: sedate the animal, cut above the growth plate, and remove the reason to shoot it. It is a bleak intervention and it measurably works.
Numbers fell from around seventy thousand in 1970 to fewer than two and a half thousand by the mid-1990s. Protection has roughly doubled that since, which is a recovery and also a reminder of the scale of what was lost. Unlike the white rhino's wide grazing mouth, the black rhino's hooked upper lip is a browsing tool, stripping woody shoots from thorn.
The open shelf
More frames of the black rhino
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