Africa & Middle East > Kenya > Nairobi > Nairobi > Articles > Saving the Rhino

‘Even as the rhino charged I knew that I should be climbing a tree. But the wispy acacia trees around me were all too insubstantial to take my weight and there was no escape.

Luckily, as rhino charges go, this was also a fairly insubstantial one so I just covered up my particularly fragile areas (my camera) and took the blunt edge of the horn as a jarring knock to my left knee.

Shida is what you might call a ‘problem child.’ He is a fifteen month-old black rhino calf - and a quarter-ton of blustering adolescent bravado. Even his name means ‘Problem’ in Swahili. Shida’s kind have been having problems throughout Africa for centuries but his personal woes started when he was two months old and his mother collapsed. He passed what must have been a terrifying night protecting his dying mother from a pack of hyenas until, in the morning, a Nairobi National Park ranger patrol found them.

Although he might not have realised it, Shida was in fact immensely lucky. He was abandoned just a few miles from the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Africa’s most famous wildlife orphanage. Dr. Daphne Sheldrick M.B.E. has dedicated the last few decades to raising orphaned rhino, elephant, zebra and buffalo in the name of her late husband David Sheldrick (founder warden of the great Tsavo East National Park).

Nairobi NP’s now healthy buffalo population stems entirely from Mrs Sheldrick’s calves and, to date, her organisation has saved sixty elephants and fourteen black rhinos. It has at times been a heart-breaking battle against malnourishment, wounds (from spear-attacks), pneumonia (surprisingly common in elephants) and what can only be described as fatally broken hearts.

“Young elephants are often so traumatised that they simply give up the will to live,” the seventy year-old conservationist explained when I met her at the Sheldrick Trust’s head-quarters in Nairobi NP. “Rhinos are slightly more robust, however, and Shida’s actually the least of our problems at the moment. He’s never had a day’s ill-health since he arrived and has always been very secure in his new surroundings…though it might just be that after hand-rearing thirteen of these wonderful animals we have finally managed to get everything just right.”

Since black rhinos are essentially solitary animals they tend to suffer less from the traumatic shock that racks a young elephant after it is lost from its herd, but the key to a young rhino’s well-being also lies in successfully replacing their old family with a new ‘human family.’ Shida is escorted round-the-clock by keepers whose job it is to care for and protect him. Stephen Kiarie Mioru was acting as Shida’s ‘mother’ on the day I went to meet him in a dense and spiky acacia copse on the edge of the park. Stephen was wearing the special coat that had been impregnated with a scent that Shida associated with his mother and the diminutive rhino was happily using his distinctive hooked lip to pluck the succulent young leaves. Apart from the stubby horn that gave him away as a juvenile he was a perfect miniature of his kind. He allowed me a couple of minutes to photograph him before he decided to show me that even at this size it was him who called the shots.

As I made a hobbling retreat back out of the copse Stephen apologised. “He’s a little bit feisty lately,” he said. “There’s a big male rhino who occupies this area and Shida’s becoming aware that one day he’ll have to fight for a territory so he needs to practise his charge. There’ve been days when we had to come to work in cricket pads!” I wondered if complimentary reports on Shida’s progress - since the last unsuspecting victim was sent in here - would make it back to Mrs Sheldrick in the office.

Nairobi National Park is too small to support a healthy elephant population so the elephant orphans will eventually be released into wild herds in the massive Tsavo NP, in Kenya’s arid eastern region. Black rhinos do well in Nairobi, however, and Shida is correct in thinking that one day he might have to do battle with a local bull for a territory and breeding rights among the local wild population.

That bull might even be Makosa, Daphne Sheldrick’s previous rhino success story. At five years old, Makosa is now almost two tonnes of solid, armour-plated muscle, fronted with a metre of impressively sweeping horn. The horn that has evolved as a very effective defence mechanism in the rhino’s natural habitat has more recently become the animals betrayer, though the quirk of some bizarre human superstitions on the other side of the world. Despite the fact that it is made from simple keratin (the same material as human fingernails), rhino horn has been accredited with all sorts of mysterious powers: a rhino horn cup can supposedly detect the presence of poison in a drink; rhino horn daggers can make their owner invincible; and crushed rhino horn is said to cure everything from fevers and rheumatism to a waning sex drive. Far from being outmoded, these myths have been revived by Chinese nouveaux riches who now see rhino horn and tiger bone as a status symbol, and oil-rich Yemeni men who are finally able to afford the daggers that were once the property only of the elite.

Kenya is the leading light in the struggle to save the black rhino and the entire wild population has now been gathered in supposedly secure sanctuaries under tight surveillance. Yet, even here, thirty-three black rhinos were killed by poachers last year and there are fears that rhino-horn could even have become an important source of funding for al Qaeda operatives.

The black rhino’s problems are far from over and Daphne Sheldrick believes that the future for Shida’s generation might be very black indeed unless they can be supplied with an abundance of what she calls “the three Ps: PROTECTION, PRIVACY and PEACE.”

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