This year already looks certain to beat that dreadful record. Last year 1,215 rhinos were slaughtered for their horns in South Africa. From 2007, when just 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa, the killings have grown horrifically. But the demand in Asian countries such as Vietnam for rhino horn as a traditional medicine believed to cure everything from flu to cancer is fuelling a boom in poaching. There are far greater numbers of southern white rhinos and black rhinos. The northern white rhino is the rarest species of African rhino. Today, immense love is invested in rhinos, yet they are being slaughtered in ever greater numbers. As climate turned against the woolly megafauna with the end of the last ice age, human spears probably delivered the coup de grace. But the same people who painted such sensitive portraits of ice age rhinos helped to kill them off. A woolly rhino in Chauvet cave seems agile and young, a creature full of life. These ancient relatives of Sudan share his heroic bulk, mighty power and paradoxical air of gentleness. There are beautiful pictures of European woolly rhinos in caves in France, that were painted up to 30,000 years ago. Human beings – we always kill the things we love. In 1515 a live Indian rhinoceros was sent by the ruler of Gujarat to the king of Portugal: he in turn sent it to the Pope, but on the way it died in a shipwreck. Dürer was a Renaissance artist picturing an exotic beast from the exotic lands that Europe was starting to see more and more of. They have the same little legs stuck out of a majestic body and they even lower their heads in the same contemplative way. For Sudan does not look so different from the rhinoceros that Albrecht Dürer portrayed in 1515. The way his foreleg emerges from his thick coat of skin reminds us how long human beings have been wondering at the natural spectacle that is the rhino. Under his immense looming shoulder, his legs protrude like squat columns from the tough tank of his body. Today, immense love is invested in rhinos, yet they are being slaughtered in ever greater numbers This is the noble head of an old warrior, his armour battered, his appetite for struggle fading. It is lowered melancholically beneath the sinister sky, as if weighed down by fate. How terrible that such a mighty head can in reality be so vulnerable. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone and leathery flesh, a head that expresses pure strength. His eye is a sad black dot in his massive wrinkled face as he wanders the reserve with his guards. Even at this last desperate stage in the fate of the northern white rhino, Sudan is under threat from poachers who kill rhinos and hack off their horns to sell them on the Asian medicine market – despite the fact that he has had his horn cut off to deter them. But of course it is an image of brutality. It seems an image of human tenderness that Sudan is lovingly guarded by armed men who stand vigilantly and caringly with him. Apart from these three animals there are only two other northern white rhinos in the world, both in zoos, both female. And it seems a slim chance, as Sudan is getting old at 42 and breeding efforts have so far failed. If he does not mate successfully soon with one of two female northern white rhinos at Ol Pejeta conservancy, there will be no more of their kind, male or female, born anywhere. Sudan is the last male northern white rhino on the planet. W hat is it like to look at the very last of something? To contemplate the passing of a unique wonder that will soon vanish from the face of the earth? You are seeing it.
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