I have recently self-published an e-book, which I am selling to raise money for a rhino conservation charity. I’ve written today’s blog to explain why I am doing this. The book is called On The Verge, and you can see it here.
The realisation that I had become obsessed with the family Rhinocerotidae struck me one morning 23 years ago, while I was sprinting across Clapham Common. Obsession was the only explanation for my recent crazy behaviour. I lived in Edinburgh at the time, and I’d been out of work for most of the previous two years, living in a squalor in an unheated flat above a Chinese grocery store in the Bruntsfield district of town, yet two days previously I had parted with a whole week’s dole money in exchange for a ticket on the overnight coach service to London. I had endured a sleepless nine-hour journey sitting upright in a non-reclining seat, and now I was bursting my lungs in an effort to get to a meeting with a man I’d never met in a flat in Clapham. It didn’t help at all that the evening before I’d got rip-roaring drunk with a London-dwelling friend on whose floor I was presently sleeping - I was suffering an excruciating hangover and was also late for my appointment.
So what has this got to do with rhinos? Well…in 1989 I had spent most of the year back-packing my way around the world, and in the course of my peregrinations I’d developed a fascination for all the bewitching varieties of life that share our world with us. Returning to the UK, I settled in Edinburgh and signed up for one of the Thatcher-era Employment Training Schemes, learning countryside management skills with the Scottish Wildlife Trust as well as travelling all over Scotland doing voluntary work. I had an ambition to get myself a job on a nature reserve as a warden or ranger, an ambition that I never fully achieved.
While I was scanning the job vacancy pages in the New Scientist one day, I had spotted a small advertisement from a man who was planning an expedition to Borneo to look for a population of Sumatran Rhinos that was rumoured to be in a remote forest region. He wanted six people to go as team members. The more I thought about this, the more exciting it sounded. I could think of no good reason why I shouldn’t be eligible so I phoned the man and tried to sound as enthusiastic as I could. He told me he’d consider me if I sent my CV and came to London for an interview, at my own expense.
To be honest, I knew next to nothing about Rhinos at that time, but I’d had a taste of exploring tropical rainforests in Thailand and Australia and I was raring to escape from Britain once more and walk in the world’s great wildernesses. So I cycled down to the Scottish National Library and filled up a sports bag with all the books the lending section had to offer on rhinos. This was well before the days of the Internet - becoming an instant expert on any subject still required a journey to a library and a strong back to carry many kilos of books home.
What I learnt was shocking. The rhinoceros family first appeared on earth in the late Eocene, somewhere around 35 million years ago, which is about 34 million years before the first Homo Sapiens walked the plains of Africa. Rhino species’ have roamed across most of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America in the past, and even Britain used to have woolly rhinoceros’ until the last ice-age, a mere 10,000 years ago. This species, like its cousins in North America, fell victim to the spears of Stone Age human hunters, and the world is left with only five rhino species today: White Rhinoceros, Black Rhinoceros, Indian Rhinoceros, Javan Rhinoceros,
and the one that I was hoping to go to Borneo seeking out, the Sumatran Rhinoceros.
This latter species has two claims to fame: it is the oldest, having evolved 15 million years ago; and the smallest, standing only four foot high at the shoulder. Back in 1990 there were an estimated 500 individuals remaining in the world; today there are reckoned to be less than 200 left alive, scattered across a few isolated pockets of forest in Sumatra and Borneo.
The other four species, I learnt, had fared not much better. In the 1980s there had been an upsurge in rhino poaching, and the world population of the five species had plummeted. The driving force behind their impending extinctions was the illegal international trade for rhino horn, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine. Powdered rhino horn has for centuries been prescribed as a cure for fever by traditional practitioners, although the truth is that it is only keratin, the same protein that our hair and fingernails are made from, and it has no medicinal value whatsoever. But truth, you may have noticed, has little force when it is pitted against ingrained belief, and as the wealth of the Far East has increased over the past few decades, so has the demand for this bogus medicine.
A pitiless law of economics states that as a commodity becomes rarer, its market price will increase. Tragically, this means that as an animal approaches extinction, products derived from its body parts will become exponentially expensive, ensuring that some criminal gangs will go to any extremes to kill the last remaining animals. Rhino horn now costs more per gramme than gold on the black market. Note my careful choice of words there: rhino horn costs a fortune but its value is absolutely nothing, unless you are a rhino yourself and it is attached to you.
At the time, in 1990, many of the commentators I’d read had been sceptical whether any of the rhino species would even survive for 20 years. That we still have some rhinos living wild and free today is due entirely to the heroic efforts of conservationists to protect them. For the first few years of this millennium, numbers of rhinos in the world were actually increasing, but recently there has been a massive surge in poaching.
Much of the demand for the horn now comes from Vietnam, where there is an unfounded rumour that it can cure cancer. In South Africa alone, over 400 rhinos have been killed by poachers this year already. Organized crime syndicates in South Africa have started using helicopters to target animals in the wildlife reserves, and with rhinos ranging over huge and remote areas, it is very hard for under-funded rangers to keep an eye on them all.
But I’m getting diverted from my story...let’s go back to Clapham Common in 1990. I finally made it to my interview half an hour late, out of breath and hung-over. Having travelled at my own expense the length of Britain, I’d been hoping that my obvious enthusiasm would have clinched me a place on the expedition, not to mention my experience of hiking in a rainforest reserve for a week in Thailand…but no! I was disappointed to discover the organizer was interviewing about 200 people, and that he was most interested in candidates who could do things like operate radios, fix jeeps and fly aeroplanes.
I never lost my zeal for saving the rhino though. Some years later, after I’d met my partner Robbie, we both signed up for a WWF rhino sponsorship programme we’d seen in a newspaper ad. We paid the WWF a small amount of money each month, although we were both close to broke at the time and it felt like a substantial contribution. In return, we were told we had adopted a Northern White Rhinoceros in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This sub-species of White Rhino was critically endangered, but the WWF was supporting a conservation project in Garamba where a population of about a dozen rhinos still survived. “Our” rhino was an old bull that they called “Notch”, because he was identifiable by a notch in his horn.
Every quarter we would get a newsletter about the project detailing what animals had been breeding, and it would tell us if there had been any sightings of Notch. I got to feel quite attached to all the rhinos in Garamba, because the rangers had given the adults names and recognised them as individuals on the rare occasions when they were sighted in the towering grasslands of the park. After about three years of this we had a letter from the WWF. They told us that rebel forces in the DRC’s interminable civil war were heading towards Garamba, and that they had decided to withdraw all their staff for safety. They asked us if they could redirect our funding to another rhino project in Africa.
We were quite annoyed by this, and wrote back saying “No! Stay and protect the rhinos in Garamba, that’s what we pay you for!” But they didn’t. Several years later, when the war had moved on, I heard the news that no rhinos could be found anymore in Garamba Park, all presumed to have been poached by rebel fighters. The Northern White Rhino is now believed to be extinct in the wild, with only a handful of difficult-to-breed animals still alive in zoos around the world.
It has taken me a long time to be privileged to see an actual rhino in the wild. Robbie and myself visited South Africa in 2002 and also India in 2007, seeing many incredible animals and birds in both countries, but no rhinos. In 2012 we went to Vietnam and passed four glorious days birding in the Cat Tien National Park. This is southern Vietnam’s best remaining forest where most guidebooks still list Javan Rhino as one of the animals that live there, the only place on mainland Asia where a population remains. The joy of our holiday was somewhat clouded by the knowledge that the last Javan Rhino in Cat Tien had been found slaughtered and de-horned a couple of years before our visit.
But this year we struck lucky. We spent three weeks in South Africa in February, and had the fantastic good fortune to come across several Southern White Rhinos in that country’s fabulous National Parks. The first we saw was in Pilanesberg National Park, northwest of Johannesburg, placidly grazing the shore about a mile away across a reservoir. I almost wet myself. The next day driving through the park, we came across a mother with a calf right by the roadside. We also had stunning encounters with these gargantuan herbivores in Hluhluwe National Park in Kwazulu Natal. Close-up, a rhino looks awe-inspiring but also terribly vulnerable. It’s not surprising they are poached so easily - you could hardly miss one with a rifle.
Coming home on the plane from South Africa, I decided I would try to do something, however small, to help in the world-wide battle against rhino poaching. I remembered a book I had written quite a few years ago - a rather over-ambitious allegorical collection of poems that touched on rhino extinction, amongst other things. The book had many problems due to my inexperience as a writer and lack of fore-planning, and I had abandoned it before starting on my book “Gringo on the Chickenbus”. But I decided to resurrect it and try to sell it as an e-book, donating all the profits to a rhino conservation project.
So I spent a feverish three months re-organising the book to look more like a proper story, and sent myself half-crazy learning how to format it on Smashwords.com. It’s called “On The Verge” and you can now buy it here. It should be readable on any computer, smart phone, e-reader or tablet, and it costs less than £2. I decided to donate all my profits to Black Rhino conservation projects that Chester Zoo supports in Kenya and Tanzania. I hope that all readers of this blog will choose to make this small contribution towards preserving such a magnificent creature. I’ve been told it’s a great book too...
The realisation that I had become obsessed with the family Rhinocerotidae struck me one morning 23 years ago, while I was sprinting across Clapham Common. Obsession was the only explanation for my recent crazy behaviour. I lived in Edinburgh at the time, and I’d been out of work for most of the previous two years, living in a squalor in an unheated flat above a Chinese grocery store in the Bruntsfield district of town, yet two days previously I had parted with a whole week’s dole money in exchange for a ticket on the overnight coach service to London. I had endured a sleepless nine-hour journey sitting upright in a non-reclining seat, and now I was bursting my lungs in an effort to get to a meeting with a man I’d never met in a flat in Clapham. It didn’t help at all that the evening before I’d got rip-roaring drunk with a London-dwelling friend on whose floor I was presently sleeping - I was suffering an excruciating hangover and was also late for my appointment.
So what has this got to do with rhinos? Well…in 1989 I had spent most of the year back-packing my way around the world, and in the course of my peregrinations I’d developed a fascination for all the bewitching varieties of life that share our world with us. Returning to the UK, I settled in Edinburgh and signed up for one of the Thatcher-era Employment Training Schemes, learning countryside management skills with the Scottish Wildlife Trust as well as travelling all over Scotland doing voluntary work. I had an ambition to get myself a job on a nature reserve as a warden or ranger, an ambition that I never fully achieved.
While I was scanning the job vacancy pages in the New Scientist one day, I had spotted a small advertisement from a man who was planning an expedition to Borneo to look for a population of Sumatran Rhinos that was rumoured to be in a remote forest region. He wanted six people to go as team members. The more I thought about this, the more exciting it sounded. I could think of no good reason why I shouldn’t be eligible so I phoned the man and tried to sound as enthusiastic as I could. He told me he’d consider me if I sent my CV and came to London for an interview, at my own expense.
To be honest, I knew next to nothing about Rhinos at that time, but I’d had a taste of exploring tropical rainforests in Thailand and Australia and I was raring to escape from Britain once more and walk in the world’s great wildernesses. So I cycled down to the Scottish National Library and filled up a sports bag with all the books the lending section had to offer on rhinos. This was well before the days of the Internet - becoming an instant expert on any subject still required a journey to a library and a strong back to carry many kilos of books home.
What I learnt was shocking. The rhinoceros family first appeared on earth in the late Eocene, somewhere around 35 million years ago, which is about 34 million years before the first Homo Sapiens walked the plains of Africa. Rhino species’ have roamed across most of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America in the past, and even Britain used to have woolly rhinoceros’ until the last ice-age, a mere 10,000 years ago. This species, like its cousins in North America, fell victim to the spears of Stone Age human hunters, and the world is left with only five rhino species today: White Rhinoceros, Black Rhinoceros, Indian Rhinoceros, Javan Rhinoceros,
and the one that I was hoping to go to Borneo seeking out, the Sumatran Rhinoceros.
This latter species has two claims to fame: it is the oldest, having evolved 15 million years ago; and the smallest, standing only four foot high at the shoulder. Back in 1990 there were an estimated 500 individuals remaining in the world; today there are reckoned to be less than 200 left alive, scattered across a few isolated pockets of forest in Sumatra and Borneo.
The other four species, I learnt, had fared not much better. In the 1980s there had been an upsurge in rhino poaching, and the world population of the five species had plummeted. The driving force behind their impending extinctions was the illegal international trade for rhino horn, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine. Powdered rhino horn has for centuries been prescribed as a cure for fever by traditional practitioners, although the truth is that it is only keratin, the same protein that our hair and fingernails are made from, and it has no medicinal value whatsoever. But truth, you may have noticed, has little force when it is pitted against ingrained belief, and as the wealth of the Far East has increased over the past few decades, so has the demand for this bogus medicine.
A pitiless law of economics states that as a commodity becomes rarer, its market price will increase. Tragically, this means that as an animal approaches extinction, products derived from its body parts will become exponentially expensive, ensuring that some criminal gangs will go to any extremes to kill the last remaining animals. Rhino horn now costs more per gramme than gold on the black market. Note my careful choice of words there: rhino horn costs a fortune but its value is absolutely nothing, unless you are a rhino yourself and it is attached to you.
At the time, in 1990, many of the commentators I’d read had been sceptical whether any of the rhino species would even survive for 20 years. That we still have some rhinos living wild and free today is due entirely to the heroic efforts of conservationists to protect them. For the first few years of this millennium, numbers of rhinos in the world were actually increasing, but recently there has been a massive surge in poaching.
Much of the demand for the horn now comes from Vietnam, where there is an unfounded rumour that it can cure cancer. In South Africa alone, over 400 rhinos have been killed by poachers this year already. Organized crime syndicates in South Africa have started using helicopters to target animals in the wildlife reserves, and with rhinos ranging over huge and remote areas, it is very hard for under-funded rangers to keep an eye on them all.
But I’m getting diverted from my story...let’s go back to Clapham Common in 1990. I finally made it to my interview half an hour late, out of breath and hung-over. Having travelled at my own expense the length of Britain, I’d been hoping that my obvious enthusiasm would have clinched me a place on the expedition, not to mention my experience of hiking in a rainforest reserve for a week in Thailand…but no! I was disappointed to discover the organizer was interviewing about 200 people, and that he was most interested in candidates who could do things like operate radios, fix jeeps and fly aeroplanes.
I never lost my zeal for saving the rhino though. Some years later, after I’d met my partner Robbie, we both signed up for a WWF rhino sponsorship programme we’d seen in a newspaper ad. We paid the WWF a small amount of money each month, although we were both close to broke at the time and it felt like a substantial contribution. In return, we were told we had adopted a Northern White Rhinoceros in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This sub-species of White Rhino was critically endangered, but the WWF was supporting a conservation project in Garamba where a population of about a dozen rhinos still survived. “Our” rhino was an old bull that they called “Notch”, because he was identifiable by a notch in his horn.
Every quarter we would get a newsletter about the project detailing what animals had been breeding, and it would tell us if there had been any sightings of Notch. I got to feel quite attached to all the rhinos in Garamba, because the rangers had given the adults names and recognised them as individuals on the rare occasions when they were sighted in the towering grasslands of the park. After about three years of this we had a letter from the WWF. They told us that rebel forces in the DRC’s interminable civil war were heading towards Garamba, and that they had decided to withdraw all their staff for safety. They asked us if they could redirect our funding to another rhino project in Africa.
We were quite annoyed by this, and wrote back saying “No! Stay and protect the rhinos in Garamba, that’s what we pay you for!” But they didn’t. Several years later, when the war had moved on, I heard the news that no rhinos could be found anymore in Garamba Park, all presumed to have been poached by rebel fighters. The Northern White Rhino is now believed to be extinct in the wild, with only a handful of difficult-to-breed animals still alive in zoos around the world.
It has taken me a long time to be privileged to see an actual rhino in the wild. Robbie and myself visited South Africa in 2002 and also India in 2007, seeing many incredible animals and birds in both countries, but no rhinos. In 2012 we went to Vietnam and passed four glorious days birding in the Cat Tien National Park. This is southern Vietnam’s best remaining forest where most guidebooks still list Javan Rhino as one of the animals that live there, the only place on mainland Asia where a population remains. The joy of our holiday was somewhat clouded by the knowledge that the last Javan Rhino in Cat Tien had been found slaughtered and de-horned a couple of years before our visit.
But this year we struck lucky. We spent three weeks in South Africa in February, and had the fantastic good fortune to come across several Southern White Rhinos in that country’s fabulous National Parks. The first we saw was in Pilanesberg National Park, northwest of Johannesburg, placidly grazing the shore about a mile away across a reservoir. I almost wet myself. The next day driving through the park, we came across a mother with a calf right by the roadside. We also had stunning encounters with these gargantuan herbivores in Hluhluwe National Park in Kwazulu Natal. Close-up, a rhino looks awe-inspiring but also terribly vulnerable. It’s not surprising they are poached so easily - you could hardly miss one with a rifle.
Coming home on the plane from South Africa, I decided I would try to do something, however small, to help in the world-wide battle against rhino poaching. I remembered a book I had written quite a few years ago - a rather over-ambitious allegorical collection of poems that touched on rhino extinction, amongst other things. The book had many problems due to my inexperience as a writer and lack of fore-planning, and I had abandoned it before starting on my book “Gringo on the Chickenbus”. But I decided to resurrect it and try to sell it as an e-book, donating all the profits to a rhino conservation project.
So I spent a feverish three months re-organising the book to look more like a proper story, and sent myself half-crazy learning how to format it on Smashwords.com. It’s called “On The Verge” and you can now buy it here. It should be readable on any computer, smart phone, e-reader or tablet, and it costs less than £2. I decided to donate all my profits to Black Rhino conservation projects that Chester Zoo supports in Kenya and Tanzania. I hope that all readers of this blog will choose to make this small contribution towards preserving such a magnificent creature. I’ve been told it’s a great book too...