article_snippet.sent: That’s what you feel when you meet a rhino in the wild.
article_snippet.sent: In 2007, 13 rhinos were poached and killed in South Africa.
article_snippet.sent: Last year in South Africa 1,215 rhinos were poached and killed.
article_snippet.sent: But as the South African poaching figures show, the market has jumped from steady but borderline sustainable to completely crazy, which has put rhinos on the fast-track to extinction.
article_snippet.sent: There are also many good projects for rhino conservation in Africa and across the world.
article_snippet.sent: The Luangwa Valley in Zambia once held 4,000 black rhinos: 4,000 black rhinos were poached out over 20 years and declared extinct in Zambia in 1998.
article_snippet.sent: Five years later, a project to release captive-bred black rhinos began: there are now 34 roaming free in The Luangwa Valley in Zambia.
article_snippet.sent: But there’s plenty of room left for rhinos in Africa.
article_snippet.sent: rhinos in Africa should be easy, yet rhinos in Africa’re going extinct not because of overcrowding but from human folly.
article_snippet.sent: And yet you can go out into the wild areas of the world, especially in Africa, and still get close to these vast beasts.
article_snippet.sent: I once spent a day in Zimbabwe tracking a big male black rhino on foot and when at last we found him it seemed this might have been a mistake.