Rhinos are back in the news, for the usual bad reasons. Poaching has gone crazy again and the worry is that at the current rate, in a few years’ time, more animals will be killed than are born. And there can be only one outcome if that continues. It’s a desperate situation.

The horns are highly prized for ornamental status symbols or are powdered for oriental medicines. Bizarre, seeing as horn is made of keratin, which is essentially toenails. I wonder what the herbalists would think if I offered them my clippings.

The black rhinoceros is critically endangered and white rhinos are near threatened.

In the field, rhinos have crap eyesight, so it’s possible to get quite close to them on foot, which is what we did on this trip to Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe. This white rhino was aware of our presence, but didn’t get spooked. I was slightly concerned about my guide’s insistence that I should climb a tree if the animal got agitated and charged. There weren’t any trees! I needn’t have worried though, and the colossal animal continued placidly munching and lumbered on with its business without any fuss.

Seeing a rhino in the wild is an increasingly rare experience. On my last trip to the Masai Mara, I didn’t see a single wild rhino. I’ve compensated for this somewhat in my 2015 Mara safari by adding in a visit to the rhino sanctuary, just in case. It seems incredible that even with armed guards watching over them, these iconic animals are still being slaughtered for their horns. The scale of the problem is frightening and those that watch over rhinos simply can’t keep up with the poachers.

I have my fingers crossed for the survival of these magnificent creatures, which are reminiscent more of dinosaurs than modern day animals. But I suspect crossing everything I have won’t be enough. All I can do is hope that my small contribution in getting the conservation message out there with my images and writing will help.

Here’s a video that’s targeted at China and Vietnam about not buying rhino horn. You may be ambivalent about the celebrity nature of the video, but it’s this sort of thing that raises awareness:

White rhino – Matopos, Zimbabwe. ‘White’ is actually a corruption of ‘wijd’, meaning ‘wide’ in Dutch (of which Afrikaans is a major influence). It doesn’t refer to the colour (black rhinos are much the same) but to the width of the mouth. Black rhinos have a more pointed mouth, which they use for browsing twigs and leaves, whereas the wide mouth of a white rhino mows the grass. Probably overkill for the lawn though

 

If you can, please share this on social media so that global awareness can eventually drive enough action to save threatened species. Thanks.

I put this question up on a photography forum today to hopefully engender some interesting debate. I’ve posed a difficult question out of a certain amount of desperation at the plight of the hen harrier and – I’ll wager – not a question that many people want to engage with properly because it’s neither black nor white.

The moderator deleted, as was his prerogative, because it didn’t appear to be about photography. A couple of people had complained that it should be removed in case it caused an argument. The moderator may have had a point that it was a photography forum and not a nature forum, but to me, the hen harrier debate is not just about conservation, it’s also about creating beautiful images of this magnificent bird. None of us can do that if it’s extinct in England. To me, it’s implicit in what I do that I have a naturalist’s interest (and often a conservation interest) in the wildlife I photograph and perhaps that didn’t come across in the post.

However, I think the question is still worth posing and there’s a poll at the bottom of this page if you’d like to give me your opinion either way. So here it is. Let me know what you think.

“Here’s a rather heretical question: I’m very keen for the hen harrier to be brought back to England after a shocking decimation in numbers following decades of persecution. However, what gives us the right to spend a large amount of money and time trying to bring back a bird that is only a problem for the UK?

For example, France is awash with hen harriers. In fact that’s the only place I’ve ever seen one. The red kite lobby successfully argued to land-owners that those birds are not really a problem for their grouse stocks. The best we can hope to ask shooting estates to do about hen harriers is to put out diversionary feeding. They’re simply not going to budge from such an entrenched way of life that earns large amounts of money – and they’ll argue creates job yadda, yadda.

Are we banging our collective head against a brick wall? And if so, what actually makes it worth the huge conservation effort, and equally huge sums of money necessary to achieve…well…achieve what?

Sorry if that sounds negative, but after having covered the success of the red kite project locally for years, the RSPB agreed to commission me for an idea I’d had about covering “the success story of the return of England’s hen harriers”. That was years ago and I haven’t set eyes on a single bird in England since.

What d’you think? Have I just turned into an old cynic?”

Now then, these are my views and you may disagree strongly with them. That’s absolutely fine! Just let’s have a civil conversation about it

A change in Environment Secretary from Owen Patterson to Liz Truss hasn’t slowed the momentum behind the badger cull, which resumed again last night.

Scientific advice has been consistently against the effectiveness of shooting badgers to control bovine TB. Natural England’s chief scientific adviser (whom you might expect to know a thing or two about the subject) described last year’s first wave of culls as an ‘epic failure’. Truss has obviously felt some of the heat from the anti-cull lobby though and is now trying to reassure us that they have taken on board all recommendations about the lack of humane killing in last year’s trial. There will also be analysis of cattle movements and what appears to be a certain amount of fiddling around the edges with vaccination.

It remains a significant question as to whether the marksmen can deliver the required 70% kills in order for the trial to be effective. Indeed shooting too few badgers can exacerbate the problem of TB.

I personally am completely against the cull. Not because of some cute & cuddly notion or a squeamishness about culling in and of itself. Indeed I can completely understand why deer are culled on the basis that we’ve wiped out all possible predators that would keep their numbers in natural balance.

No, I’m against the badger cull because it seems senseless to kill our badgers when it has been proven that this doesn’t work, the scientific evidence argues it could make the situation worse and that only 6% of bovine TB is transmitted from badgers to cattle in the first place.

Think of it the other way around: 94% of TB cases in cattle have nothing to do with badgers. Shouldn’t this be telling us something?

I understand the National Farmers’ Union’s angst about their cattle. It’s devastating when livestock has to be slaughtered and can bring financial ruin to a previously healthy farm.

However, it seems like the government continues to cling to the cull as the panacea for placating desperate farmers in the hope that the problem will just go away. I will be incredibly surprised if this tactic works.

Meanwhile, if you have black and white fur and live underground, try to avoid catching Death By Politics from men with guns.

‘We could be wiping out half the population of badgers in the UK for absolutely no reason at all’ – Mark Carwardine.

The government has seen fit to plough ahead with badger culls to try to solve the bovine TB problem in cattle. This is misguided and ignores the government’s own scientific review conclusions.

‘The scientist whose research is being cited by the government to justify its plan to cull badgers in England has described the scheme as “crazy”.’

Let me be clear however that I do undertand that there is a massive and costly problem with bovine TB and yes, badgers do transmit it to cattle. Shooting badgers is not the solution though. £49m of tax-payers’ money over 40 years has been spent to scientifically research whether culling badgers will eradicate bovine TB. The conclusion of the 150 scientific papers? Culling would actually make the bovine TB situation worse.

Culling badgers risks wiping them out completely in a region. If they’re not wiped out, what’s the point of leaving one badger with TB? It’ll just reinfect the cattle. Even if they do get wiped out, or numbers are reduced significantly, badgers are territorial and the neighbouring badgers will move in to fill the vacuum. To put it bluntly, unless we make badgers extinct in the UK, what on earth is the point of culling them? There will always be bovine TB in the badger population. Do we want to make badgers extinct in the UK?

‘The plan showed that the spread of the disease could be slowed slightly if more than 70% of badgers in an area could be eradicated. If it was less than 70% – the spread of TB to cattle might even increase.’

So that’s useful then. They won’t even know what proportion of badgers have been culled because there isn’t a reliable way of working out how many there are in the first place.

 

What’s the answer then?

Vaccination.

Wales has gone down this route. Opponents of vaccination argue that it’s too expensive. I can understand this, but then just think what the economic fall-out already is with bovine TB. Yes, vaccination of badgers and cattle will cost a lot, but it has to be set against the current cattle losses. At least it’s effective, when culling is not.

The following video explains the facts, with Sir David Attenborough, Simon King, Mark Carwardine and George Monbiot.

What can you do? Please sign the ePetition to stop the cull. And share this blog post and the ePetition link.

Thanks,
Kaleel