Word: rhino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tusks go to collection points, and from there are carried across the continent, hidden in gas tankers and cargo trucks, personal luggage and shipping crates. The rewards far outweigh the risks. The owner of a truck carrying $2 million worth of illicit tusks and rhino horns was fined a mere $2,613 by Botswa officials last year. His cargo was said to be bound for a South African firm with Hong Kong connections. Despite crackdowns, the poachers are undaunted. Just two weeks ago, in a predawn raid on a farm, Namibian officials seized 980 tusks...
That was back in 1960, and it seemed then that the world would never run out of rhinos. "They were everywhere," Bentsen recalls of his first African safari. "They would charge the vehicles. One even walked through camp." These days, a rhino is a rare sight in the African wilderness. In the past 20 years, the black rhino population has plummeted from 65,000 to fewer than 4,000. Rhinos are headed down the trail to extinction because poachers hunt them for their horns. Most rhino horn is smuggled to the Middle East and Asia, where it is carved into...
Bentsen's ranch is closed to the public. But every week or so, Calvin and his wife Marge throw a little picnic for a few of their friends near the rhino pastures. On a balmy spring evening, lightweight tables and chairs are set out under a mesquite tree, just as they would be in an African hunting camp in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. Marge, a silver-haired Texas beauty dressed for the bush in denim and turquoise, lays on a simple feast of guacamole and chicken- salad sandwiches. Calvin uncorks bottles of fine South African grand...
...guests toast the newborn rhino. The calf, who according to Bentsen arrived looking more like a wrinkly little moose than a rhino, is now a 70-lb. miniature of its mother with a tiny stump of a horn sprouting from its nose. The curious youngster, who is just learning rhino etiquette, leaves its mother's side to approach the visitors on the other side of the bars. It paws the ground, huffing and snorting like a grownup pachyderm...
...sweetest little thing?" Calvin whispers. "I'd like to make a pet of her." Suddenly the mother rhino wheels and storms at the guests, who jump away from the fence. As Chula nudges the baby back to the safety of the tall grass, the raspy warning grunt of a wild rhinoceros saws through the quiet of the south Texas twilight...