Word: rhinos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fifty Somali poachers armed with automatic weapons came nosing around the rhino refuge at Lewa Downs. "But we put out the message that if they came in, a few of them would have to die along with us," says Anna Merz. Under the driver's seat in her car, she carries a spike-headed club. She is not licensed to carry a gun, but she employs guards with old Enfield rifles to patrol her fenced-in 7,500-acre refuge, where approximately 16 rhinos live...
...Poor buggers!" says Merz, talking about her rhinos. Her eyes now flash bright indignation. "It is a sin and a crime that animals should be driven to the brink of extinction, especially by something as idiotic as a dagger handle!" The situation of the rhino is bleak. In 1970 there were 20,000 of them in Kenya. Now there are considerably fewer than 500. It strikes a visitor that Merz's rhinos live like a child kept in a germ-free bubble because of some defect in the immune system. The germs are the poachers. With rhino horns worth about...
Merz, an Englishwoman who has lived in Africa much of her life, began the refuge two years ago. A sign at the front gate reads ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FOR RHINOS. She is now raising an orphaned baby rhino named Samia, almost two years old and up to about 500 lbs. Merz tenderly caresses her and calls her "my darling." Samia, feeling frolicsome, knocks Merz over into the mud. Merz rises, muddy and laughing, and prehistoric Samia knocks her over again. Once again, Merz laughs...
...visitor thought of a passage of bully rhetoric in Theodore Roosevelt's African Game Trails, the record of his 1909 safari. The rhino, wrote Roosevelt, "seemed what he was, a monster surviving over from the world's past, from the days when the beasts of the prime ran riot in their strength, before man grew so cunning of brain and hand as to master them...
Hugh Lamprey, of the World Wildlife Fund, flies in to Merz's sanctuary that morning to ask her to accept another baby rhino, which was just orphaned by poachers in the Masai Mara. Lamprey is a mandarin who urbanely calls down apocalypse in a voice that sounds the way the finest, oldest brandy tastes. The visitor privately bestows a title upon him: the Duke of Extinction...