The Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita announced the birth of a 60 pound baby girl rhino. She will be named by the winner of an auction in September.
The unnamed rhino was born to Bibi, the second Eastern Black Rhinoceros in the US obtained from a Japanese zoo. A survey in 2001 found fewer than 500 of the subspecies in the wild. Their populations are threatened mainly by poachers, who sell their horns in the Middle East and Asia. Their phallic shape of the horns, which can reach over four feet long, causes people to treat them as aphrodisiacs or signs of virility. Trade in rhinos is regulated by international treaties, but men who need to compensate always find a way, and Hummers aren't on sale everywhere.
The International Rhino Fund has more information on the Black Rhinoceros and what you can do to help protect them.
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"Their populations are threatened mainly by poachers, who sell their horns in the Middle East and Asia."
The problem with commons is that they are a wealth of resources that everyone has an interest in exploiting, while none have any effective rights or interests in providing protection. Only animals that are not owned are faced with extinction.
As we are unlikely to ever remove the human threat, the only real solution lie in privatizing rhinos - by focussing on strategies that provide incentives for protection of rhino habitat and rhinos. One incentive must be occasional horn harvesting.
This means I will probably invited to help keep my 2.5 year old nephew from running away on another trip to the zoo soon.
Even though the international trade in rhino horns is banned throughout the world, the decline of certain species of rhino is on the rise. This is already one warning for possible extinction of the animal. According to an article by Anna Medeva for Reuters, crime gangs who poach the rhino for their horns are becoming the number one reason for the decline in the rhino population in Africa. Throughout Asia and the Middle East rhino horns are a greatly desired commodity, with horns selling at an astronomically high price.