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Did you know that the white rhinos, together with the Nile hippopotamus, are ranked as the second largest living land mammal after the elephants? These creatures may seem awfully bulky but they can run rather fast, so beware! Irritate a white rhino and he may just decide to charge towards you at a speed of 50km/h. Yet despite its enormous size, it is generally not aggressive.
The African white rhinos are distinguished from the black rhinos not by their skin colour but rather by their feeding habits. The white or square-lipped rhino is a grazer with a long head and wide lips designed for cropping short grass. The black or hook-lipped rhino is a browser, with a prehensile upper lip for drawing branch tips into its mouth. Despite their popular names, both rhino species are basically grey. The Dutch settlers in South Africa described the snout of the white rhino as ‘widje’ meaning wide or broad. The English mistook it to mean white, hence the name ‘white rhino’.
The most prized part of the rhino’s body is unmistakably the protruding horns growing over the middle of the nose. The anterior horns of white rhinos can be as long as 1.5m long. However, as a defensive weapon, it is useless against the bullets of poachers. Countless rhinos have been sacrificed for man’s selfish reasons. Unlike the horns of the antelopes, those of the rhinos lack a bony core. They consist of a mass of hollow filaments that adhere together and are attached fairly loosely to a roughened area of the skull. Some believe that the horns have a number of uses in traditional Chinese medicine in this part of the world. Others claim that the consumption of the crushed horns will endow men with aphrodisiac ‘powers’, while others believe it can miraculously cure many diseases. Highly sought after in the Arabian Peninsula, the horns are also used as dagger handles and for ornamental purposes.
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