This Orphaned Rhino Was Lucky—1,004 Others Were Not

By Kristina Bravo, TakePart.com

21 September 14

wo weeks ago, Liam Burrough was driving on a road near South Africa’s Kruger National Park when he spotted an injured baby white rhinoceros. He called for help, and later detailed the incident on Facebook.

“Badly dehydrated, covered in wounds, and clearly in search of shade, the calf approached my car,” reads the post. “Slumping onto her hindquarters and then onto her belly she caught a few moments of peaceful rest in our shadow. She had undoubtedly lost her mother at this tender age to a poacher in this, one of the hardest hit areas by poaching in the Kruger.”

While waiting for a rescue team, Burrough helped cool the animal, estimated to be just eight weeks old, with bottled water. “The tragic irony in all of this being that the calf had approached the very creatures who are responsible for her being orphaned in search of comfort.”

A helicopter soon came, and the rhino, now called Shadow, is reportedly doing well in recovery with Mpumalanga, South Africa-based organization Care for Wild Africa:

Shadow is just one of many baby rhinos orphaned every year because of poaching, a crime that's widespread across much of southern and east Africa. Last year, poachers slaughtered a record 1,004 rhinos to supply a black market in China, Vietnam, Singapore, and other countries that value rhino horns as traditional medicines and status symbols. (The horns have no therapeutic effect.) Mothers care for juvenile for a few years, and when they are gunned down for their horns, the young ones are left to fend for themselves. The white rhino once ranged across much of sub-Saharan Africa; today, only about 11,000 of the species remain in the wild. There are even fewer black rhinos, and the western black rhino is already extinct.

Burroughs wrote, “I won’t be participating in the ice bucket challenge but I will be donating a percentage of my salary every month to a rhino charity in the area starting now. Extinction is forever and it’s coming for Africa’s rhinos, together we can stop it.”