AWF supports black rhino protection at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya
OL PEJETA CONSERVANCY / FRANK AF PETERSENS
There are about 25,000 rhino in all of Africa today. This number becomes more meaningful – and painful – when you consider the rhino’s former strength on the continent: black rhino once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to 850,000, while southern white rhino were widespread in their range south of the Zambezi river until being almost driven to extinction in the late 1800s.
Thankfully, in recent decades conservation efforts have reversed the trend toward extinction. But in 2008, demand for rhino horn, especially in China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, led to a dramatic poaching increase. While in 2007 poachers killed a total of 13 rhinos in South Africa – which is where most of Africa’s rhinos live today (more than 80 per cent) – by the peak of the poaching crisis in 2014, that number was 1215.