Horn of Darkness

The black rhino is nature's tank feared by all animals. Even lions will break off a hunt to detour around one. And yet the black rhino is on the edge of extinction its numbers dwindling from 100000 at the turn of the century to less than 2500 today. The reason is that in places like Yemen China Korea Taiwan and Thailand the rhino's horn is more valuable than gold so valuable that people will risk their lives to harvest it. To deter rhino poachers African governments have spent millions--on helicopters paramilitary operations fences and guard dogs even relocation to protected areas. Finally Namibia decided to de-horn its rhino population in a last ditch effort to stop the slaughter. In 1991 Carol Cunningham and Joel Berger and their eighteen-month-old daughter Sonja went to Namibia to weigh the effects of de-horning on rhinos. In Horn of Darkness they tell the story of three years in the Namib Desert studying Africa's last sizable population of free-roaming black rhinos. This is the closest most readers will come to experiencing life in the remaining wilds of Africa. Cunningham and Berger writing alternate chapters capture what it is like to leave the comforts of civilization to camp for months at a time in a land filled with deadly predators to study an animal that is reclusive unpredictable and highly dangerous. The authors describe staking out water holes in the dead of the night creeping to within twenty-seven meters of rhinos to photograph them all the while keeping a lookout for hyenas elephants and lions. Weaving together the historical accounts of other naturalists a vividly detailed look at life in the wild and a behind-the-scenes glimpse of scientific work and the dark side of the conservation movement Horn of Darkness is destined to be a classic work on the natural world.