Run Rhino Run

The rhinos are an ancient lot. If you spend any time looking at the few that survive today you are struck by their antiquity. Let your eyes wander over a rhino’s anatomy; its thick leathery skin, beady eyes, lumbering bulk and that epitome of being a rhinoceros, a horned nose, and you could sympathise with Ogden Nash when he wrote: “The rhino is a homely beast, for human eyes he’s not a feast. Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, I’ll stare at something less prepoceros.”

- Vivek Menon

The rhinos are an ancient lot. If you spend any time looking at the few that survive today you are struck by their antiquity. Let your eyes wander over a rhino’s anatomy; its thick leathery skin, beady eyes, lumbering bulk and that epitome of being a rhinoceros, a horned nose, and you could sympathise with Ogden Nash when he wrote: “The rhino is a homely beast, for human eyes he’s not a feast. Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, I’ll stare at something less prepoceros.”

Or else you could roam prehistory in their unflustered, unhurried company. I have done this through much of my life and have spent considerable time with three of the five species that survive today, marvelling at their 50 million-year-old model of mega-herbivory.

BLACK, WHITE AND WOOLLY

Helping move black rhinos from Nairobi National Park to Tsavo in Kenya in the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity of closely examining that hooked upper lip that makes them more browsers than grazers. Many an hour has also been spent in private holdings of white rhinos in southern Africa, watching the very opposite evolution that has happened to their upper lip – from pointy and hooked to a broad, wedge-like flange. And then, the couple of decades of familiarity with our own one-horned armoured tank of a rhino in the swamps of Kaziranga, which further clinched my feeling of Auld Lang Syne, for surely the armour-plated look of our beast makes it seem a few centuries older than any other.