Rhino - Anna Merz

Fourteen years ago, an English woman named Anna Merz decided to try to do something to stop the massacre of the black rhino and this book tells her story. Having spent most of her adult life in Ghana, Anna Merz retired to Kenya in 1976, only to find herself unable to sit back and passively watch the destruction going on around her. The price of rhino horn had escalated dramatically, making it one of the most valuable commodities in the world. The trade involved hundreds of thousands of pounds, an international market and the most sophisticated weaponry. Rhinos were being murdered in their thousands and were very close to extinction, and all for the sake of carved dagger handles and an aphrodisiac of dubious efficiency.;"Rhino" is the story of how, in the face of incredulity and ridicule, Anna Merz coaxed the use of 10,000 acres of Africa from a farming family and cajoled permission from the Kenyan government to hunt and capture rhinos in the wild and place them behind a 2.5m electric fence. It is also a description of life within the Ngare Sergoi Black Rhino Sanctuary of her struggle to protect the rhinos without interfering with their independent lives and of how she brought up the orphaned baby rhino Samia so that she was able to return to the wild. At the same time it is an introduction to an unexpectedly intelligent, gentle and highly individual species and its behaviour, and a rallying cry for help to save the last 3500 black rhinos in the world.