Book Review: Horn of Darkness - Rhinos on the Edge

“Perhaps skeptics of this project had been correct all along.  During our earlier planning and correspondence, Raoul du Toit, a Zimbabwean monitoring black rhinos in his country, had written, ‘What we don’t need are more Americans bumbling around in the bush.’”

African elephants may have taken center stage at last week’s CITES Conference of Parties in Switzerland, but there was plenty of room left on the sidelines for drama concerning Africa’s second largest land mammals, the rhinos.  Proposals to loosen restrictions on the trade of rhino horn, with the hope that the funds generated could be used to support conservation efforts, were defeated.  This mirrored the debates swirling around elephants and their ivory.  The main difference between an elephant’s rusk and a rhino’s horn is that, in the latter case, it’s possible to relatively easily separate the two and leave the animal unharmed.  Decades earlier, some African governments decided to put that theory into practice.

In Horn of Darkness: Rhinos on the Edge, American wildlife biologists Carol Cunningham and Joel Berger recount their journeys through the newly-independent nation of Namibia in pursuit of the endangered black rhinoceros.  The Namibian government was conducting its controversial new plan to save rhinos by removing their horns and, the theory went, thereby removing the incentive for poachers to kill them.  I hope it won’t be too big of a spoiler, but that fact that rhinos are still highly endangered should serve as an indication that all did not go according to plan.  In their shared narrative, Cunningham and Berger help explain why.

Horn of Darkness reads almost like a spin-off on one of my favorite African conservation books, Cry of the Kalahari.  Both detail husband-wife teams of American field biologists (in this case further complicated by the presence of their infant daughter) in a southern African nation, told through alternating chapters (some by him, some by her), trying to study wildlife in an inhospitable desert setting while navigating the dangers of the bush and those of the political arena.   One key difference is that Mark and Delia Owens focused their conservation studies on the relatively obscure, unnoticed brown hyena, while Cunningham and Berger were working with one of the most high-profile endangered species on the planet. 

As they were to learn very quickly, conserving a mega-herbivore with the financial equivalent of gold or diamonds growing from the end of its snout is a complicated endeavor.

I can’t say that I was a huge fan of the narrative style – there were times when I felt like some minor anecdotes were harped on incessantly, while more interesting topics that could have been discussed in more debt were brushed by quickly.  A lot of the book is spent regaling the reader with the backroom deals and politics of conservation in Namibia, to the point where an entire glossary of government and NGO players is required at the end to help the reader make sense of it all (I wish I’d noticed it before I got to the end – it would have really simplified my read).

One feature that I did enjoy was the introduction and extensive featuring of Archie Gawuseb, the biologists’ guide, tracker, and friend, who proved to be vital to the success of their research.  Archie was a former tracker turned rhino poacher, and not surprisingly persona non grata through much of Namibia’s conservation community.  Despite their initial misgivings, Cunningham and Berger found him to be an invaluable member of their team.  Glancing through the list of publications at the end of the book, I was pleased to see that Archie was included as a coauthor on some of the scientific papers resulting from this research.

So much of the conversation about rhinos in Africa inevitably turns to demonization of the poachers.  Poaching of rhinos, elephants, and other wildlife is an awful crime.  In many cases, however, it’s one that people are forced into by desperation, as Archie was.  The real money is not going to poor rural Africans who put themselves in danger to harvest horns, and we should be concentrating our ire on those who are fueling this illegal trade, not the poor people who are caught up in it.  As long as there is a demand, there will be poaching, with folks like Archie being as expendable of a commodity on the international market as the bullets that they use.

As it happens, Cunningham and Berger ended up making themselves persona non grata as well.  It turns out that the answers they found to certain questions were perhaps not what the government wanted to hear.   Black rhinos continue to disappear across their range, and the future of the species in the wild looks grim, though not hopeless yet.    Despite all of the hours that scientists like Berger and Cunningham have spent in the bush, the final solution to this problem probably isn’t going to come from greater understanding of rhinos.  It’s got to come from changing the human perspective.

Horn of Darkness: Rhinos on the Edge at Amazon.com