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| Photo credit: Keen Observer9 via Flickr |
More than 32 Yangtze finless porpoises have been found dead in the Dongting and Poyang lakes in China in the last two months, leading wildlife experts to worry whether the rare animals are being pushed closer to extinction, the World Wildlife Fund has reported. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porpoise
http://www.globalanimal.org/2012/05/03/rare-yangtze-river-porpoises-found-dead/73394/
Another endangered mammal is the rhino. The word "rhinoceros" is of Greek origin; "rhino" meaning "nose" and "ceros" meaning "horn". The genus contains two species, the Indian Rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) and the Javan Rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus). Although both types are endangered, the Javan Rhinoceros is one of the most endangered large mammals in the world with only 60 individuals surviving in Java, Indonesia. "The Sumatran and Javan rhinos inhabit the rainforests of Southeast Asia, but probably not for much longer (populations are estimated at about 300 and 50, respectively). Both are confined to small, isolated pockets of forest and are frequent victims of poaching for Chinese medicine." [www.globalanimal.org/]
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photo credit: http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/ |
Barbaric poachers simply hack off the rhino's horn as in the graphic photo above. I read somewhere that when Marco Polo first saw a rhinoceros on the island of Java, he thought it was a unicorn! The creature had a single horn and the word for a one-horned animal called a “rhinoceros” did not yet exist but the word "unicorn" did. In the late 1950's, the Rhinoceros became the symbol for an artistic and intellectual movement that viewed any position not Existential as absurd. In his play "Rhinoceros" (Paris, 1960) Eugene Ionesco wrote of a village whose inhabitants, absorbed by ideologies, turn into rhinoceroses one after another. Stubborn and blindly charging, their hides are so thick that any stone would just bounce right off.
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