Save The Species: West African Black Rhinoceros

Save the Species: West African Black Rhinoceros Name Institutional Affiliation Course Title Instructor Date Save the Species: West African Black Rhinoceros The West African black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) was declared extinct in 2013 as per the animals and plants review conducted by the world’s largest network of biodiversity conservation network. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), this black rhino subspecies was marked as “critically endangered” in the Red List of Threatened Species and was last spotted in 2006 in West Africa (Knight, 2013). While not common in conventional medical research, black rhinos have been used in Chinese medicine where their horns are harvested for a number of medical exploitations. In the world, there are only 5000 black rhinos that have been left in their natural habitats with the persistent pressure from poachers who hunt them for their horns that are considered valuable for medical research and in the treatment of rheumatism, fever, gout and other infections. In 1993, a kilo of black rhino horn was estimated to be about $4,700 (Fernandez, 2017). Black rhinos have traditionally been known to be extremely aggressive to the natural ecosystem. They are classified as browsers and in their wild habitat, their diet comprises of woody plants although they are mainly fed with domestic forages and manufactured pellets in animal protection centers Miller & Buss, 2015). There are multispecies epizootic disease transmissions from animals to zoo workers. For instance, tuberculosis has been reported to be transmitted from black rhinos to humans. Apart from animals such as rocky mountain goats, humans and black rhinos are involved in the transmission of the disease from species to species (Ribinowitz, & Conti, 2010). West African black rhinoceros was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and its numbers started declining across the sub-Saharan Africa as a result of widespread poaching (Platt, 2013). If this species could have been saved, there are numerous benefits which people could have attained. For instance, the Rhino is part of wild animals that attract huge amount of tourists who visit the national parks. Attraction of tourists is an important factor that enables the country to earn revenues and also act as a means of creating employment opportunities, both directly and indirectly. Some individuals believed that the horn of the West African black rhinoceros had medicinal powers. The reasons why this species was hunted is due to the value of the horn, and it was said that it had the ability of curing certain ailments as well as detecting certain poisons as a result of its high alkaline level. The West African black rhinoceros did not pose any environmental dangers since it did not adversely harm people or the savannah region where they were mostly found. Basically, it can be argued that the huge price of the horns was the main reasons why this species was hunted down. For instance, evidence indicates that a kilogram of its horn could earn over fifty thousand U.S. dollars and this implies that the value and ...