Gestation: 283 days, giving birth to 1 or 2 calves.
Weight: Varies between dairy and beef animals, between males and females and between breeds. A calf can weigh anything from 25 to 75 kg at birth, reaching an adult weight of 270–1,200 kg.
Growth: Calves feed on milk for the first 5–6 weeks, then as their rumen develops, can start grazing and will naturally completely wean by 7–8 months. Both males and females become fertile at about 7 months, but are not fully grown till 2 years. In the dairy industry the aim is for a heifer to have her first calf at 2 years old, which means mating her at 15 months. In the beef industry animals tend to be slaughtered between 18 and 24 months.
Body temperature: 38–39.3 °C.
Facts: Cattle can be divided into two groups, dairy cattle and beef cattle, though the two industries overlap. In the dairy industry, every cow has to produce a calf a year to maintain its milk yield, but not all the calves produced will join the milking herd. Half the calves will be male, and these will then be sold on to rear as beef or as veal calves. Of the remaining female calves, only around half will be required as replacements. With beef cattle, a good beef rearing mother is a cow that calves easily and produces a lot of milk, but at the same time will pass on the genetics of a good meat producer, and will often be a cross between a dairy and a beef animal, a Friesian–Hereford being the commonest breed in the UK.
Conservation: With an estimated 1.47 billion cattle worldwide they are not endangered, but with these numbers come concerns about their welfare, human welfare and the environmental impact. Cattle are thought to be responsible for 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions through methane production when they eruct during rumination. In the developing world cattle are often a sign of wealth, and are closely guarded which means that humans and cattle often co-exist in close proximity, leading to a two-way transmission of zoonotic diseases, most notably tuberculosis. TB kills over 4,000 people globally every day and awareness is growing of the contribution of bovine or zoonotic TB in this epidemic. The World Health Organization has set a target to reduce TB deaths by 95 per cent and to cut new cases by 90 per cent by 2035. See: www.who.int/tb/areas-of-work/zoonotic-tb/en/.
10
RHINOCEROS
‘I wish that people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children, a trust that is put upon all of us.’
James Herriot
I shuddered as I gazed at the item in my hand: a coarse, disagreeable material, with an unpleasant odour. The myriad of emotions was overwhelming: helplessness, disgust, bewilderment, confusion, and an anger that only a deep injustice can bring.
I turned the item over and over in my hand, studying its every facet; I felt the barbarity, suffering, cruelty and death of what had gone before. But at the same time the item created a glimmer of hope in the darkness, a sign that despite the depravity of human nature, there would always be a fight against it.
The item was maybe 6 inches long by 6 inches at its base, a dark grey almost black in colour, rough on all but one side and conical in shape. It might have resembled a large chunk of laval rock, but for the unique and distinctive smell. The smell was undeniably animal in origin, a noxious, stale, earthy dung recently infiltrated with the pernicious stench of burnt hair.
Moments before, Geoff had casually thrown the item to me as nonchalantly as if it were indeed worthless rock. But this was far from worthless, and it was not a rock of any kind. It was in fact one of most expensive commodities on the black market, more expensive than heroin or cocaine, and its illicit and illegal brutal trade was bringing a species to the brink of extinction.
I was holding about a kilogram of rhino horn, which at current valuations was worth about £65,000. Just minutes earlier, it had been the property of the large female white rhino that was lying metres from where I stood.
She was lying on her chest, her front and back feet tucked under her, her head swaying gently, inches from the ground, as she snorted in an anaesthetic stupor. A blindfold covered her eyes, and an old pair of tights stuffed with padding made convenient earplugs. A dozen people busied themselves around her, some monitoring her heart rate and breathing, others adjusting the intravenous catheter in her right ear which was connected to a 5-litre bag of saline being held above her head. The dart that delivered the Etorphine and Azaperone drug combination to induce anaesthesia had been removed, and the resulting wound had been injected with penicillin to prevent infection. Several of the farm workers were pouring large drums of water over her to prevent overheating in the sweltering African sun. Every procedure required serious manpower. Another group held taut a thick rope that looped around one of the rhino’s back legs – the full extent of African health and safety! We were in exposed bush, with no trees to climb or obstacles to hide behind. If the rhino suddenly awoke, the rope would give us the crucial momentary advantage we would need to retreat. Weighing close to 2 tonnes and reaching speeds of up to 40 mph, a rhino is not to be trifled with. We all knew that this ostensibly very organized, controlled, routine procedure could, in an instant, turn into a very dangerous life-threatening scenario. I had learned never to be complacent around animals, and never more so than when it was a wild animal of such immense strength and speed.
Geoff, the farm manager, had just finished removing the secondary horn with his Black & Decker cordless reciprocating saw. He threw the horn to one of his colleagues as he stood up, groaned, and stretched, rubbing his lower back. Dressed in his obscenely diminutive blue light cotton shorts, with the typical safari thick khaki cotton short-sleeve shirt and khaki ankle boots, he was in his mid-sixties. A true Afrikaaner farmer, he was rough and tough, but with a huge heart and a gentle soul. From a lifetime of working with wildlife he had become hardened to most things, but the horrific reality of being on the front line of rhino poaching was taking its toll. Every morning when he went out on his daily check of the 200-hectare game farm, he feared what he might find. I had only ever seen pictures before and that was shocking enough. To actually find the mutilated body of an animal that you had known from a calf, had watched grow, then produce a calf of its own which it nurtured and raised, I could not begin to imagine. On top of that, to know how much it must have suffered before it died would make you physically sick. Geoff said it often did.
The reason for our presence there that day, and for our involvement in the risky anaesthesia of a healthy animal, was as part of a dehorning programme, designed to prevent the rhinos on the farm being poached. The hope was that if the horn were removed back to its germinal base, the remaining horn tissue would be of insufficient size to be worth poaching. The dehorning of rhinos was stringently controlled. A rhino owner needed to apply for a specific licence from the Parks Board to allow them to dehorn an animal. Once granted, the procedure required the attendance of a State Vet to supervise and document the operation. Delaray was the State Vet today, a tall, slender, youthful chap. It was his first job out of vet school, and as such it could have been a very tough first gig, having to lay down the law with some of these toughened farmers. But he was a warm, friendly, likeable chap and it was immediately apparent on first meeting the group that day that Geoff and the senior farmhands had an immense respect and affection for him.
As Geoff finished the dehorning procedure, Delaray and a couple of vet students busied themselves around the rhino’s head, variously taking blood from an ear vein, collecting hair and toenail samples, gathering up any remnant fragments of horn, and tagging and photographing the rhino. It was all part of the DNA identification record that allowed each and every horn to be traced to the farm, with details of the animal, and the date and time that it had been removed. With the horn being so incredibly valuable, the paper trail had to be impeccable to prevent even a sniff of corruption or any horns inexplicably ‘disappearing’. Even so, and despite every effort to the contrary, corruption was still heartbreakingly rife. With its value of £65,000, each kilogram of horn was worth more than most Africans would earn in a lifetime. This was often just too tempting to resist. I remembered a conversation I had had two years previously with a ranger at Chobe National Park in Botswana, when we were out on a morning game drive. It was my first trip to Africa and I was intent on learning more about the poaching problem. He told me that just a few months previously the park had lost its last black rhino to poaching, an utter devastation for all who had fought, quite literally, to prevent such a scenario. But to add insult to injury, when they located the horn using the tracker that it had been implanted with, it was under the bed of one of the park security guards. ‘You can’t trust anyone in this game,’ he had said.