Renshaw, G., 1904. Natural history essays. London and Manchester, Sherratt and Hughes, pp. i-xv, 1-218
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| Location: |
Africa - Southern Africa - South Africa |
| Subject: |
Distribution - Records |
| Species: |
White Rhino |
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reduction in numbers - Ceratotherium simum. The first definite sign of the decadence of Rhinoceros simus which appears on studying the history of the species, is a circumstance related by Sir Andrew Smith. He tells us that when his expedition of 1836 passed into Bechuanaland, the white rhinoceros had already receded further north, owing to continual persecution, and was not found within a hundred miles of Letakoo, where Burchell had met with it in abundance in 1812. For many years afterwards, however, the animal continued plentiful in the far interior. Harris found it extremely abundant in the Cashan mountains (Magaliesberg), the future environs of Pretoria being in 1836 and for long afterwards a vast natural zoological park, replete with great game. Cumming, Andersson, Oswell, and others have left behind records showing that in the middle of the last century simus was still plentiful. Several causes, however, were fast contributing to its downfall. In 1850 the north-trekking Boers began systematically to exterminate the splendid
fauna of South Africa, the persecution being continued in season and out of season, without intermission. Giraffe, elephant, buffalo, eland, hartebeest, and a host of other noble forms diminished rapidly under their attacks, and the Boers were aided by a multitude of native gunners which the advance of civilisation had provided with more or less reliable firearms.
Prominent in the host of vanishing creatures stood the great white rhinoceros, whose immense size promised a corresponding amount of meat and at certain seasons an abundance of fat also to his destroyers. The very harmlessness of the unfortunate colossus was but an added incitement to the destruction of so meek a quarry. `He was just the very thing for young gunners to try their prentice hand on,' said Oswell. These considerations eventually compassed the death of almost every white rhinoceros south of the Zambesi, and so rapidly was the animal shot out, that like the true quagga, the American bison and the northern sea-cow, it had practically vanished before it was even recognised as rare. In 1880 hunters began to notice the great scarcity of Rhinoceros simus: it was hardly to be found even by the most diligent search over the very plains once so abundantly enlivened by its burly presence. Scientific naturalists abruptly realised that it had all but vanished from Southern Africa.
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