
It has been a decade of quite spectacular triumph and devastating failure for the custodians of Africa's rhinos.
For the first time in several decades the overall number of white and black rhino has gone up rather than down, thanks to a determined rearguard action and a few frontal assaults by conservationists.
The good news is that there are now almost 4 000 black rhinos compared to the 2, 600 which survived 10 years ago.
The white rhino has fared even better, with the overall population almost doubling from a total of 8, 400 10 years ago, to almost 14 500 individuals today.
That translates into an annual growth rate of almost 7 percent for the white rhino and about 4,5 percent for the black rhino.
Yet it's still not a very rosy picture, considering that well over 62, 000 black rhinos were slaughtered by horn poachers in the four decades that ended in the early 1990s.
And the bad news is that two subspecies of rhino have almost certainly become extinct over the past five years.
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