Someone dear once told me that I should use color in my drawings. So, I am starting to use colors. She also told me to draw happy scenes. Most of my images are derived from my own happy experiences, but I am a realist, so I draw what is real and sometimes they are painful. I do, however, draw satire (mostly political) and that's when I try to be subtly sarcastic, if there is such a thing. There is no satire on this one, not yet that you can see. Rhino poaching is real. The extinction of some species is real. There is no covering up for this.
The image above is what happens to a rhinoceros when a poacher or poachers remove its horns. I tried to be kind here, I left the eyes intact. Most of the time poachers carve out the entire face of the rhino so they do not leave any horn fragments. They leave the faceless or headless rhino to die in the hot sun. Rhinoceros horns fetch a hefty price in several thousand dollars, where they end up as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine or relics in the belief that a rhino horn affords passage to heaven because of its location and hollow nature. The economic boom in Southeast Asia, affords people in from Indonesia, Thailand, India, Vietnam and most especially China, the ability to purchase illegal rhinoceros horns up to $35,000.00 per horn. The Indian, Javan and Sumatran rhinoceros once roamed these Asian countries but were heavily hunted. The depressed economic states of African nations turn the native guardians of these species to willing poachers and enablers of their massive destruction and eventual extinction. In the US, a raid of traditional Chinese medicine shops yielded a bounty of illegal rhino horns sold in the states of Oregon and Washington.
Rhinoceros horns have no medicinal value. They are they same material as human fingernails and toenails.
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