What We Still Have

Another belly, this time a white rhino's. Up close it stops being an animal and becomes a surface: dark, faintly pebbled, and crossed in every direction by scratches picked up over a lifetime.

It looks like armour. It is armour. Against thorns, against rock, against each other. Just not against the one thing that counts. In Kruger we saw around nine of them across a few days, always in pairs, usually at the end of the afternoon. Every one of them had its horn sawn off. That is not mutilation, it is protection: a dehorned rhino is worth far less to a poacher, and is therefore a great deal safer.

That this is what it takes to keep them alive says enough. It is why a share of every print sold goes to Stichting Wildlife.