Saturday, March 24, 2007

Non-warring tame rhino's

So inspired by the movie of Frank Miller's The 300, Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology produced a much anticipated post on the use of domesticated rhinos in war. Unfortunately the conclusion reached was that this pretty much didn't happen but the post inspired some interesting discussion on the Durer image and Rhino domestication. One comment in particular intrigued me suggesting that of the 3 larger species " I used to know the keeper at London Zoo who hand reared our female black rhino Rosie, and she was always very careful around her, and never entered the enclosure with her. Whites and Indians are naturally far more docile so I wouldn't rule them out as domestic animals." It was the reference to Black Rhino that intrigued me because this is a black rhino called Mokwena I saw at Solole game reserve in the Cape.



black rhino


and this is the reason I was surprised. Mokwena was unbelievably tame. One swallow does not a summer make and I am out of my depth in this discussion by some way but I wanted to share these pictures on the blog in case it added something to the discussion.


'black

2 comments:

DDeden said...

Hi, nice photos.

(via TZ)

I note your interest in scuba and digital diving, have you seen the video of the divers feeding the "tame" morays?

A link to it is at my blog post here:
http://the-arc-ddeden.blogspot.com/2007/03/all-thumbs.html

Reminds one to not trust the wild ones to behave as expected or hoped.

DDeden

tai haku said...

I hadn't seen that video but I had heard of it. I used to have a pet moray and can tell you from experience that they are unbelievably short sighted and will bite anything that smells of food. If you have just been handling food and then wave your hand around the possible results are fairly predictable.