Businessweek A Rhino Is Worth More Dead Than Alive

Twisting above the South African grasslands, the pilot maneuvers his four-seat helicopter lower and lower, the rotors whipping up a cloud of red dirt and spiny branches. A rifleman in the passenger seat leans out and scans intently for his targets. How did that 9-foot-long southern white rhinoceros and her calf just disappear? Are they lying down, hiding in the vegetation? Out here in the 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres) of Greater Kruger Park, it’s easy to lose a rhino.

Following directions from the chopper, two packed Land Rovers plow over bushes and bounce along the rough terrain, a man in one vehicle holding tight to an orange Stihl chainsaw. Hacking the horns off a rhino is always a team effort, and with the black market price for a horn topping $40,000, there’s no shortage of people willing to traffic one of the animal kingdom’s most valuable commodities.

The dust briefly clears, and the pilot spots his chance. He hovers above the terrified animals, providing the shooter a clean look. The first shot hits the mother in the flank; she panics and pounds forward. A second shot hits the calf, which immediately starts to wobble. Less than five minutes later, both rhinos are toppled in the grass. The Rovers brake, and a dozen people hop out. Rhino poachers often use a panga, a sort of machete, to crudely hack off the horn—after, if the animal is still alive, immobilizing it via a number of deep, brutal slashes severing the spinal cord.

This time, a chainsaw roars to life and seconds later, chips of rhino horn (worth $50 a gram as a powder to be swallowed as a supposed cancer cure in Vietnam) shower into the grass. A series of slow, deliberate slices sever both horns from the mother and one from the calf. In total, the horns weigh about 8 pounds—at $11,000 per pound in the collector’s market in China, this small bag of loot is worth about $90,000. That in part explains why an estimated three-quarters of the wild rhinos in South Africa have been killed in less than a decade. And why poachers might risk a 25-year jail sentence for a night spent evading lions and leopards and then hacking off horns.

As he sets down the chainsaw, the cutter looks exhausted, but he isn’t done yet. Leaning into the side of the mother rhino, he braces his leg and tries to move her into a more comfortable position. These men and women aren’t poachers. The animals were darted with an opiate. Once they were down, a veterinarian poured artificial tears into their eyes, then blindfolded them, trying to minimize their distress as their horns were taken. This elaborate process, called dehorning, is how rhinos, under attack by poaching gangs in South Africa and anywhere else they roam, are protected. Their most valuable part is sawed off and immediately measured, tagged, microchipped and locked away under armed guard.

Like human fingernails, rhino horns carry no nerves, are made of keratin and grow constantly. Once trimmed, the horn grows from flattened nub to a foot in length in five years. The visual effect of a dehorned rhino, meanwhile, is disturbing; it’s like looking at a lion after someone has razored off his flowing mane.

“I must have participated in 2,000 dehornings. We’ve done up to 22 in a single day,” says Gerry McDonald, the helicopter pilot on this mission. “We shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s the only thing that’s working. At the reserves where we have dehorned, the rhinos have been left alone. We know it’s a temporary solution—it’s just buying us time. But if you have rhino with horn, you are going to be poached. That’s just the way it is.”

Across South Africa, teams such as this, combining the skills of experienced bush pilots and frontline veterinarians, are fighting to slow the killings of rhinos and the theft of their horns. In this latest twist in the illegal rhino horn trade, the people lopping off the horns with chainsaws are the good guys.

Rangers and conservation managers in Africa refer to Kruger National Park as “Fortress Kruger.” Despite the effort and money invested in keeping them out, poachers roam widely inside the park. Elephants are killed for tusks and pangolins for scales. Antelope, buffalo and other species are trafficked into the illegal trade in game meat. A decade ago, Kruger had approximately 9,000 southern white rhinos. That population has been reduced, through poaching and drought, to about 2,600. As with the war on drugs, it appears that government crackdowns and prohibitions do little more than professionalize the traffickers and maintain black market prices. But unlike cocaine or fentanyl, the supply of rhino horns is finite. If every rhino on Earth were poached tomorrow, the total supply would weigh roughly 29 tons and fill only three shipping containers.

Rhino horns are trafficked by transnational criminal syndicates with well-organized supply chains. Demand comes from Southeast Asia and China, where millions of people believe powdered rhino horn has medicinal qualities, combating hangovers and slowing cancer. Intact horns are also prized, as well as intricate horn carvings and libation cups. An ostentatious show of rhino horns on the mantelpiece is, for a certain kind of collector, a sign of membership in a most exclusive club.

Given the value placed on horns, it’s little surprise that rhinos throughout Asia were poached almost to extinction by 2008. Populations that once roamed Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia are almost gone. The number of Java rhinos is down to 76, Sumatran rhinos, 80. Having exhausted Asia, the smugglers and traffickers turned their attention to Africa around 2007.

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Africa’s rhinos—blacks, northern whites and southern whites—had been making a modest comeback after 200 years of being ravaged by European settlers and hunted for sport. The population, once less than a hundred, was headed toward 30,000. Criminal gangs quickly reversed that. The black rhino population is now about 6,000. There are only two northern white rhinos, both of them female. Southern white rhinos number about 16,000, at least three-quarters of them in South Africa.

The country’s rhino population is spread thin and far. Several thousand roam the federally maintained Kruger National Park and the private nature preserves that have taken down their fences and become part of Greater Kruger. Even more, about 60% of the total, live on what are functionally breeding farms. But habitat destruction has disturbed migration patterns enough to make it difficult to precisely count the remaining rhinos. Many park rangers say published population figures are too high; they suspect the South African government is overestimating the rhino population to divert attention from the grim reality of poaching inside Kruger, the nation’s showcase park.

The costs of fighting poachers are difficult to tally. There are direct expenses, including security fences, live-feed cameras, bulletproof vests, satellite connection fees and an air wing of helicopters and airplanes. There are substantial indirect costs, including the care, feeding and upbringing of orphaned rhinos. There’s also a more devastating line item: the lives of rangers. Across Africa more than 100 rangers died in 2022. Roughly 80% were homicides.

In July 2022, Anton Mzimba, a ranger in the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve, was assassinated in his front yard. In the weeks before the hit, Mzimba received word that a contract had been placed on his life because of his fight against rhino poaching. He consulted with his superiors and colleagues; they say he believed he could outmaneuver the poaching syndicates. He was wrong. Shot repeatedly in front of his family, he bled to death before he reached the hospital.

“Anton was my friend,” says Altin Gysman, a 23-year veteran of the South African Army who now trains paramilitary conservation protection teams. “We trained together, and he was killed because he was true to his word. He would not be corrupted. That’s why they killed him. Now all our rangers must wonder, ‘Are we next?’ ”

Inside his sweltering office at the Southern African Wildlife College, a training ground for national park rangers, Gysman can hear the drill sergeants on the nearby parade field as they lead new rangers through a six-week boot camp. Dressed in military-style uniforms, they stomp the ground in unison while holding faux rifles made of plywood and painted blue. These men and women are preparing to be sent to the front. They will learn to handle semiautomatic weapons, analyze intelligence feeds and employ combat medic skills. “We are the bulletproof vests for the rhino,” Gysman says. “If you want to shoot a rhino, you must take us out first.”

Across the fields from Gysman’s office—past the firing range, the hangar for light aircraft and a grass runway chewed clear by a herd of impala—are kennels for the unit’s dogs: bluetick, redbone, and black and tan hounds, as well as Belgian Malinois. Leading this pack is Johan van Straaten, a barefoot, sunburned man who lives and breathes to track poachers. The dog team, supplemented by another detachment at a satellite station in Skukuza, 120 kilometers (75 miles) south, is a rapid reaction force.

It’s startling to watch a pack of trained dogs sprint on command, jump into a helicopter and then immediately fall asleep on the chopper floor as the craft buzzes above the grasslands. But the dogs know their mission will be exhausting. “We have tracked poachers who walked 150 kilometers over a four-day period,” Van Straaten says. “Once we caught up to them when they were resting with their shoes off, and they still ran off for 40 kilometers in the bush, barefoot.”

Poaching attacks are often carried out by three-man teams: a shooter, a panga-wielder and a human mule to carry food, water and extra supplies. Increasingly, poachers use silencers. Gunshots carry far across the grasslands, and the sound sends conservation officers and helicopters scrambling. A massive rhino is rarely dispatched with a single shot, even though the .458 caliber slugs are the same as those used to poach elephants.

In an attempt to throw off the pursuers, some poachers pad their boots or sneakers with five pairs of socks to blur and distort their footprints. Others walk backward or jump from rock to rock. Tactics such as these may slow human trackers, but when the dogs arrive, deception rarely works. The K-9 teams have a success rate of 75%, versus 5% to 10% by human-only teams. “A person may take five minutes to advance a hundred yards. The dog does it in seconds,” van Straaten says. “Even before the helicopter touches the ground, all six dogs are barking and ready to go. We land, and they jump out, and they will find the poacher.”

A well-trained hound can follow human tracks as old as 48 hours, but by then the horn is likely out of the park and headed toward the airport in neighboring Mozambique or on a cargo ship destined for Vietnam or Laos, with a high probability that it will end up with Chinese buyers.

For veteran rangers, the militarization of protected areas in South Africa, with all the marching and emphasis on firepower, is a far cry from the initial romance implicit in wildlife protection. Wilson Siwela has spent 32 years as a ranger in Kruger National Park. Asked about the old days, and his main concerns when he first began, Siwela pauses to collect his thoughts. “There were so many thirsty animals,” he says.

No one knows exactly how many rhinos are being poached in South Africa. Sometimes after a horn is stolen, the carcass is whisked away, then butchered and sold into the underground game-meat market. Sometimes hyenas, lions and vultures devour the evidence. South African investigators have proof—in the form of mutilated rhinos—that a minimum of 451 rhinos were poached in the country in 2022. If this pace of poaching continues, wild rhinos could be exterminated in as few as seven years.

That, perversely, would probably juice the illegal horn trade. “What’s currently happening now is a systematic deletion of rhino. People are saying, ‘We’re going to hunt them until there is none, because then the horn will be worth even more,’” Ruben de Kock, a longtime trainer of African park rangers, said in the recent documentary Rhino Man.

A 2003 University of Wisconsin academic paper titled “Betting on Extinction: Endangered Species and Speculation” made a similar point. “It can be optimal for a speculator to induce poachers to harvest so rapidly as to make extinction of the species inevitable,” the paper stated. “With natural stocks depleted, the investor would then enjoy considerable market power, allowing him to obtain supra-normal profits.” The paper suggests that dehorning might not be sufficient to stem the slaughter, based on “anecdotal reports from poachers claiming to have been instructed to kill rhinos in the wild, whether they have valuable horns or not.”

The two remaining northern white rhinos are in Kenya; each has its own bodyguard. In South Africa several private nature reserves link individual rhinos to satellite feeds. “I used a system where there is one sensor in the horn and one on the rhino’s body,” says Craig Spencer, a warden inside the Olifants West Nature Reserve, a privately owned 22,000-acre reserve that’s part of Greater Kruger. “If the horn moves more than five meters from the body an alert is triggered, and we can track the movement of the horn.”

Spencer appreciates the importance of dehorning operations, aerial surveillance and K-9 units, but he’s convinced that the most effective antipoaching tool is building community support for wildlife conservation. A decade ago he assembled an all-female, unarmed antipoaching unit led by local women with lifelong ties to nearby villages. The group, known as the Black Mambas, patrol in jeeps and on foot to disrupt poachers sneaking into the park or trying to escape with bush meat, ivory or rhino horn. They routinely find and destroy wire snares used to trap animals.

The Black Mambas are also like detectives. Rumors, gossip, tidbits of useful information are more likely to be picked up by a female team roaming the communities than by military-style units wielding heavy weaponry. Spencer also figured the Black Mambas would be at less risk than their militarized counterparts. The murder of a local unarmed woman would bring widespread condemnation, not to mention a vast law enforcement counterattack.

Bouncing in the back of a pickup during a patrol in the Greater Kruger, two Black Mambas hold on to a roll bar and aim high-powered flashlights into the bush. To their right a 10-foot-high electrified fence is meant to keep lions, leopards and marauding elephants inside the reserve and the illegal poachers out. Neither the animals nor the poachers are particularly discouraged by the fencing. The clever elephants have learned to use their tusks to hook, then snap, the lines, as if they were popping piano strings, one by one by one, after which they trample down the fence. Poachers use wire cutters. Or they crawl through tunnels dug by wandering warthogs.

Any sign of sliced fencing is an alert for the Mambas to radio for reinforcements. On this night the fence is intact, but that’s not to say all is quiet. In the bobbing pools of illumination created by the headlights, a lone hyena trots. To the left, a solitary elephant curls its trunk around some branches and rips them free. Farther down the road a wild ruckus erupts as two—maybe more—elephants brawl.

At the park rangers’ base, none of the locals seem worried that a trio of lions pace and rest under a porch swing, perhaps attracted by the smell of a barbecue. In many ways it’s easy to see this natural wonderland as a protected paradise. It’s that, but it’s also a battlefield, and should one of the reserve’s rhinos show its face in the starry light of the African landscape, its silhouette would be eerie and unnatural: a rhino with no horn. A rhino perhaps with no future.

Given the heightened security in both private and public parks, poachers are diversifying from their longstanding tactic of using evenings with a full moon (known locally as poacher’s moon) for their forays into the park areas. Now, they increasingly enter the nature reserves disguised as tourists. The guns are smuggled in by clerical or cleaning staff, stashed in cars or in the bottom of laundry bins. A 2022 investigation commissioned by the European Union found evidence that poachers had positioned so many guns inside Kruger National Park that “sometimes a hyena or elephant would discover [a] rifle and play with it.”

“Many of the 2.6 million people who live along the western border of Kruger have never seen wildlife,” says Spencer, the warden. “It’s a travesty, but they live on the other side of the fence, and to many, the safari and bush experiences are seen as a tourist activity arranged for the comfort of white outsiders.” The animals live in protected areas; local people scratch out a living in what they sardonically call “the unprotected areas.”

Mzimba, the ranger assassinated last year, was a passionate proponent for distributing the revenue from wildlife tourism more equitably. His commitment to bridging the gap included years advocating for local youth to be incorporated into the workforce through a program called Future Rangers. “People around the protected areas see that the hunting and tourism companies [are] making money and getting rich,” he said on a podcast accompanying the Rhino Man documentary. “The conservation areas are seen as islands of gold, where only a few people are benefiting.”

Three sociologists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands who studied this phenomenon published a paper in 2022 criticizing South Africa’s safari business and the attendant real estate gold rush—there’s a booming business selling lots on wildlife estates and private game reserves. Vacationers at their second homes and wealthy tourists cavort in open-topped vehicles at the reserves while impoverished Black South Africans (minimum wage in the country is $1.38 an hour) commute great distances to work as service staff. It isn’t uncommon to see 12 or 14 workers standing in the back of a pickup truck racing along potholed roads, meaning a single traffic collision could disintegrate the integrity of a dozen families. The segregation and inequality, say the authors, are similar to the former apartheid government’s scheme of banishing Black citizens to Bantustans and townships. The authors call these aspects of ecotourism business “green apartheid.”

Poachers around Kruger promote the idea that they are Robin Hood-style outlaws who rob rhinos from the rich to spread cash among the poor. Among the most famous was Petros “Mr. Big” Mabuza, an accused trafficker living near nature reserves in the South African town of Hazyview. In 2018 he was arrested for his central role in a poaching scheme; prosecutors described him in court proceedings as “a crucial point of receiving and distributing rhino horn” in and around Kruger National Park.

Mabuza was also facing charges of murder. Nonetheless, he was released on bail, and while he awaited trial, he was killed in a roadside assassination, his car riddled with bullets. Mr. Big was buried like a cartel boss. His body was delivered to the funeral ceremony in a helicopter, the casket draped in leopard skin. Two professional video teams recorded the event. Hundreds of supporters paid homage to a man they revered for paying university fees for local students and in other ways sharing his vast wealth. For those who couldn’t attend, the ceremony was livestreamed on YouTube.

People in the towns near Kruger say it’s easy to tell who’s working for the rhino kingpins. Suddenly a neighbor has a new car or a second story on the house. “But the [low level] poachers don’t make the big money, probably only 50,000 or 100,000 rand”—$2,700 or $5,500—explains a member of one antipoaching unit, who asked to be identified only as Patrick. “So that’s not enough to finish building a house, maybe they build half the house and then they are back into the bush, trying to poach another rhino.” In local street slang, someone who’s struck it rich is said to “have the horn.”

In March this year, antipoaching units received an urgent report that a robbery was underway at a rhino breeding farm. Alarms were sounding, guards were rushing to inspect a hole cut through the security fencing and tracking dogs were scouring the lands. There were no reports of shots fired, so perhaps the farm’s rhinos hadn’t yet been poached.

Tracking the footprints and bent grass, the guards saw that the poachers had made a beeline for the main house. There they emptied a metal case holding approximately 18 rhino horns. They also tore apart two rooms looking for cash, cut open a small safe with an acetylene torch and tried, unsuccessfully, to pry open a gun safe. No one was found on the property; there were indications the robbers might have escaped in a waiting vehicle.

In the conservation community, the idea of a robbery was mocked. Most private rhino owners don’t keep horns around; they use armored-car transport services and place their horns in safe deposit boxes alongside Krugerrands and diamonds. Pointed questions were raised: Was the ranch owner faking the invasion to cover up the illegal sale of rhino horns? Was it an inside job? Had the security team at the ranch robbed their own boss?

Investigators tracking the rhino horn trade in Asia have been baffled in recent years by the quantity of horns coming out of South Africa. Even if they account for every rhino poached in Africa, the volumes don’t add up; there are simply too many horns for sale. Some ranchers insist that South African officials have been pilfering from a rhino horn stockpile the government maintains in a vault near the town of Skukuza. Conservation advocates allege the black market is being fed by private owners, who have no legal outlet for the horns they harvest. Rhino owners also, they say, fake robberies of their homes and attacks on their animals, then sell the horns they’ve reported as stolen to dealers in Johannesburg. “We have heard of many cases in which the owner goes out and shoots his own rhino and claims that a poacher did it,” says Spencer. “That is the reality.”

A week after the robbery, the ranch owner, who later asked to remain anonymous because of additional robbery attempts on the farm and his home, knows what people are saying. “To be involved would be a betrayal of everything that I morally stand for,” he says, weeping. He has invested millions raising and protecting rhinos and dedicated years advocating for a legal trade in their horns—from which he planned to make even more millions. He openly cries as he describes fears that the raiders would have murdered or tortured him with the acetylene torch had he not been out on the day of the incursion. He also shows off a seriously upgraded security profile. An automatic pistol is tucked into the front of his cargo pants. A matte black AR-15 with silencer and thermal scope sits on his desk. A heavy bulletproof vest hangs off the back of his chair. On the veranda (decorated with a trio of bleached white rhino skulls), a half-dozen armed men are receiving a security briefing from a British Special Forces veteran.

Under South African law, landowners are permitted to buy, sell and trade the wildlife on their property. The online auction site My Wildlife SA offers everything from a herd of 50 impala (a relative bargain at $102 apiece) to a rhino family that includes bull, cow and calf. In only five clicks a buyer can have these three rhinos in their basket and be ready to enter credit card details for a payment of $24,540, not including transport and sales tax. Five years ago the price might have been 10 times higher. The difference is the fear factor. Landowners know that keeping rhinos might subject them to home invasion, kidnapping or murder by poaching gangs. This explains why rhinos can even be had for free, to a good home. “I could get six rhinos with a few phone calls,” says Spencer. “People are dumping them. No one wants rhino, it’s just too costly.”

It’s an uncomfortable economic reality in South Africa that a rhino is now worth more dead than alive. “What we have is the arbitrage between the legal value of a live rhino and the illegal value of a dead rhino. That arbitrage is huge,” says Kevin Leo-Smith, a South African economist who has spent decades in both conservation and wildlife tourism developments. “The bottom line is that you are actually incentivizing dead rhinos and—lo and behold—that is what we are finding, dead rhinos. And more and more.”

Nowhere is this conundrum more apparent than on the 21,000-acre rhino ranch belonging to John Hume. For well over two decades Hume, who made millions in the holiday resort industry, has watched his herd flourish; he now has slightly more than 2,000 southern white rhinos, meaning he personally owns 12% to 15% of the remaining members of this species. Hume’s investment strategy was to raise rhinos like a herd of cattle—to inoculate, vaccinate, feed and breed. He never planned on having so many rhinos, but as security costs soared, he received hundreds of animals at minimal or no cost. The result is not only a massive herd but also rhinos from almost 100 locations, providing a diverse genetic pool.

Every two or three years he trims his animals’ horns. His stockpile has grown steadily, and while he declines (for security reasons) to provide precise figures, he told National Public Radio in 2016 that he had five tons of horn, roughly $300 million worth based on current black market prices. Given that Hume has said he can harvest a ton per year, he could now be sitting on three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of rhino horn. He, like others in his position, lobbies for the legalization of the international horn trade. The South African government has repeatedly rejected the idea, as have most international conservation groups.

In early 2023, at 81 years old and with his rhino security costs topping a $1 million a year (not to mention the expense of 16 tons a day of barley and other feed), Hume gave up. Even his critics have no doubt that he truly cares for the health and welfare of his animals. But with no sign of a legalized trade in sight, Hume put up the entire herd for auction. The minimum bid (for the herd, not the horns) was set at $10 million.

“He is a controversial character. He took a big bet on being able to trade horn, and he basically lost his fortune trying to do it,” Leo-Smith said as the date of the auction approached. “Will he get his $10 million minimum price? I am not sure. Ten years ago for sure.”

Leo-Smith was right to be skeptical. In May, Hume announced that the auction had failed. No one had met the minimum bid. He vaguely described conversations with possible buyers but then went on vacation.

Will his herd be bought by a conservation NGO and used as breeding stock for wild rhino herds across the continent? Will another rhino rancher buy it up, betting again that a regulated international trade in rhino horns will be legalized? The implications are far broader than just Hume’s farm and animals. Dozens of private rhino owners across South Africa face financial disaster. Their costs are soaring and they have no legal way to sell the horns they harvest.

Leo-Smith takes the side of those advocating for legal trade in horns. It would send the value of live rhinos soaring, he says, which in turn would ensure rhino grazing lands would be preserved. (This argument is sometimes pitched as “horns for habitat.”) “Imagine how much the rhino could contribute to overall conservation,” he says. He is, however, against the conversion of rhinos into a kind of domesticated livestock. “Captive breeding is a bad situation for rhino,” he said. “It’s like a zoo as far as I am concerned. We want wild rhino.”

The prohibitions that stymie the international trade in rhino horn are established by the 50-year-old endangered species treaty known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites. Last December, however, legal rhino trade advocates saw an opening in a new agreement: the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework, signed by 196 nations in Montreal. This agreement specifies fundamental conservation tenets that include community involvement, the protection of biodiversity and sustainable use of resources. The pro-trade lobby argues that legal horn harvesting meets all three requirements. Africa’s rhinos, in this view, can be saved by market forces. Humans “look after what is valuable and neglect what is not,” Leo-Smith says.

The anti-trade coalition is vehement that if the trade is legalized, demand will immediately outstrip the supply. The possibility that 1.4 billion Chinese consumers, with a centuries-long tradition of using rhino horn powders in traditional medicine, will have legal access to horns is terrifying to many rhino defenders.

In late June came perhaps the most brazen horn theft yet. The target was a government stockpile, at the North West Parks Board headquarters in the town of Mahikeng. Thieves made off with 51 horns in an operation that carried all the hallmarks of an inside job—the intruders appeared to know where the keys were stored and how the alarm systems functioned. The horns weighed between 70 and 90 kilograms and were worth approximately $2 million. Days later, police investigators reported that there were two burglars, both wearing balaclavas, and no one had been arrested. Dave Bryant, shadow minister of forestry, fisheries and environment, told the South African press that the robbery raised the specter of additional attacks on the government's horn stockpiles.

Activists opposing legalization of the horn trade say this proves a point they’ve been making—that the logical end of a dehorning operation should be the destruction of the culled horns. “Maintaining stockpiles of rhino horn sustains the notion that at some point in the future, what is currently banned in international trade will be legalized again and that the stocks will be cashed in at vastly inflated costs,” says Mary Rice of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based conservation group. “Dehorning is clearly not disrupting the organized criminal networks, who are now able to get a significantly greater return on their investment by targeting the storage facilities.”

As these debates about antipoaching tactics, community engagement and legal trade become more heated, rhino populations continue to fall. If that problem isn’t solved, the rest will be academic. Bands of hunters will continue to prowl the African plains, slaughtering rhinos at a rate that will leave future generations with no other options than to study the bones and imagine the behavior of a wild animal that roamed the Earth for 14 million years. It will be a theft for the ages.