
The Last Rhino
South Africa holds the largest wild rhino population left on the continent, which is exactly why it has become the center of a poaching crisis. Al Jazeera correspondent Jonah Hull travels the country to trace how rhino horn, now worth more per gram than gold on black markets in Asia, has turned a protected species into a target for organized crime. The film lays out the numbers plainly: South Africa lost 333 rhinos to poachers in 2010, and officials interviewed expect that toll to roughly double by 2012. Hull's reporting follows the mechanics of the trade, poaching gangs working by helicopter with tranquilizer darts and chainsaws to remove horns from animals sometimes still alive, and the corruption and demand driving it from rural reserves to overseas buyers. Conservationists, rangers, and officials describe a species that survived for millennia largely because of that horn, now being pushed toward extinction because of it. The film stays close to the people fighting the trade and the ones profiting from it, without offering a tidy resolution.