is lowered melancholically beneath the sinister sky, as if weighed down by fate. This is the noble head of an old warrior, his armour battered, his appetite for struggle fading. Under his immense looming shoulder, his legs protrude like squat columns from the tough tank of his body. The way his foreleg emerges from his thick coat of skin reminds us how long human beings have been wondering at the natural spectacle that is the rhino. For Sudan does not look so different from the rhinoceros that Albrecht Dürer portrayed in 1515. They have the same little legs stuck out of a majestic body and they even lower their heads in the same contemplative way. Dürer was a Renaissance artist picturing an exotic beast from the exotic lands that Europe was starting to see more and more of. In 1515, a live Indian rhinoceros was sent by the ruler of Gujarat in India to the king of Portugal: he in turn sent it to the Pope but, on the way, it died in a shipwreck. Human beings – we always kill the things we love. We have been doing so since the Ice Age. There are beautiful pictures of European woolly rhinos in caves in France that were painted up to 30,000 years ago. These ancient relatives of Sudan share his heroic bulk, mighty power and paradoxical air of gentleness. A woolly rhino in Chauvet Cave seems agile and young, a creature full of life. But the same people who painted such