sensitive portraits of Ice Age rhinos helped to kill them off. As climate turned against the woolly megafauna with the end of the last Ice Age, human spears probably delivered the coup de grâce. Today, immense love is invested in rhinos, yet they are being slaughtered in ever greater numbers. The northern white rhino is the rarest species of African rhino. There are far greater numbers of southern white rhinos and black rhinos. But the demand in some countries for rhino horn as a traditional medicine believed to cure everything from flu to cancer is fuelling a boom in poaching. From 2007, when just 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa, the killings have grown horrifically. In 2014, 1,215 rhinos were slaughtered for their horns in South Africa. 2015 already looks certain to beat that dreadful record. The vulnerable northern white rhino has been hunted virtually to extinction – in spite of every precaution, in spite of the guards and their guns – and other varieties of African rhino are under a sustained attack from poachers that is totally out of control. The Javan rhinoceros is also on the verge of extinction. India has successfully protected the Indian rhinoceros after it was almost wiped out by British hunters in colonial times but here, too, poaching is a menace. What a majestic creature and what futile human destructiveness. Have we learned nothing