The vultures are startled and take flight as our pickup truck arrives at the giant carcass lying in the lowveld. They have had a week to pick its bones. All that remains of "Izzy", a six-year-old white rhino, are the curved spears of her ribcage, dismembered feet and a head infested with flies and maggots.
"She was a beautiful cow, a magnificent specimen," says Barry Bezuidenhout, the estate manager of a sprawling game ranch near South Africa's Kruger Park. "When I think of her, I get a lump in the throat."
We are at the frontline of a conflict that is threatening to turn some of South Africa's most beautiful nature reserves, a draw for tourists around the world, into lawless battlegrounds – and drive a magnificent animal towards the brink of extinction.
Some 265 rhinos have been poached so far this year, according to government figures, an average of more than one per day. This puts 2011 on course to surpass last year's record death toll of 333. In 2007, it was just 13.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/20/rhinos-threatened-extinction-cancer-cure
