The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles The Red List, and which is widely recognised as the most comprehensive method for evaluating the conservation status of animal and plant species around the world, has declared the subspecies, the western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes), as extinct.

The list has also recorded the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), another subspecies from central Africa, as possibly extinct.

The IUCN on the western black rhino’s extinction:

The last extensive survey of possible rhino range in the last known range state, Cameroon in 2006, failed to find any rhino or signs of rhino (dung, spoor or signs of feeding) but did find evidence of widespread wildlife poaching and local rhino monitors faking rhino spoor in the absence of any surviving rhino.

There have not been any reports of any sightings or signs since 2006. Given the wildlife poaching taking place, lack of political will and conservation effort by Cameroon conservation authorities in the past, and increasing illegal demand for rhino horn and associated increased commercial rhino poaching in other range states, it is highly probable that this subspecies is now extinct.

Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, told BBC News:

They had the misfortune of occurring in places where we simply weren’t able to get the necessary security in place.

You’ve got to imagine an animal walking around with a gold horn; that’s what you’re looking at, that’s the value and that’s why you need incredibly high security.

Statistics for South African rhino poaching this year are almost impossible to monitor at the moment, and the latest figures available go like this:

Rhino Death toll as of this week: Monday: 347, Tuesday: 349, Wednesday morning: 353, Wednesday afternoon: 362.

Black and white rhino populations elsewhere have been expanding, but it seems poachers and users of the horn that has no medicinal value whatsoever, will continue at nothing to destroy an animal that has existed for millennia.

[Sources: BBC, IUCN, RhinoConservation]