Rhino

A dedicated park ranger has protected his population of critically endangered black rhinos so well that they have run out of space. Cornered by ruthless poachers, the rhinos are at risk of turning on each other. His team must implement a daring plan to move 21 rhinos across the country and open a new safe haven.

Though it’s called “Rhino”, it is really more of a filmed critique of life in rural Kenya as it deals with the consequences of a four-year drought. With the rivers running low and the animals forced to forage even more frugally than usual, we are introduced to the dedicated rangers in two of the country’s game conservancies where they hope to restore the dwindling rhinoceros population and keep them safe from poachers, bandits and each other. With the weather conditions worsening and impacting on water and crop supplies, increasingly lawless renegades are marauding the countryside stealing herds from the farmers and endangering the people who are trying to relocate some of these beasts to an adjacent site where they can more readily establish their ten square kilometre territories. The photography is intimate and there are several personalities encountered en-route as we spend our time travelling the communities that straddle these wide sections of the country. What this doesn’t really tell us, though, is much about the creatures themselves. There are white and black rhinos, but we don’t really learn much about them or their eating/family/breeding habits. We see a little of their perilous rutting rituals but we don’t really take advantage of the extensive tracking technology to spend enough time watching them in the wild. Indeed, too much of this is spent discussing topics away from those of the wilderness I turned up to see. Even when the torrents finally come, we don’t really get any appreciation of the scale of those inundations nor really of the scale of impact they have on the environment. It’s still interesting and it certainly emphasises the efforts being made by both the the Kenyan authorities and it’s increasingly better educated population to protect these animals and, of course, there is some stunning photography of the terrain and the wildlife, but I was a bit disappointed.