Rhinos’ Twilight Hour Grows Dim : Kenyan Activist, San Diego Zoo Fight to Preserve Endangered Beast

Anna Merz is terrified. She hates speaking to “large groups of people,” given that she prefers animals to people.

“I am damn near phobic about it!” she said of public speaking, trembling ever so slightly while waiting to address fewer than two dozen people at Clairemont High School, hoping to sell them on the dire need to save one of the world’s most endangered species:

The rhinoceros.

Merz, 61, lives alone on a farm in Kenya. She shares 61,000 acres with four dogs, some chickens and 24 rhinos. “Survivors,” she calls the last group, for they represent a now-sizable percentage of a population that is rapidly disappearing.

With her own money and her own effort, Merz founded a well-guarded sanctuary designed to protect rhinos from the hordes of poachers that crisscross Africa hoping to “bag” the rare and hard-to-get horns that fetch $60,000 on black markets in Taiwan and Yemen.

Merz is one of a handful of people around the world struggling to save the embattled beast, several species of which could be gone within half a century. She recently came to San Diego to ask for money from “all these animal lovers,” whose efforts she calls imperative.

Hence the risk of uttering words to “more than two people in a room at one time.”

Merz is joined in the save-the-rhino crusade by the San Diego Zoo, which, through its Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species, is aiding efforts in both Africa and North America to preserve and breed rhinos.

Oliver Ryder, the center’s geneticist, spent three months in Kenya in 1990. Scientists from Kenya and other countries have come to Balboa Park to benefit from the zoo’s expertise. But much more needs to be done, Ryder said, and even then, the future is bleak.

“It will take a much more concerted effort by people around the world to ensure the survival of rhinos. This is literally their twilight hour,” he said. “It is up to us to determine whether they will even be around at the millennium.”

Ryder applauds the efforts of Merz and others but laments that the rhino’s world has changed, perhaps irrevocably.

“We have to learn to preserve and breed better, and on a larger scale,” he said. “This applies to rhinos in zoos, such as ours. It applies to sanctuaries, which are scattered across Africa. They represent, on one hand, our best hope for preserving this species in the wild.

“But on the other, they are--despite fine intentions--a pitiful and shameful remnant of the former distribution of rhinos, which once roamed freely across the African continent.”

The San Diego Zoo’s genetic breeding program has seen the birth of only one black rhino at the zoo itself, and that happened last week--a male named Werikhe, after rhino activist Michael Werikhe.

The more impressive numbers are at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, where zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett said more than 100 have been born over a 20-year period.

Those include southern white rhinos, black rhinos and Indian rhinos, Jouett said, adding that during the past two years, the zoo has raised more than $50,000 for Werikhe, who has used it to “fence off sanctuaries and buy trucks and equipment for people guarding individual rhinos or groups of rhinos.”

Although Merz is an increasingly active voice in the rhino movement, Jouett said Werikhe is the best-known activist, having initiated rhino projects in six African countries on behalf of the East African Wildlife Society and staged walks across Africa, the United States and Europe to raise money for rhino preservation.

By almost any reckoning, the dwindling numbers are shocking. The black rhino has been a particular victim. One million black rhinos existed at the turn of the century, experts say. By 1960, the number had fallen to 65,000. By 1980, the figure had sunk to 14,700.

Today, no more than 2,000 are thought to exist, and those are disappearing fast.

Poachers are blamed almost exclusively for what many call a crime of epic proportions. Slowly, the international effort to stop the genocide of all species of rhinos is gathering momentum. It is in this way that San Diego and Kenya are now inextricably linked.

Because of its role, the San Diego Zoo and others across the country have emerged as focal points of fund- and consciousness-raising. Experts agree that money leads to education and awareness, which are vital to preservation and genetic breeding.

In other words, it has been difficult getting people to care, experts say, one theory being that the save-the-rhino movement hasn’t been romanticized or publicized in quite the same way as similar efforts for the whale, dolphin and spotted owl.

Merz is valuable to the cause, many believe, because her individual story is so inspiring. A lean, intense woman with a narrow, angular face and a rapid, articulate delivery, she attacks her subject with evangelical fervor--despite the nervousness.

Born in England and trained as a lawyer, she worked briefly as an engineer in Ghana, where she first grew concerned over the state of the disappearing rhino and the cavalier attitude of the poachers who claimed them.

“The rhino didn’t really arouse any passions in me when I first started this exercise,” she said, “except the rage of seeing animals driven so close to extinction--and so little being done about it. Everyone told me they were stupid and aggressive and bad-tempered. It didn’t take long to realize that this was a total lie.”

Merz now sees the rhino as “beautiful, elegant, incredibly intelligent. They are the most fantastic animals.”

During a recent interview at her farm in Kenya, Merz told the story of raising, from the time it was two days old, a black rhino cow whose mother couldn’t nurse her.

“If enough people care about rhinos, we can save them,” she said. “They are highly intelligent creatures. She is far more intelligent than myself. She understands me 50 times better than I understand her.

“The first time she watched me unhook the gate to keep her in the boma (the area where she stays), it took her an hour to unhook it. The second time, it took her 30 minutes, and the third time, it took her 30 seconds. There is nothing stupid about a rhino.”

Much of the rhino’s problem, Merz said, is the way it looks. It isn’t sleek and graceful, like the dolphin; or athletic, despite its size, like the whale; or capable of inspiring great sympathy, like the spotted owl.

“It doesn’t have that innocence about it,” she said. “Rhinos have a definite PR problem.”

As she tells her listeners in San Diego and elsewhere around the world, “People have this perception of them as being stupid, antisocial--some prehistoric dinosaur. They have gotten bad press, and they have a bad reputation. People tend to care about animals and mammals if they think they are intelligent, and I am thinking here of the elephant, the whale, the dolphin, the tiger and the great apes.”

People relate to apes because “they are so obviously like us,” she said. “They relate to elephants because they have a trunk, which some people perceive as a hand. We relate to things that behave in the way we do. Because an animal doesn’t have a method of communication that comes close to ours, we think it doesn’t communicate--at all!”

During her recent visit, Merz toured the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Sea World and came away with mixed feelings. She sees such places as having enormous power but regards them as “necessary evils . . . nothing more.” She also finds some zoo scientists “condescending, imperious, not really wanting to connect with people in the field--like me.”

“I don’t think most zoos around your country--and I don’t mean the one in San Diego--are doing as much as they could be and should be,” she said. “And I despise the ways in which some of these places capture animals,” citing, in particular, Sea World’s seizure and training of great whales.

She saw a dolphin show at Sea World and a black-bear show at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and while marveling at the intelligence of such animals, said, “I felt sick to my stomach.”

“I don’t like seeing a black bear on a chain made to do parlor tricks,” she said. “It is wrong--it is making a fool of the animal, and we shouldn’t make fools of animals. I don’t like animals in zoos. Period. But zoos have a role to play in breeding endangered species and in educating the public, and it is a role the rhino, for one, can’t live without. It may not be a marriage the rhino, or I, likes very much, but it is a marriage we have to have.”

Merz’s critics say her sanctuary is a noble, but small-scale, effort, and that such endeavors must be broadened and carry the backing of governments worldwide if they have even a chance to succeed. But with all their limitations, experts agree: Sanctuaries are the rhino’s best hope, at least at the moment.

“Planes and helicopters have been brought into rhino sanctuaries at great expense,” said the San Diego Zoo’s Ryder. “Rhinos have been dehorned to try to remove the incentive for killing them. But in the face of all this, has it been successful?

“With the rhino population at such a low level, I can’t say anti-poaching efforts have been successful. The only method that has worked at all is enclosing them--fencing them in, in sanctuaries.

“One can say that sanctuaries are the only viable option for securing the rhino population, for preventing their complete decimation. Whether sanctuaries can actually represent a long-term method (of preservation) becomes a matter of increasing concern. There are so many questions.

“Are the capacities of sanctuaries enough to ensure a viable population of rhinos? Will it be necessary to move rhinos? Will they degrade their own habitat? Will they eat everything on the sanctuaries? These are the things we are looking at, and, we have a long way to go.”

Merz said that, with the backing of such “powerful organizations” as the San Diego Zoological Society, the Kenyan government, for one, has “done all it can” to try to eradicate poaching.

“But so much of Africa is bush,” she said. “It is almost impossible for governments to enforce the laws. If poachers are found, they are shot on the spot. If they are confronted, a pitched battle ensues. Most of the poachers are from Somalia, and they are nothing more than armed, paid mercenaries.”

Rhino horns have not diminished in value. In Yemen, they are used as dagger handles, she said. In Taiwan, where black market sales are rampant, the price is said to be going up. In South Africa, it is still legal to “trophy hunt” the white rhino, which Merz and others find “reprehensible.”

“As long as the rhino is carrying the most expensive commodity on its nose, it can’t be free,” she said. “The trade has to be tackled. It can be tackled in the United States and Europe, but in the Middle East, where a pound of horn goes for $50,000, it is almost impossible.

“The answer in the States is awareness. Our children and grandchildren won’t see them if something isn’t done. And if that isn’t a crime, I don’t know what is.”

Times staff photographer Gail Fisher contributed to this report.