Vanishing Act : Animals: A world without the homely rhino? It’s possible, say the endangered creature’s friends, who are drumming up support for preservation and anti-poaching efforts.

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

“I’m damn near phobic about it,” she says, trembling ever so slightly while waiting to address an audience of fewer than two dozen at Clairemont High School. She is 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, because they represent a now-sizable percentage of a rapidly disappearing population.

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

Merz is one of a handful of people struggling to save the rhino, several subspecies of which could be gone within half a century. She recently came here to ask for money from “all these animal lovers,” whose efforts she calls “imperative.”

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 Africa and North America to preserve and breed rhinos. Although the zoo’s breeding program has produced only one of the extremely endangered black rhinos thus far, more than 100 have been born at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, an adjunct to the zoo.

“It will take a much more concerted effort by people around the world to ensure the survival of rhinos,” says Oliver Ryder, the center’s geneticist. “This is literally their twilight hour.

“It’s up to us to determine whether they’ll even be around at the millennium,” adds Ryder, who laments the fact that the rhino’s world has changed, perhaps irrevocably.

“We have to learn to preserve and breed better, and on a larger scale,” he says. “This applies to rhinos in zoos, such as ours. It applies to sanctuaries, which are scattered across Africa.”

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The decline in the overall rhino numbers is shocking, but the black rhino has been particularly hard-hit. Experts say 1 million black rhinos existed at the turn of the century, but by 1960, the number had fallen to 65,000. By 1980, the figure had sunk to 14,700. Today, only about 2,000 of the rhinos are thought to exist. (The Javanese rhino is even closer to extinction: Only 60 remain.)

Poachers deserve most of the blame for the rhino’s decline. But the international effort to stop the slaughter of rhinos is gathering momentum, and it is through this endeavor that San Diego and Kenya are now inextricably linked.

The San Diego Zoo and other zoos 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 rhino preservation and breeding.

But it’s been difficult to get people to care, activists say, mainly because 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.

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Anna Merz is valuable to the cause, many believe, because her 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 became concerned about the disappearance of the rhinos 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 says, “except the rage of seeing animals driven so close to extinction--and so little being done about it. Everyone told me (rhinos) 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’re the most fantastic animals.”

During a recent interview, Merz told the story of raising a black rhino because its mother couldn’t nurse it.

“If enough people care about rhinos, we can save them,” she says. “They are highly intelligent creatures. (This young rhino) 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’s nothing stupid about a rhino.”

Much of the rhino’s problem, Merz says, is the way it looks: It is rather homely.

“It doesn’t have that innocence about it,” she says, pausing before adding: “Rhinos have a definite PR problem.”

As she tells her listeners here and elsewhere, “People have this perception of (rhinos) as being stupid, antisocial--some prehistoric dinosaur. They’ve gotten bad press, and they have a bad reputation. People tend to care about animals and mammals if they think they’re intelligent, and I’m thinking here of the elephant, the whale, the dolphin, the tiger and the great apes.”

People relate to apes because “they’re so obviously like us,” Merz says. People “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.”

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

“Planes and helicopters have been brought (in to patrol) rhino sanctuaries at great expense,” says 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’re looking at, and we have a long way to go.”

Merz says 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 says. “It’s almost impossible for governments to enforce the laws. If poachers are found, they’re shot on the spot. If they’re confronted, a pitched battle ensues.”

Rhino horns have not diminished in value. In Yemen, they’re used as dagger handles, Merz says. In Taiwan, where black market sales are rampant, the price is said to be going up. In South Africa, it’s 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,” Merz says. “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’s almost impossible.

“The answer in the States is awareness. Our children and grandchildren won’t see (rhinos) 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.