White Rhino, South Africa. SAVE THE RHINO © Brian Basson 2014

Poachers killed an unprecedented 1,004 rhinos across South Africa in 2013, officials announced last week, a 50 percent spike from the previous high of 668 set i...
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Poachers killed an unprecedented 1,004 rhinos across South Africa in 2013, officials announced last week, a 50 percent spike from the previous high of 668 set in 2012. The new record also marks a 4,463 percent increase in rhino poaching over the past decade.

This news comes from South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs, which is caught in an increasingly brutal war with poachers from around the world. Unlike "subsistence poaching" of the past — in which local hunters illegally killed small numbers of rhinos — today's poachers typically hail from organized crime syndicates based in Asia, travel by helicopter and carry silenced weapons with night-vision scopes to kill rhinos in bulk.
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