It's become a poignant pastime, observing endangered animals in the wild. Last week I spotted seven rhino while visiting South Africa's Kruger National Park on a family holiday.
We'd been in the vast wilderness reserve for less than an hour when we encountered the first lot, two white rhino blissfully asleep in the shade of a tree just off a lonely dirt road in the park's south.
They weren't immediately discernible through the gauze of afternoon sunlight and brittle winter bush, and when finally their bulky shapes came into focus they seemed like a beautiful, sacred gift.
It was a bittersweet sight. In the 13 years since we were last in this park — a place we visited frequently before leaving South Africa — rhino poaching has become commonplace. One relative told me a rhino is killed here every seven hours. Another said she'd seen hyenas feasting on the body of a rhino, its horn hacked off in an apparent poaching.
In 2007, 13 rhinos were recorded as having been poached in South Africa; by 2014 that number had risen to 1215.
But it's not just rhino, with their apparently curative and aphrodisiacal horns beloved of Asians, that are subject to such brutality.
The epidemic of African wildlife poaching returned to the headlines this week with news that an American hunter had killed a much-loved lion, Cecil, in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park. Cecil, who had been collared by the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford University as part of a long-term study, was allegedly lured out of the park with fresh bait and shot with a bow and arrow. The injured animal was then tracked for around 40 hours before finally being put out of his misery.
The hunter, identified as Minneapolis dentist Walter Palmer, appears contrite, claiming he wasn't aware he'd breached the terms of his hunting permit. But the images of his previous kills now circulating on social media paint a bloodthirsty picture: a beaming Palmer squats beside a white rhino, a quiver of arrows propped against its dead body; a grinning Palmer stands behind a dead lion, its mighty head drooping and defeated; a bare-chested Palmer grips a bleeding, lifeless leopard.
The idea that a man might get pleasure from killing an animal that is worthless to him in any utilitarian sense is deeply disturbing. While hunting for subsistence or culling for game management can be justified, it's retrograde in this era of animal rights awareness for