“Canine” is a film that will premiere next month at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
Here is more information about it, along with a trailer:
Now, this is not a movie blog but the film is relevant because I think I know the rhino shown in that trailer — one of the animals AK will be helping to protect.
We haven’t actually met, of course. It’s wild and I have never been to Namibia.
But in the last few weeks I have been watching a waterhole cam in Etosha Park —
This one, which is live and currently focused on a couple of sunbathing turtles — who knows what it will be showing when you see it! There is a lot of wildlife there.
One night, a rhinoceros was browsing — first one I’d ever seen, live or on a cam.
I must have been expecting a horned hippo because all the bony angles on the rhino looked to me as though it was sick; however, the moderator said the animal looked alright to her.
So then I really looked at rhinos over the next few visits and realized just how strange they appear — like some cubist multidimensional being that somehow got crammed into our space-time continuum. Even healthy, they are round and angular at the same time!
They are ponderously large, too, and yet the rhinos all walked gracefully through the vegetation and stones of the waterhole shore, daintily stepping along.
They do stand still for long periods, making me again think that they might be ill. A Wikipedia look-up, however, showed me that rhinos have a very small brain handling all that bulk.
So, I guess, it takes them time to do things.
Then I saw the mother and calf and recognized the same close attachment and reactivity there as in any other mammal.
By now, of course, I was (and am) hooked on rhinos.
My readings on the cat family have also shown me that the northern continents used to be full of similarly strange-looking “tank animals,” though at the moment these alone are among the megafauna survivors of that end-Pleistocene extinction, hanging on in Africa.
It is, then, a privilege to see such living reminders of earlier, weirder days for life on Earth.
I can’t remember now if it was the mother rhino who was missing a horn, or one of the others.
In any event, upon seeing its neat stump, I realized that conservationists had probably done it to protect the beast.
Poachers kill them, remove the horn (valued for its “magical” powers), and leave the carcass.
A little of the horn surgery is shown in the “Canine” trailer up above, whether on “my” Etosha rhino or some other one.
I’m glad they’re sending AK in, though poachers might shoot the dog. Some criminals are really stupid.
Most, though, would think twice about it, recognizing that the Tribeca premiere makes AK an international figure, beloved by some powerful people in this world who are far beyond the reach of local politics and local corruption.
Good luck, AK, and go get ’em!
A little lagniappe:
This past Thursday, three lionesses showed up on one side of the pool (on the other side was a rhino, but the cam zoomed in on the charismatic cats):
The three settled down gradually, starting with the hairy lady on the left here:
One lioness wandered off, while the other two curled up, with their rear ends almost touching and their heads held high, in an alert pose.
I’ve seen lions do that on cam while waiting for a baby elephant to get juuuust far enough away from Mom for an attack (it didn’t and Mom eventually charged the cats, chasing them off).
So I figured maybe the girls were hunting after all, especially since that third lioness was out of sight.
The rhino must have felt it, too, because it walked over to the two reclining cats, who slowly got up. One disappeared and the other sort of led the rhino around the shore a bit.
You can’t really see it clearly but here they are:
With two cats now lurking somewhere in the night nearby, the rhino apparently sensed danger and got a tad more aggressive — just a tad, because it’s rather small and there are three of them — not following any more but taking a few short quick steps towards the one visible lioness as if it was going to charge.
The cat did not call its bluff and strolled off, as did the rhino, who disappeared while the lioness came back and curled up on the ground again — apparently she was in a restful mood.
At this point a song came to me and I switched over to —
Featured image: Roger de la Harpe/Shutterstock
Flight To Wonder 