What is an endangered animal? Is it an insect? Is it a type of animal? No way! An endangered animal is an animal that is dying off from loss of habitat, poaching, or pollution. Loss of habitat is when an animal is losing it's ecosystem. An ecosystem is a community of plants and animals and their surroundings living together as a unit. Poaching is when people kill off animals illegally. Some animals that are commonly poached include elephants, bisons, rhinos, and bears. I think this way of killing animals is the worst way and hope that in the future it will be easier to enforce the laws protecting these animals. Pollution as everyone knows affects everything including animals. For example, oil spills destroy all types of sealife.
The endangered animal I have chosen to discuss is the rhinoceros or rhino for short. There are five types of rhinos, the White, Black, Indian, Javan and Sumatran. Although they vary in size and appearance some things all rhinos have in common is a large head, short neck, broad chest and very thick short legs with three toes on each foot and one hoof on every toe. All rhinos are also vegetarians and never eat meat. A rhino has very poor eyesight and cannot even tell a man from a tree from 15 feet away! But although rhinos have a very poor range of vision, they have a very keen sense of smell.
Rhinos are found only in Asia and Africa. They live in different habitats from dry grasslands to swamps. They eat shrubs, grass, leaves, and roots. Rhinos live in areas that are usually very hot and where there are many insects. But birds call oxpeckers perch on the backs of the rhino and eat them up.
Rhinos are very big and different from all other animals. They are the second largest land mammal after elephants and can weigh as much as 50 average men! Now that's big! The word rhinoceros comes from two ancient Greek words - "rhino" means horn and "ceros" means nose. The rhinoceros is the only animal in the world that has horns on its nose. How many horns does a rhino have? The answer is 1 or 2 depending on the species.
Rhino horns are worth a lot of money and people kill them just to obtain the horns. Horns from rhinos are not made of ivory, but keratin, the same thing our fingernails are made out of. But some people think the horn has magical powers or some kind of medicine to heal certain diseases. Medical tests have proven that this is not true. Even so people keep killing off rhinos and their population has declined rapidly over the last 10 years. There are some programs working to protect the rhino from poachers, but only a few have been effective. I myself hope the population rises because if not, all rhinos will be on the brink of extinction very soon.