Poachers kill 3 rhinos a day... It rhinois so painful when we lose those we are trying to save

programme co-ordinator Martin Mulama, who has worked with the endangered species for 20 years.

“I am utterly devastated,” said Martin, 53. “At a time when three rhinos are killed a day by poachers, the loss is particularly painful for those of us fighting to protect them.”

He explained why conservationists were forced to adopt the high-risk relocation strategy. He told me there were more than 70,000 black rhinos in the wild in the 1960s, but just 2,410 by 1995 because of poaching.

On October 9, 1961, the Mirror featured a shocking photograph of rhino on the front page, headlined “Doomed”. Our ground-breaking seven-page expose followed the formation of the World Wildlife Fund a few weeks earlier, and brought vital attention to a little-known crisis.

“Doomed to disappear from the face of the earth due to Man’s FOLLY, GREED, NEGLECT,” the article continued. “Unless something is done swiftly, animals like this rhinoceros will soon be as dead as the dodo.”

Money donated by readers helped the WWF to purchase land bordering Lake Nakuru, northern Kenya, to create a reserve in which rhinos later thrived. Yet the slaughter continued unabated elsewhere.

Between 1970 and 1992, around 96% of black rhinos were lost to guntoting poachers who fuelled the rhino horn trade.

Backed by cartels and terror groups, they cut off the rhinos’ horns and left their carcasses to rot in the blistering sun.

The market is fed by the misguided belief in Vietnam and, increasingly, in China that rhino horn has medicinal properties.

In fact – as we saw when vets drilled a hole in Jack’s horn to fit a microchip and tracker transmitter – rhino horn is made of keratin, just like human hair and finger nails. Following