40 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 6l 



HABITS 



In disposition the white rhinoceros is mild and inoffensive. Indeed 

 its record for good behavior is quite immaculate. There are very 

 few recorded instances of authentic charges. One of these is the well 

 known assault made upon OswelFs horse by an enraged female. 

 This charge resulted fatally for the horse, whose death was due 

 chiefly to its slowness in moving out of the path of the advancing 

 rhinoceros. The rhinoceros in this case deliberately walked up to the 

 standing horse, thrust its horn into the animal's side and disem- 

 boweled it. Many hundreds of white rhinoceroses have been wounded 

 and killed in South Africa without offering to inflict any injury upon 

 their pursuers. This docility of disposition is in strange contrast to 

 the pugnaciousness and bad temper often displayed by the black 

 species. White rhinoceroses are, as a rule, found associated in small 

 family parties consisting of an old male and female, and their recent 

 offspring, usually a nursing calf, and another fully grown one. 



The sense of smell is used by the white rhinoceros as the chief 

 means for the detection and location of other animals and objects 

 generally. It is the most highly developed sense, and apparently the 

 only one employed to really identify things, sight and hearing being 

 used only as a means to warn or arouse the animal, in order that it may 

 maneuver so as to get the scent of the objects whose presence has thus 

 been made known. Enemies are winded under favorable conditions at 

 least as far as 400 or 500 yards. Their sight, however, is really feeble, 

 the eyes seldom receiving impressions of stationary objcts beyond 30 

 yards. Slowly moving objects are often not detected at 50 yards, 

 but where the motion is more rapid the sight is affected at least as far 

 as 100 or 200 yards. White rhinoceroses do not have the pugnacious 

 habit of charging up wind at an enemy, as is often done by the 

 black. Such action has been accounted for on the basis of the weak 

 vision, the rhinoceros merely coming up to within range of its eye- 

 sight. Vision, however, is never used as the determining sense in 

 such cases, smell alone having this function. When irritated by the 

 presence of an enemy the white rhinoceros moves about nervously, 

 twists its tail into a knot, cocks its ears at various angles and gazes 

 about in its bewilderment with head erect. As soon as the position of 

 the annoyance is located the animal either bolts at a fast gallop or trots 

 away more leisurely in the opposite direction. Sound is perceptible at 

 least as far as sight and is a sense of considerable keenness so far as 

 plains standards are concerned. Normally they give no evidence of a 

 voice. It is only occasionally when mortally wounded that they give 



