Even though Chairman Mao himself did not believe in TCM, he called for its use over Western medicine.

The final nail in the rhinos' coffin began in the early 1950s, when Mao Zedong promoted so-called traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as a tool for unifying the country he had recently come to lead. Farmers and ranchers at the time viewed large herbivores such as rhinos as pests and dangers to their crops. Industrial agriculture came next, clearing many historic rhino habitats for fields and settlements. Widespread sports hunting in the first decades of the century quickly decimated rhino populations.

Although it had lived in these countries for centuries, the western black-like most rhinos-found itself to be incompatible with the 20th century. Historically, the western black rhino had a fairly large range across central and western Africa, with populations in modern-day Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan, making it the northernmost African rhino subspecies. It is a story of greed, indifference, hope and despair. This is the tale of how we lost one of those subspecies, the western black rhinoceros ( Diceros bicornis longipes). By 2001 that number had dropped to about 2,300 black rhinos and just three subspecies. At the beginning of the 20th century, an estimated one million black rhinoceroses from four different subspecies roamed the savannas of Africa.

Western black rhinoceros extinct