As a young child, rhinos always fascinated Diana. She was born in New Mexico and raised in Gallup. Around the age of eight, she expressed an interest in animals and told her father she wanted to run a pet store. He introduced her to the local veterinarian, who educated her about what his job entailed. She was enthralled from that moment on, and has never wanted to do anything else. When she was a senior in veterinary school, she had the opportunity to work with a baby Rhino from the Denver Zoo.
In 2017, she travelled to South Africa to fulfill a lifelong dream of seeing rhino in the wild. For the past seven years, she has been traveling to South Africa working on the front lines of the poaching crisis. Rhinos are being killed in unprecedented numbers so that their horns, believed by some cultures to possess potent medicinal properties, can be sold for huge sums on the black market. During her first visit, there were 18,000 white rhino and 2,500 black rhino at Kruger National Park in South Africa. In 2022, only 3,500 white rhino and 250 black rhino remained. If we don’t stand to action, rhinos will go extinct within five years.
Please join us at 2 PM on Saturday, April 22 at the Placitas Community Library, to learn about what is happening to our precious rhino and what you can do to help us save this iconic species.
