I like to keep an eye on the analytics reports for savingrhinos.org. The other day, I saw a search query I didn’t like one bit: ‘Rhino Horn Jambiyas’.

A Jambiya is a dagger handle made out of rhino horn, and these useless things are created in Yemen.

It is chilling to think that someone is “out there” looking for these horrid things. Did they want to purchase one? Did they want to obtain it for an online auction? If they can’t find one “ready-made” online, where will they turn next?

I do not think that this searcher was looking for rhino-friendly information. This is because they immediately clicked away from the home page of the web site (not the typical visitor, who our analytics tells us views several pages per visit).

If this person was doing rhino-friendly research, our reports would have shown that they stayed long enough to locate the word “jambiya”, nearly at the end of the home page, and most likely clicked at least one more page to locate additional information about the topic, for example, the FAQ page (the second most-visited page on our site, next to the home page).

(Sigh.)

Rhishja Cota-Larson

I am the founder of Saving Rhinos LLC, which publishes news and information about the global rhino crisis. Besides writing Rhino Horn is Not Medicine, I am the author of the book Murder, Myths & Medicine, the Editor of Project Pangolin, and a writer for the environmental news blog Planetsave. When I'm not blogging about the illegal wildlife trade, I like to rock out to live music.

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