There are currently only 29,000 rhinos left in the wild, and this number continues to reduce every year as poachers continue killing these magnificent herbivores for their horns. And given that the conservation efforts are failing to stop this from happening, tourists on safaris often take advantage of what is becoming a quickly diminishing opportunity to take snapshots of the animals in their natural habitat.
However, the problem with this is that smartphones often geo-tag images, giving sophisticated poaching syndicates pinpoint coordinates to the the rhinos they so desperately covet.
For this reason, safari operators in South Africa have started advising tour attendees to disable the geo-tagging function on their smartphones in order to ensure that poachers aren’t able to use this information to track the rhinos.
This issue garnered international attention earlier this week after Twitter user Eleni de Wet shared this post on her account:
A sign of our times. Makes me sad! pic.twitter.com/PoEnwFSHgE
— Eleni de Wet (@Eleni_dW) May 4, 2014
