The great one-Horned Asian Rhinoceros is one of the rare beautiful animals found in Nepal . In recent years its population has been growing slowly, thanks to habitat and protection programs in places like Nepal 's Royal Chitwan National Park . It is a huge vegetarian that spends its days amid tall grasses and swampy wallows. Very large, brownish gray, with plate-like pleats to their thick skin, greater one-horned Asian rhinoceroses are built somewhat like tanks with skinny, short legs. Their hearing and sense of smell are acute, but these animals have poor vision and cannot see a non-moving animal 100 feet away. Present in both males and females, but not newborn young, the distinctive horn is made of keratin-the same protein that forms fingernails and the covering of cow horns.

Males are noticeably larger than females, standing five and a half to six feet tall, weighing up to 5,000 pounds, and reaching up to 12 feet long. It has a life expectancy of some 47 years in the zoo but unfortunately very much shorter in the wild. The greater one-horned Asian rhinoceros is listed as endangered on the World Conservation Union's (IUCN's) Red List of Threatened Animals. The one-horned Asian rhinoceroses have drastically declined since the early part of the 20 th century, as their riparian (river-side) grasslands were replaced by farmland. Trophy hunting and a bounty placed on rhinoceroses by tea growers (the animals chewed their crops) pushed them to the brink of extinction. Today, the biggest problems are that very little prime habitat remains and poachers shoot the animals for their horns and other parts, which are used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. It is time before we make a constant effort to save this beautiful creature.