Cross River Gorilla

You'll only find me living in the Congo Basin,

Please help in my conservation, and not my doom to hasten.

I'm not as numerous as the western lowland Gorilla,

My numbers of two hundred, is to me a total horror.

Poaching, disease and habitat destruction,

Critically causing my species, near future extinction.

Vegetarian, I feed on stems, bamboo shoots and just fruit,

For the manner in which my kind have had to die, as a human please feel hurt.

The largest living primate, with a well developed social structure,

Exhibiting behaviour and emotions like humans, laughing and feeling sad at our butcher.

Charismatic and intelligent, less than two percent does even our DNA differ,

I am your closet cousin, after smaller chimps and bonobos, like you I shiver.

We live as individuals a couple, or up to forty as a group round a head male of family.

As adult male I can weigh upto four forty pounds, six foot tall and rather gangly.

As an adult male of fourteen I develop a silverback of white hair,

A baby in 6 years is slow a growth, our population can't survive I do despair

It's across central Africa, illegal trade of me and other great apes, does prevail

So please provide me sanctuary, demand wildlife laws, ones that don't so simply me fail.

Black Rhino

Killed like vermin, by European hunters were we,

Five or six killed in a day, for food or simple glee.

Our decline in population, at the hand of European settlers,

With guns they would choose to kill, and to so better us.

A further cost of the 20th century, colonization of Africa,

 Establishing farms and plantations, continuing a senseless slaughter.

. We are regarded as pests, and exterminated at all cost,

“DOOMED!” was the headline in 1961, due to the numbers of our loss.

 A result of man's folly, greed and wholesale neglect,

So please support our conservation effort, as your charity select.  

Help in the fight, to protect me and my kind,

For soon, there wont be any of us left around to find.