Rhinos have a social network built on dung

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The last thing you want charging towards you is an angry rhino. You're better off with a bulldog doing that.

This man is by far one of the bravest people I've seen, to be able to bring your hand close to a rhino.

https://youtube.com/shorts/GEaH1N65EtI?si=SGNBWGY1j9HLSN74

But if you study these animals, like a lot of animals in the wild, they have unique habits.

I didn't realise rhinos had their own sort of noticeboard until not too long ago.. watching a documentary of them. They actually use their dung to get information.

There are these communal places called middens where rhinos go to poop. This is a communal area for rhinos to go together and deposit their dung, and other rhinos can then come to smell that dung for information about the rhinos that have recently been there. They can tell who has been in the midden, what age they are and their health. This helps other rhinos to work out if the other rhinos are in season or if they are fit enough to mate by simply being able to smell dung.

Rhinos use this to create a sort of messaging system or to put it another way, a bulleting board that is constantly updated. One rhino deposits dung, leaves their mark, and another rhino smells that mark.

When you see it this way, rhinos are far more efficient in their way of communicating than we are. We tell ourselves we have advanced means of communicating with ourselves and we still have difficulty understanding each other. Rhinos have found a way to communicate without any face to face visual contact.

If your focus is on the fact that they use dung and everything associated with it, it's quite disgusting, but when you think about it from a functional standpoint, it shows how clever nature can be by creating something that is basic and crude, which can actually serve a purpose.

This creator on YouTube calls it the rhino's own version of Facebook.

https://youtube.com/shorts/aFvt2FuAsus?si=fcA6oPFmGdHPkVm2