Prince William will attend an event celebrating the Tusk Rhino Trail in the Kensington Palace Gardens next Monday.
The Tusk Rhino Trail is an art installation that has popped up all over London and celebrates the African rhino to highlight the animal’s dwindling population due to illegal poaching.
“The illegal wildlife trade is now the fourth largest criminal industry in the world, after drugs, arms and human trafficking,” says Kensington Palace.
When the Tusk Rhino Trail is installed at the Kensington Palace Gardens, Prince William will see seven of the 21 rhinos that were designed by internationally recognized artists; and meet illustrator Axel Scheffler, who has designed one of the rhinos.
The Tusk Rhino Trail will be displayed at various iconic spots throughout London until World Rhino Day on 22 September. Afterwards, they will be auctioned at Christie’s on 9 October to raise funds for Tusk.
Tusk was founded in 1990 and has invested over £40 million into field projects across 21 African countries to “protect wildlife, and help to alleviate poverty through sustainable development and education.”
Prince William is active in supporting the end of poaching and illegal wildlife trade, and has been the Royal Patron of Tusk Trust since 2005.
On World Rhino Day in 2016, Prince William spoke of the need to stop poaching African rhinos.
The rhino, he said, is “a species that, due to demand for its horn, is being killed at a rate of nearly three animals a day. Rhinos face extinction in our lifetimes as we struggled to correct lies about the supposed benefits of using its horn as a drug.
“It is some of the world’s poorest people who will suffer when their natural resources are stripped from them illegally and brutally. It is families in the world’s most vulnerable regions who suffer when two rangers are killed every week on the frontline of this fight… Ladies and gentlemen, I am not prepared to be part of a generation that lets those iconic species disappear from the wild.”
