>1) Rhinos are VERY valuable, far too valuable to eat normally.
This is, sadly, true. However, rhino riders do eat their animals on occasion. Excess male calves are eaten, and animals getting too old to breed or ride are killed and eaten.
2) Rhinos are very tough and not good eatting.
Pshaw! They're the best food on the plains. Ask any rhino rider. Seriously, the calves are just as tender and juicy as any other young animal, and the old rhinos aren't any more tough than an old sable or bison. You just have to boil it longer, or chop it finer. A rhino steak can be pounded thin before cooking to break up the fibers. Praxian cooks know well how to tenderize their animals.
ALSO -- to make the rhino meat most palatable (also applies to all other types of herd beasts), you need to let the meat hang for a few days or a week or even more. It gets lots more redolent and tender. This doesn't work during the dry season, so you have to pound it or chop finely instead.
3) Rhino clans are very small (generally one one family) and there is far too >much meat on a rhino to use so it is wasteful to butcher one.
ALL Praxians are expert at making jerky and pemmican. No meat on any animal, no matter how gigantic, is ever wasted.
>4) Rhino riders generally raid other tribes and steal their
animals to eat.
Rhino riders, in fact, rely mainly upon hunting and gathering. No tribe is able to survive primarily on raiding to survive, for raiding is too dangerous and attrition will destroy the tribe over time.
>5) Other tribes generally don't bother to raid the rhino riders
This is as much because the rhino riders are rare as anything else. Their animals are large, but that's good. They're ill-tempered, but not as ill-tempered as a high llama. They breed slow, but you don't allow captive animals to breed anyway.
>The rhino people are not one of the five great tribes of Prax.
The Five Great Tribes got their name because they were the five biggest. At the Dawn, the Rhino Riders were as large and as important as any of the other five -- if someone had invented a Nomad Gods game for the First Age, it would have included the Six Great Tribes of Prax. And probably would have had Plains Elk, Nose-Horn, and Long-Noses among the Independents.
>They are also IMO not fully part of the covenant of Waha.
Them's fighting words. They are totally and utterly part of the covenant. However, they
>The poor breeding rate means that the rhino riders will never be a
major
>force,
Why does Lewis keep saying rhinos breed slowly? They only breed a little more slowly than high llamas, and tons faster than herd men.
BREEDING SPEED OF RHINOS -- Breeding occurs year-round, and the gestation period is a year and a half. The calf weighs 40-65 kg (90-150 lbs) and is wobbly for 2-3 days. When alarmed, the calf runs _ahead_ of its mother, unlike most other herd beasts, which follow their mothers. Weaning commenses at only 2 months, but nursing continues sporadically for over a year. Females give birth every 2-3 years, and drive off their latest calf just before they give birth. Sexual maturity comes at 4-5 years, but females won't have their first calf till they're 7 or so, and most males won't mate till they're at least 10-12. They live up to 40-50 years, and females remain fertile almost till they die.
Most important is that rhinos live a very long time, and have a very long breeding lifespan -- a female rhino will breed the age of 7 till 40 or more, which means it will have 11-17 calves in its lifetime, assuming she never twins. A high llama cow stops breeding at age 20 or so, breeds every two years, and is sexually (but not physically) mature at age 3.5 -- in her lifetime, she'll have about 6-10 calves. Bison and sables have similar numbers, though impalas do breed somewhat more quickly.
It is not breeding rate that determines a beasts' ability to dominate terrain -- it is a combination of breeding rate and longevity/hardiness. All animals reproduce more quickly than their environment can handle. Rhinos are no different.
Rhino Riders are kept small in numbers because of their original social system, not because of their animals. The Rhino riders are a solitude-loving folk, who generally live in small family groups. Both the other Praxians and the Rhino folk themselves agree that this is what led to their near-demise, as other, better-organized, peoples bushwhacked the Rhino folk and overcame them one by one. The Rhino Riders still live in small family groups, but they are now organized into septs, and in any given area, all the family groups of a sept are generally no more than an hour's ride from the next family group, and if a family is raided, the avenging Rhino patrols are on the move soon.
They have tiny little "herds", occasionally consisting of just one rhino, the father's personal steed! Alone among the Praxian tribes, they often keep foreign animals to _milk_, rather than to fatten for slaughter. They probably eat more vegetable matter than any other tribe, but this doesn't mean they don't like to hunt. They do, but their steeds aren't suitable for all hunting styles. So they are hunter-gatherers, like other tribes who cannot live off their beasts. This, too, is the Way of Waha.
A rhino rider is "living off his beast" when he uses it to hunt and defend his family just as much as is a bison rider living on bison steaks and kvass. The rhino survives because its owner tends it, and the owner survives because the rhino supports him.
Sandy P.
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