Cost of the damage? There’s no charge!
0 Comments | Milton Keynes Citizen (Milton Keynes, England), Feb 5, 2004
A GROUP of teenagers say their car was lifted inches off the ground by an angry rhinoceros’s horn at Woburn Safari Park.
But the park has played down the incident saying there was “no charge”.
The three youths had been for an afternoon drive through an enclosure in their white Vauxhall Corsa when they met Pongola, a white female rhino.
Driver Mark Freeman, from Ashley Green, Herts, said: “The rhino was standing there in the middle of the road and would not let us pass.
“It was scary – we didn’t know what it was going to do next.”
Mark and his two passengers say the rhino then charged the car and pushed its horn under the front wing.
It retreated and then went for the wing again, lifting the Corsa several inches off the road. Mark, aged 18, blew his horn and the frightened Pongola galloped off.
“I’ve got a great trophy – a hubcap with a horn-shaped hole in it,” he added.
Pongola, one of the park’s two female white rhinos, was brought over to Woburn last summer from Prague Zoo which had been devastated by floods.
A park spokesman said that a ranger had witnessed the whole incident which begun with the two rhinos crossing the road to their shelter.
She said: “All the cars were asked to move on by the ranger and the other cars complied with this request, but the car in question did not, and did not move even when the ranger asked a second time.
“The rhino was unsettled by the proximity of the white Corsa and caused some damage to the nearside of the car above the wheel arch.”
richard.cooper@mkcitizen.co.uk