A rhinoceros horn is not ivory and it is not bone. It is keratin, the same protein your fingernails and your hair are made of, packed into a solid cone that grows out of a patch of skin on the animal's face.
Hold onto that, because it is the engine of this book.
Big Game is the third FunJungle novel. Teddy Fitzroy lives at an enormous zoo and theme park in Texas where his parents work, and Rhonda, the park's greater one-horned rhinoceros, is pregnant, endangered, and being shot at. Security goes up and it is not enough. For the first time the head of the park asks Teddy to investigate rather than chasing him off for it, which is a nice payoff if your child has read the earlier ones and costs nothing at all if this is the first.
The science it actually teaches
This is why it sits on our Stealth Science shelf. The mystery cannot be solved without understanding why a rhinoceros is worth more dead than alive, and that is a real conservation problem, not one somebody made up for a plot.
Start with the horn. It is not magic. It is compressed keratin, chemically closer to a hoof than to a tusk, and if you cut it off it grows back from the base the way a fingernail does. Every claim ever made about grinding it up and swallowing it runs straight into that fact and none of them survive the collision.
So why will somebody kill for it. Because a black market prices it by weight, and that price is set by belief rather than by chemistry. This is the hardest idea in the book and the most useful one, and a nine year old can carry it: a thing can be worth a fortune and worth nothing at the same time, depending on whether you ask a buyer or a chemist.
Then the species. The greater one-horned rhinoceros is a real animal with a real history. It was hunted down to a remnant and pulled back by decades of hard protection work. It is one of the better arguments going that conservation is not a lost cause.
Then the pregnancy, which is the quiet horror sitting under the whole plot. A rhinoceros carries one calf for around sixteen months and produces one at a time. An animal breeding that slowly cannot replace what a rifle takes. That arithmetic is the reason one pregnant female at one zoo is worth a novel's worth of security.
And the horn growing back is not a throwaway line. It is exactly why keepers and reserve managers cut the horns off living rhinoceroses on purpose. The animal walks away. The poacher gets nothing.
What the book does not do is teach rhinoceros anatomy or behavior in any depth. Your child will not finish it knowing how the animal sees or what it browses on. This is a mystery, and the science it carries is the economics of poaching, which happens to be the part most nature books leave out.
The child it lands with
The nine or ten year old who is deep in a mystery phase and getting nothing out of it but plot. This one has something underneath the plot.
Also the animal kid who has hit the wall where every animal book is either a picture book or a sad one. Big Game is neither. It is funny and fast and it takes poaching seriously inside the same two hundred pages.
And the reluctant reader at the top of the band. Short chapters, constant motion, and jokes about animal waste is a combination that gets books finished, whatever you think of it.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the point where the horn's value comes up and put one question on the table. If the horn is the same material as a fingernail, why is it worth more than gold by weight?
Let your child sit in that for a minute. The answer is not chemistry. The answer is that enough people believe it works, and belief on its own is enough to set a price and pay for a rifle. That is the moment a mystery novel turns into an economics lesson without asking anyone's permission.
If the first question lands, there is a second one worth the time. What would have to change for the horn to be worthless?
What to know going in
An animal is shot at repeatedly in this book and animals get hurt. Nothing is dwelt on and the book is not grim, but poaching means killing and Gibbs does not pretend otherwise. If a hunting scene in something else upset your child, this will land in the same place.
Then the humour, which parents do not get warned about often enough. Gibbs writes broad, loud, physical comedy aimed squarely at nine year olds, and a great deal of it involves animal waste, vomit, smells, and people falling into things. It is genuinely funny and it is genuinely crude, and the crude arrives well before the conservation argument does. Some families love the whole package and some are worn out by chapter four. Read three pages standing up before you decide.
Teddy is also in real danger more than once, including from adults holding guns.
Where to get it
The paperback is $8.99 at Big Game, the third FunJungle book, and it reads perfectly well cold if this is where your child starts. What makes this one worth owning rather than borrowing is that the science is load bearing. Pull the poaching economics out and the mystery collapses, which is not true of every book in the series. Buy it for a child who already likes mysteries and you have smuggled in a conservation argument. Buy it for a child who already likes animals and you have handed them a mystery they will actually finish.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Squirrelly Situation: When a Wild Baby Comes Home
A Squirrelly Situation by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Calpurnia Tate: Natural Selection in a Texas Backyard
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate: (Newbery Honor Book) by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
