It’s not easy being a black rhino.

One minute, you’re wandering the African savanna, the next the Chinese decide that your horn cures epilepsy, and some quack in India tells everyone it’s the perfect aphrodisiac. Oh, and the Yemenis want it for their ceremonial daggers. The rhinos are now critically endangered — it’s a miracle there are any left at all.

Yet the past 10 years have been good to the black rhino. For one thing, the Yemenis aren’t buying as many daggers. For another — and this is key — tourists will pay big bucks to see rhinos in the wild. Locals no longer have to kill a rhino to feed their family.

They can get a job in a hotel instead, or as a guide, or a driver — jobs they wouldn’t have without the rhino. It doesn’t pay as much as poaching, but at least it won’t get you shot. As a result, Namibia’s black rhino population has tripled since 1995.

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Rhinos are not the only species for which tourism is saving the day. From the Moray Firth to Madhya Pradesh, here are 10 trips where your tourist dollar makes all the difference. In some cases, it’s all that stands between a species’ survival and its extinction.

WHITE-EYES

Seychelles

It’s not every conservation project that let’s you save a species just by sipping piña coladas in your own private plunge pool — but then Noah’s Ark, on North Island, in the Seychelles, is no ordinary conservation project. Funded by an unashamedly high-end, Crusoe-chic, £1,200-a-night resort, the project debunks the myth that you have to slum it to do the world a favour.

What does your money buy? Mostly, it pays for pampering on an almost indecent scale: spa, private plunge pool and butler, open-fronted thatched villa staring out over a bone-white beach and cobalt sea. You can go out with wardens on turtle-nest patrols, but good luck tearing yourself away from the veranda.

Noah’s Ark hopes to return North Island to the state it was in before coconut plantation workers brought in rats, cats, cows, pigs and invasive stuff such as lantana weed. Without your money, that won’t happen. With it, rats have been wiped out, 100,000 trees have been planted, and the island now supports 10% of the global population of the warbler-like Seychelles white-eye, whose numbers have increased by 36% since 2007, taking the species off the critically endangered list. As with all hotels run by Wilderness Safaris ­— which has raised more than £2m for conservation projects in Africa — your money pays for 20 local kids to stay every year, to learn why wildlife is worth protecting.

Ultimate Safaris & Islands (020 7589 8800, ultimatesafarisandislands.com) has seven nights at North Island from £12,999pp, full-board, including Padi diving courses, spa treatments and flights

BLACK RHINOS

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