Clara

Another stolen baby animal from me, this time Clara, a baby rhino taken from her mother who was shot and passed in ownership to the director of the Dutch East India Company who then passed her on to a Captain Van De Meer who took her to the Netherlands and then on a seventeen year European tour. This was in the 1740s and 50s. She died in 1758 having also become quite dependent on sweet wine. Like Obaysch, she was quite the celebrity and having been taken as a baby, was tame and attached to Van De Meer despite the obvious cruelty of her life. So I wrote a poem about her. 
 

Clara attended dinner parties

and ate from her own salver, until

she became too big, too cumbersome 

for polite company.

A rhinoceros has always needed thick skin,

though even horned, armoured,

and at one tonne, a mother

can still be felled to steal a daughter.

Clara's horn broke off on her European tour;

yet she remained a wonder, to Vienna

for an Empress, she drank sweet wine in London,

nonetheless, she dreamt only of mud.

A rhinoceros is not built for urban life,

or their little eyes for the landscape 

of the confines of a crate, equipped, as they are,

for grasslands and floodplains.

Clara was unheard if she tried to speak

in infrasonic waves of a dim memory, 

her plates and folds to ward off sun and

parasites - she could not have bargained for man

but comply, comply, smile and lie if you need to,

be amenable and docile and still: it is undignified, though

quiet work to love who you ought to fear, ever afraid

 to meet the emptiness you suspect at the loss of it.
 

The first two are paintings of Clara, there's a lovely Stubb's painting, but I don't think it's in the public domain. 
Image is from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clara_1749_Oudry.jpg

Image on Twitter: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clara_1751_Pietro_Longhi.jpg

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clara_1751_Pietro_Longhi.jpg