CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

He was one of a kind, the last male of his species, but the animal world’s toughest and most swiped bachelor is dead. Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, was a celebrity in his own right, pampered in retirement, cared for around the clock by a team of keepers and under armed guard to protect him from poachers.

He was, after all, the final hope of an entire species whose numbers were destroyed by those seeking a lucrative trade in rhino horn which is believed by some in the Far East to have magical powers.

Now that hope is gone. The 45-year-old rhinoceros, kept since 2009 at the Ol Pejeta conservation project in Laikipia National Park in Kenya, was put down on Monday after his condition deteriorated.

There are five rhino species of which two types of white rhinoceros exist — the northern white is now represented by just two remaining females. Threatened by poachers and propped up only by relatively low-successrate breeding programs, all could go the way of the northern white — perhaps in some readers’ lifetimes.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates at least 200 species of flora, fauna and insects are made extinct every year.

Among the largest of the living megafauna, rhinos exceed one tonne in weight and have been around for millions of years.

Sudan had been ailing for years. His legs were almost too weak to support his vast bulk.

He spent his last days lying on grass, while his keeper massaged his hide with wet clay to prevent it drying out and to keep the insects away, and worked oil into his hoofs to stop them from cracking.

It was a miserable end to a sad, captive life that started in southern Sudan in 1973.

I’ve been besotted with rhinos since age six when I was taken to see Maginda, the first white rhino born in captivity in Britain, at Whipsnade Zoo in 1971.

And I first became aware of Sudan last year when I reviewed a BBC documentary and discovered his sorry tale.

In the 1960s and ’70s, northern whites were still numerous in Central Africa. At just a few months old, Sudan was snared by Richard Chipperfield and Ann Olivecrona who worked for the Chipperfield family — circus moguls and then the world’s biggest supplier of wild animals to zoos and safari parks, including Longleat in Wiltshire, England. Surviving film footage shows spotters in

aeroplanes directing the “net team”, which chased the baby rhinos on the ground by Jeep.

Mr Chipperfield later said he remembered the day Sudan was caught.

“I don’t think I ever thought I was doing wrong,” he said. “You have to remember, in those days there was so much wildlife around.”

Sadly, the young Sudan wasn’t sent to Longleat where he might have enjoyed some semblance of life in the wild.

Instead, he was sold to a zoo behind what was then the Iron Curtain, run by eccentric Czech TV presenter Josef