THIS IS WHAT EXTINCTION LOOKS LIKE
An emotional CHRISTOPHER STEVENS on the death of world’s last male Northern White Rhino
THE world’s most eligible bachelor is dead.
Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, was a celebrity in the animal world who, in recent years, had enjoyed a pampered 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 poachers seeking a lucrative trade in rhino horn that 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 deteriorated. on Monday after his condition
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 hooves 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 aged 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. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, northern whites were still numerous just snared a few by months’ Richard in Central old Chipperfield Sudan Africa. was At and for the Ann Chipperfield Olivecrona family who worked – circus moguls and then the world’s biggest supplier of wild animals to zoos and safari parks, including Longleat in Wiltshire. 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 that he remembered the day Sudan was caught. He said: ‘I don’t think I ever thought I was doing wrong. 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 Czechoslovakian TV presenter Josef Vagner.
The charismatic Vagner was a chancer, a PT Barnum character who had the backing of the Communist government for his efforts to bring exotic animals to Eastern Europe.
To ensure supply, Vagner struck shady deals with African warlords, running Soviet arms to Uganda and other countries in exchange for wildlife export permits.
Conditions at Dvur Kralove zoo near the Polish border were unconventional to say the least. Seven rhinos were kept in a pen with stone walls, and keepers wandered among them freely.
Vagner’s children used to herd the rhinos into a line, and even played leapfrog over them.
Despite his questionable methods, Vagner was a committed conservationist whose breeding scheme seemed at first to be working.
Sudan was mated with Nasima, and their first calf, a female called Nabire, was born in 1983 but died at Dvur Kralove just three years ago. The second, also female called Najin, is now 40 years’ old.
Sudan and the baby rhinos pulled in the crowds, but the breeding experiment went sour. Sudan became confused and aggressive towards females. When he gored one of them, his keeper Mirek rushed into the enclosure and was killed as the female picked him up with her horn and dashed him against a wall.
Today we know that northern white rhinos cannot thrive in zoos and need space if they are to breed happily. But that knowledge came too late. Vagner died in 2000, but his rapidly dwindling band of rhinos lingered on in the zoo, until 2009 when Sudan and the other surviving northern whites, his daughter Najin and grand-daughter Fatu (father unknown), were shipped to Africa.
The hope was that in the Kenyan heat and a more natural habitat, the old male might feel like one last attempt at mating. But that ambition was at least a decade too late.
Sudan was fertile but no longer had the strength to perform. Later, he also had to be kept separate from the females, Najin and Fatu – sensing his weakness, they would
have bullied him. Sudan was catapulted to global fame after the death of the only other male northern white, Angalifu, at San Diego Zoo in California in 2014.
An American wildlife activist named Daniel Schneider tweeted a picture of Sudan looking forlorn in his pen at Laikipia.
‘Want to know what extinction looks like?’ read the caption. ‘This is the last male northern white rhino. The Last. Nevermore.’
The tweet went viral, reposted endlessly by distraught animal lovers and conservationists.
Seeing an opportunity, fundraisers at Ol Pejeta signed Sudan up to dating app Tinder, posting his photo and a brief biography.
Declaring him to be ‘the most eligible bachelor in the world’, Sudan’s profile read: ‘I don’t wish to be too forward, but the fate of the species literally depends on me. I perform well under pressure.’
Tinder users could swipe across his picture, not to arrange a date but to donate money.
That wasn’t enough for many smitten devotees, some of whom made a pilgrimage to the park to be photographed with him.
Actress Liz Hurley was one of those who posed with him.
That BBC documentary last year, Sudan: The Last of the Rhinos, showed the emotional reaction of many visitors, some of whom broke down at the sight of Sudan wearily munching grass, the very last of his kind.
So many film crews came that keepers nicknamed him ‘the Hollywood rhino’ and limited his schedule to one shoot per day.
Ultimately, the only hope for Sudan and his species lay with IVF treatment. In 2016, a team at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin implanted eggs harvested from Najin and Fatu and fertilised with Sudan’s sperm – inbreeding is not an issue for species in crisis – in a southern white female acting as a surrogate.
The attempt failed because of the difficulty of implanting an embryo in the womb located so deep inside such a massive animal.
It is still possible that a northern white will one day be born via IVF or by cloning should technology permit – indeed Sudan’s genetic material has been collected with that in mind this week.
But clinging to such slight hope is to ignore his poignant legacy. What happened to his species can happen to any.