Last male northern white rhino too old to sire
OL PEJETA CONSERVANCY, Kenya — It’s not that Sudan didn’t want a baby. Researchers had watched the 42-year-old northern white rhinoceros try to mount a female. Rangers had seen him stare across the enclosure at the ladies “admiringly,” sharpening his horn as if he was preparing to win them over.
But age had caught up with him. His hind legs were weak. The quality of his sperm was poor. And as the odds dimmed that he would mate successfully, conservationists had to reckon with their own failure.
How had the fate of an entire subspecies of rhinoceros been left to one elderly male?
In just a few decades, a large population of northern white males has been reduced to one 1,590-kilogram bull living in a 10-acre enclosure with roundthe-clock guards. There are also four females left: two in Kenya, one each in the United States and the Czech Republic. But none is fertile, meaning the population is on the verge of extinction.
Scientists estimate hundreds — perhaps thousands — of species are becoming extinct each year. In 2011, the western black rhino was classified as extinct. That same year, a subspecies of the Javan rhino was declared extinct in Vietnam. And barring a scientific breakthrough, the northern white rhino, the second-largest mammal in central Africa, will be gone soon, too.
“It’s a massive conservation failure,” said Richard Vigne, chief executive of Ol Pejeta Conservancy, the private wildlife refuge where the white rhinos live.
When Sudan was born in 1972 in what is now South Sudan, there were about 1,000 northern white rhinos scattered across central Africa. They were concentrated in countries plagued by war: Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic. When fighting broke out, the rhinos were also victims, killed for their meat or horns, or sometimes exchanged for money or arms.
Sudan got lucky. When he was three, he was rescued by representatives of the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic. He was tranquilized, loaded into a boat that travelled the Nile, then heaved onto a series of trucks, trains and trailers that led to a complex described as “a small Africa in Czechoslovakia.”
By then, northern white rhinos were endangered, but extinction loomed far off and seemed preventable with just a modest intervention. That intervention never came.
First, the subspecies was wiped out in the Central African Republic. Then in Sudan. By the mid1980s, the situation was dire, but not irreversible, with dozens still living in the wild, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
By 2003, there were thought to be about 20 rhinos left in Garamba National Park in DRC. A plan was crafted to move some of them to a conservancy in Kenya. At the last minute, the Congolese government blocked it, claiming the rhinos were a valuable natural resource.
Within a few years, all the rhinos had been killed, leaving only those left in captivity. Biologists went on missions to some of Africa’s most remote corners hoping to discover a northern white that had somehow survived. They found nothing.
The situation continues to worsen, not just for the northern whites but for other rhinos. There were 1,215 rhinos poached in 2014 in South Africa, which has the largest population in the world, compared with 13 poached in 2007.
Rhino horn is now sold for $65,000 a kilo in Southeast Asia, up from $300 in the 1990s — making it a prize for poachers in Kenya, where the average yearly income is less than $3,000.