Last male northern white rhino crisis
|Published
If North Korean diplomats were active in illicit smuggling in Southern Africa in the past decade in order to raise foreign currency for the regime, our rhinos are at even more risk, says the writer. If North Korean diplomats were active in illicit smuggling in Southern Africa in the past decade in order to raise foreign currency for the regime, our rhinos are at even more risk, says the writer.
Laikipia, Kenya – At the Ol Pejeta reserve in northern Kenya, Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros in the world, still searches for the females he needs to mate with to save his sub-species, but lives out his last days alone. Only the tourists who pay an extra fee to enter Ol Pejeta's endangered animal enclosure to see extinction live keep Sudan company, plus his five keepers that give him round-the-clock care and security from possible poachers.
“The fact that he's the last male is clearly a crisis”, says Ol Pejeta's CEO Richard Vigne, explaining that with the average lifespan of a rhino being 35, 42-year-old Sudan is living on borrowed time. As Sudan is on his last legs – buckled by years of standing on concrete and in the cold – he is too arthritic and blind to ever mount and mate naturally. Ol Pejeta has two of the three last female northern whites – Sudan's daughter and granddaughter – but his attempts to woo them culminate with them beating up what Vigne calls this “old man”. They were all brought here in 2009 from a Czech zoo in the hopes this species could breed itself back up in the wild, but in March Sudan became the last male and while two of the females are too old to reproduce, the youngest has problems with her womb.
“All in all you've got a situation where the females are probably incapable of naturally conceiving and carrying a calf to term, and the last male who is too old to mount”, says Vigne. And so recently, Ol Pejeta launched an $800,000 crowd-funding appeal to save this ancient species the modern way – with in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
There's quite a lot of northern white rhino semen stored around the world, says Vigne, but “what there isn't is a method of preserving female rhino eggs”, so if the females here, and one in a San Diego zoo die, so does the plan to perpetuate the sub-species. “The really key thing here is that the females stay alive,” says Vigne – long enough for scientists to successfully extract their eggs.
If this pioneering process works, the northern white's egg and frozen sperm would be implanted into a southern white rhino in South Africa or a European zoo. Some conservationists think that this subspecies should be left to die out as breeding it back using such closely related and unproductive former zoo animals is unwise, and comes at a great expense when other endangered species that have not fallen below the critical mass of 20 animals need saving.
Decades of war in Central Africa turned these rhinos into meat and barter material for guns, but the soaring price of rhino horn has led to record levels of poaching that could see all rhinos wiped out by 2026, if it is not curbed. In South Africa, private game reserves have started selling on their rhinos as it has become more expensive to keep them out of poachers' hands than make money out of them. Poaching killed 1,215 rhinos in South Africa last year, compared to an average of 13 per year between 1990 and 2007.
South Africa's Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa recently reported that this year rhino killings were up five percent on this time last year, and two thirds of those were in Kruger National Park.
While criminal gangs, mainly in Vietnam, are touting rhino horn – made of the same keratin which constitute human nails – as a cure for cancer or in big cities as a must-have status symbol for middle-class men, governments are pondering how to stop the killing. In South Africa, these criminals “come up with incredibly ingenious schemes and scams and the problem is that bureaucracy moves very slowly”, says Julian Rademeyer, a former journalist turned author of rhino-killing expose 'Killing For Profit'.
It took South Africa a decade to end “pseudo hunts” by mainly Asian poachers posing as tourists to exploit a legal loophole and export horn legally, says Rademeyer. After the Ukrainian and Czech tourists that followed were stopped, gangs started bringing Asian prostitutes from Johannesburg to pose as hunters and export horn in their names. Rademeyer describes it as “like the drugs war” with a trail of criminal elements stretching far across countries and continents, including neighbouring Mozambique whose poachers cross into Kruger and whom South Africa cannot extradite.
Meanwhile, 'khaki-collar crime' involving veterinarians and rangers darting animals and taking the horn is on the rise, while some ministers call for South Africa to sell its US$1bn horn stockpile and create a sustainable trade in farmed horn. The system could be modelled on the Kimberley process for preventing blood diamonds from reaching markets, but many people feel that regulating any kind of trade could feed an artificially created market driven by criminals which few understand. As the debate rages, “there are concerns about whether South Africa could set up a regulatory framework, there are concerns about corruption”, says Rademeyer. While bureaucrats flounder and conservationists call for secondary populations of rhinos out of danger zones, entrepreneurs want to flood the market with synthetic keratin horns or inject rhinos' horns with poison to deter sellers. But all these schemes come too late for the northern whites, as their last male faces imminent death. “We'll announce it to the world and humans can look at themselves and hopefully understand that they're the cause of his demise as a species”, says Vigne, patting the one-inch-thick skin of what he calls “an old softie”. – African News Agency