Kenya: the death of the last Northern white rhino male

AFP

AFP

Tuesday, 20 march, 2018 03:52

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Tuesday, 20 march, 2018 03:52

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NAIROBI, Kenya | The last Northern white rhino male has died in Kenya at the age of 45 years, leaving more in life that two females of this subspecies, announced on Tuesday that its security guards.

Named Sudan, the rhinoceros was suffering from a long time of health complications related to his age and after a serious deterioration of his health, “the veterinary team has made the decision to euthanize,” according to a press release issued by the reserve Ol Pejeta in Kenya where he lived.

“His state of health has significantly deteriorated in the past 24 hours; he was no longer able to stand and was suffering a lot,” said the team of Ol Pejeta, a reserve of 350 km2 located about 200 km north of Nairobi.

The death of Sudan is synonymous with the extinction of his subspecies. Unless the scientists who have extracted genetic material manage to develop techniques of in vitro fertilization to design a “baby rhinoceros specimens” that would be implanted in a surrogate mother of another sub-species.

The Northern white rhino should be in the first place, its extinction from poaching, in particular because of the alleged medicinal properties attributed to its horn in Asia, particularly in China and Vietnam.

The species has been even more decimated by poaching in the 70’s and 80’s as its traditional territories – the central African republic, Chad, democratic Republic of the Congo, today’s South Sudan – were conflict-ridden, and thus much of the areas of non-conducive for criminal activities.

The last wild population of the subspecies included between 20 and 30 individuals in the DRC and it has disappeared in the fighting at the end of the 90s and early 2000s. In 2008, the Northern white rhino was considered extinct in the wild.