Sudan escaped the fate of his wild peers. In 2008, the creature was believed to be extinct in the wild. By the early 1990s, there were just a few dozen left. But in the following decades, pseudoscientific beliefs about the medical properties of rhino horn created a lethal demand that poachers rushed to fill. In the 1960s, an estimated 2,300 northern white rhinos still lived in the wild. The only way to save the northern white is to now artificially inseminate their eggs with stored sperm from Sudan and other males, and implant the resulting eggs into females of the closely related southern white rhino. After all, both Najin and Fatu are highly inbred, and neither of them are capable of reproducing naturally. But it doesn’t really change the fate of the northern white rhino, which was already functionally extinct long before Sudan died. Sudan’s death is certainly a tragedy-the heartbreaking end of a momentous individual life, and a moment of symbolic import for the world. His death means that the total northern white rhino population on Earth stands at just two: Sudan’s daughter, Najin, and his granddaughter, Fatu.
After his health took a dramatic downturn, a team of vets made the decision to euthanize him. At the age of 45, Sudan was an elderly rhino who suffered from various age-related problems and infections. On Monday, Sudan died at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy.
0 kommentar(er)
