Sudan, the last male white rhino, has died despite efforts to save subspecies from extinction
AFP: ‘When Sudan was born in 1973 in the wild in Shambe, South Sudan, there were about 700 of his kind left in existence. At his death, there are only two females remaining alive and the hope that in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) techniques will advance enough to preserve the subspecies. Sudan, elderly by rhino standards, had been ailing for some time, suffering from age-related infections, according to his keepers at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy…
Modern rhinos have plodded the earth for 26 million years. As recently as the mid-19th century there were over a million in Africa. The western black rhino was declared extinct in 2011… Demand for rhino horn in traditional Chinese medicine and dagger handles in Yemen fuelled a poaching crisis in the 1970s and 1980s that largely wiped out the northern white rhino population in Uganda, Central African Republic, Sudan and Chad…
Sudan lived out his final years on a 90,000-acre (36,400-hectare) reserve of savannah and woodlands in central Kenya, along with the two remaining females, under armed guard to protect them from poachers… A number of high profile figures in the wildlife industry, including Australia’s own Bindi Irwin, took to Twitter to express their sadness over the news’. SOURCE…
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