Rhino Requiem? Not yet

Rhino Requiem? Not yet

rhinossurviveScience is not a Fox News forte, and they shouldn’t have tried to report this weekend’s death of Nola, the rhino in San Diego.

“The subspecies has been decimated by poachers… The horns are in high demand in parts of Asia where some people claim they have medicinal properties for treating everything from hangovers to cancer,” Fox reported.

Like much news telling only some of the story leads to massively misunderstanding it. This is a Fox News forte.

First, vigorous debate continues in the scientific community as to whether this rhino and its three remaining cousins still alive in a reserve in Kenya are, in fact, subspecies of the 20,000 white rhino that survive in South Africa.

The Northern White Rhino (NWR), of which Nola claims descent, has been considered a pretty distinct animal from its much more successful southern cousins (SWR) throughout my lifetime. I remember in the early days seeing them frequently in Meru National Park in Kenya.

Their difference is slightly taxonomic, but in 2010 several scientists delved into the DNA and concluded NWR was a sub-species. But many scientists then and now vigorously disagree.

More to the point, a heavily read science blogger in 2010 explained, “The danger in [suggesting a separate sub-species exists] could eventually backfire: it would not look good if zoologists were thought to be tweaking their conclusions in order to suit their favoured conservation projects.”

Many animal species — indeed including ourselves — develop slight genetic differences and even greater taxonomic differences simply by long periods of geographic separation. The scientists who believe the NWR is a separate sub-species believe that divergence was a million years ago.

Fox also simplified to the point of near falsehood regarding the reasons rhino are poached:

Rhino poachers are motivated far more by a Mideast market than an Asian one, albeit both markets exist. But a poacher’s pay is considerably higher from a buyer in Yemen or Djibouti than Hong Kong.

In the Mideast a rhino horn is polished up to become a dagger handle presented to rich young men by even richer fathers at their rite de passage. The Asian market is a close second, but what is noteworthy is that today’s conflicts in the Mideast have actually enhanced this market, as anything anti-western (like conservation) grows in popularity.

Fox also messed up seriously the suggestions that the subspecies might be saved by in vitro fertilization. I wrote extensively about this in 2009.

Reuters as usual got the Nola death more correctly.

What concerns me is the range of unhelpful conclusions that people of widely different predispositions will have with the notion that an animal has “gone extinct.”

African rhino as a whole are in need of our serious attention, and in fact a lot of good is being done. I think many will agree with me, today, that the white rhino will be saved when only 15 or 20 years ago we doubted this would be possible.

Perhaps it’s the desire for scandal, but the notion that the death of the San Diego rhino presages the death of all rhino is right up the ally of Fox News, or more to the point, its readers.

And once again, they’re wrong.

2 thoughts on “Rhino Requiem? Not yet

  1. Thanks for this post Jim – incredibly sad that Nola has died and tragic that now we’re down to three northern white rhinos…

    The prospect of losing a subspecies is shocking and chilling, but it’s not like the extermination of a species. I’ve never quite understood how southern and northern white rhinos could be considered different species if they can interbreed and produced fertile offspring (which in my limited understanding is the definition of a subspecies – I thought subspecies usually emerged through geographic isolation). If northern white rhino DNA can be preserved, then eventually it may be possible to regenerate white rhino individuals that have all the characteristics of typical northern white rhinos. I guess since all the world’s wildlife is now subject to massive human-induced environmental impacts, this may not in practice be much different from sustaining a tiny population in secure parks like the “Rare Species Boma” at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. But in this case we’re on the brink of losing that more natural option.

    Incidentally, from my reading the Yemeni dagger handle trade fizzled out a couple of decades ago. Chinese and Vietnamese “medicinal” rhino horn use at $60,000 a kilo (despite having no active pharmacological effect of any kind) is what’s decimating all five rhino species, though at least the southern white rhino, despite the poaching, has a world population of more than 20,000 and is the least critically endangered (and it’s worth remembering it was down to 50 individuals in the early 1900s). The Black, Indian, Sumatran and Javan rhino species are much more on the edge, the latter two species each down to double figures.

    I remember the six Meru National Park white rhinos too. They were so tame my wife was encouraged to actually sit on one young female, or rather lean against her huge bulk as the rhino snoozed on the ground, while I took a photo. I remember the news coming in 1989 that they had been killed by poachers. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty certain those rhinos in Meru were southern white rhinos, like all the other white rhinos in Kenya brought in from South Africa, and the several dozen that are back in the rhino sanctuary at Meru NP. Surely the northern white rhino vanished from Kenya a couple of centuries ago?

    Richard Trillo
    The Rough Guide to Kenya
    Kenya Programme Manager at Expert Africa

  2. Richard,

    Thanks for pointing out that the Yemen market diminished as the wars there did. But do you know of any current data since the major outbreak of fighting again there last year? I know that after the U.S. Cole attack and all the attention that the US paid to Yemen thereafter, that they started to vigorously enforce CITES. But since the takeover last year, I’ve also heard that things have once again reversed. What’s the most current info that you have?

    – JIM

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