Author: Anthea » Sat Jan 16, 2021 10:05 pm
The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth
What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?
The story of Najin and Fatu, a mother and daughter at the end.
The day Sudan died, everything felt both monumental and ordinary. It was a Monday. Gray sky, light rain. On the horizon, the sun was struggling to make itself seen over the sharp double peaks of Mount Kenya. Little black-faced monkeys came skittering in over the fence to try to steal the morning carrots. Metal gates creaked and clanked. Men spoke in quiet Swahili. Sudan lay still in the dirt, thick legs folded under him, huge head tilted like a capsizing ship. His big front horn was blunt, scarred, worn. His breathing was harsh and ragged. All around him, for miles in every direction, the savannah teemed with life: warthogs, zebras, elephants, giraffes, leopards, lions, baboons — creatures doing what they had been doing for eons, hunting and feeding and scavenging, breathing and going and being. Until recently, Sudan had been a part of this pulse. But now he could hardly move. He was a giant stillness at the center of all the motion.
Sudan was the last male northern white rhinoceros on earth — the end of an evolutionary rope that stretched back millions of years. Although his death was a disaster, it was not a surprise. It was the grim climax of a conservation crisis that had been accelerating, for many decades, toward precisely this moment. Every desperate measure — legal, political, scientific — had already been exhausted.
Sudan was 45 years old, ancient for a rhino. His skin was creased all over. Wrinkles radiated out from his eyes. He was gray, the color of stone; he looked like a boulder that breathed. For months now, his body had been failing. When he walked, his toes scraped the ground. His legs were covered with sores; one deep gash had become badly infected. The previous day, shortly before sunset, he collapsed for the final time. He struggled, at first, to stand back up — his caretakers crouched and heaved, trying to help — but his legs were too weak. The men fed him bananas stuffed with pain pills, 24 pills at a time. Veterinarians packed his wounds with medical clay.
In the last years of his life, Sudan had become a global celebrity, a conservation icon. He lived, like an ex-president, under the protection of 24/7 armed guards. Visitors traveled from everywhere to see him. Sudan was a perfect ambassador: He weighed more than two tons but had the personality of a golden retriever. He would let people touch him and feed him snacks — a whole carrot, clamped in his big boxy mouth, looked like a little orange toothpick. Tourists got emotional, because they knew they were laying hands on a singular creature, a primordial giant about to slide off into the void. Many hurried back to their cars and cried.
Image
Najin (left) and her daughter, Fatu.
Credit...Jack Davison for The New York Times
Although Sudan was the last male, he was not, actually, the last of his kind. He still had two living descendants, both female: Najin, a daughter, and Fatu, a granddaughter. As Sudan declined, these two stood grazing in a nearby field. They would live out their days in a strange existential twilight — a state of limbo that scientists call, with heartbreaking dryness, “functional extinction.” Their subspecies was no longer viable. Two females, all by themselves, would not be able to save it.
In his final moments, Sudan was surrounded by the men who loved him. His caretakers were veterans of the deep bush — not, on any level, strangers to death. They had survived close encounters with lions and elephants and buffalo and baboons. But this was something new. We expect extinction to unfold offstage, in the mists of prehistory, not right in front of our faces, on a specific calendar day. And yet here it was: March 19, 2018. The men scratched Sudan’s rough skin, said goodbye, made promises, apologized for the sins of humanity. Finally, the veterinarians euthanized him. For a short time, he breathed heavily. And then he died.
The men cried. But there was also work to be done. Scientists extracted what little sperm Sudan had left, packed it in a cooler and rushed it off to a lab. Right there in his pen, a team removed Sudan’s skin in big sheets. The caretakers boiled his bones in a vat. They were preparing a gift for the distant future: Someday, Sudan would be reassembled in a museum, like a dodo or a great auk or a Tyrannosaurus rex, and children would learn that once there had been a thing called a northern white rhinoceros. Living creatures would look at the dead one and try to imagine it alive. But they wouldn’t be able to, not really. We can never reconstruct all the odd little moments, boring and thrilling, that make a creature a creature, that make life life.
Sudan’s death inspired a media frenzy. A photo of him being caressed by one of his caretakers went viral, collecting millions of likes on social media. The rhino area was overrun. And then, inevitably, the world’s attention moved on.
In May 2019, just over a year after the death of Sudan, the United Nations issued an apocalyptic report about mass extinction. One million plant and animal species, it warned, were at risk of annihilation. This, obviously, was a horror. Mass extinction is the ultimate crisis, doom of all dooms, the disaster toward which all other disasters flow. What could humans do that would be worse than killing the life all around us, irreversibly, at scale? One million species. A number so large exceeds the mind — it becomes, as Albert Camus puts it in “The Plague,” “a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
And yet we cannot allow ourselves to forget the reality concealed by that puff of smoke. One million is not just a number — it contains countless living creatures: individual frogs, bats, turtles, tigers, bees, eels, puffins, owls. Each one as real as you or me, each with its own life story and family ties and collection of habits. Together, these animals make up a vast, incredible archive: a collection of evolutionary stories so rich and complex that our highly evolved brains can hardly begin to hold them. Modern humans, for no good reason, have lit that archive on fire. We are destroying the vaquita, a tiny porpoise that glides around in the Gulf of California. The Christmas Island shrew, which scurries (or scurried — there may be none left) through rainforests on a speck of land out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
And, of course, the northern white rhinoceros.
Zacharia Mutai, head rhino caretaker at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, with Najin.
Credit...Jack Davison for The New York Times
The evolutionary story of the rhinoceros stretches back roughly 55 million years, to an alien epoch when Europe was a cluster of tropical islands, when cat-size horses galloped across North America, when wolflike carnivores were just beginning to wade into the ocean to start the very strange process of turning into whales. All over the planet, mammals were feeling out what it meant to be mammals, groping toward their best forms. Some early kinds of rhinos looked like hippos or tapirs; one especially huge relative had such a long neck that it is sometimes called the “giraffe rhinoceros.”
At some point, rumbling across the eons, the rhino settled into the basic form we know today: massive and thick and front-loaded, with small eyes set behind a menacing horn, often two. Although rhinos look dangerous, their life mission has always been peaceful: to munch on plants and reproduce. For many millions of years, rhinos fulfilled their goals with great success. Without many predators, without any prey, they flourished across Asia and North America, Africa and Europe.
Humans put an end to that. With primitive weapons, we hunted the rhinoceros. Over time, those weapons grew so strong that the rhino’s natural armor stood no chance. The very assets that made them prehistorically indestructible — size, horns — turned out to be liabilities. Size made rhinos easy targets. Horns were coveted for all kinds of reasons: as trophies, as tools reputed to detect poison and ease childbirth, as the raw material for decorative Yemeni dagger handles. And perhaps most notorious, as an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, whose practitioners believe that powdered rhino horn can perform a long list of marvels: It can cool the blood, ease headaches, stop vomiting, cure snakebites and much more.
Alongside the acute violence of hunting, there is the chronic violence of habitat loss. Strip malls, soccer fields, farms, highways, factories — these, too, are weapons. Big wild animals need big wild spaces, and modern humanity has left almost nothing untouched.
This has resulted in almost unfathomable loss — a holocaust of rhinos. The Javan rhinoceros, which once roamed all over Southeast Asia, is now confined to a single national park in Indonesia, its tiny population (74) concentrated so dangerously that conservationists worry it could be wiped out by the eruption of a nearby volcano. The Sumatran rhino — a small, hairy, adorable loner — is in a similarly poor state; today there are fewer than 80.
Image
Credit...Jack Davison for The New York Times
No rhino, however, is doing worse than the northern white. Its native habitat, in Central Africa, was roiled by civil wars in the late 20th century, making conservation basically impossible. By the 1970s, a population of thousands was reduced to just 700. By the mid-1980s, only 15 northern whites remained in the wild. By 2006, that number was four — and they seem to have disappeared by 2008, almost certainly the victims of poachers. The northern white rhinoceros had been eliminated from its native range.
Fortunately, there was a backup plan: In the 1970s, a small reserve supply of northern whites had been captured and relocated to a zoo, as a kind of biological life-insurance policy. Unfortunately, these animals were dying off faster than they could reproduce. In 2009, the only remaining eligible breeders — Sudan and Suni and Najin and Fatu — were brought back to Africa, to a wildlife conservancy in Kenya. It was a moonshot: a hope that their native continent might stir something deep in the biology of the final four, that it might produce a miracle.
Alas, it did not. Suni died, then Sudan. Suddenly, there were only two northern whites left. They were still out there in the field, doing the things their ancestors had always done: eating grass, wallowing in mud holes, taking naps in the shade of trees. But now everything was different. They lumbered around in a world between life and death, both here and not-here. Every mouthful of grass they ate was one mouthful closer to the last that would ever be eaten.
After Sudan died, I could not stop thinking about the last two. What were they like? What did they do all day? I found their existence strangely cheering. Although their story was almost unbearably tragic, they themselves were not tragic — they were just rhinos. To meet them would be a chance to look mass extinction in the face.
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds