Teh One Who Knocks
03-09-2018, 11:43 AM
Tom Herbert for Metro.co.uk
https://i.imgur.com/nNCZ6Tj.jpg
This is Sudan.
Take a good hard look at him, because this could be the last photograph ever taken of a male northern white rhino.
That’s because his spieces lies on the brink of extinction. Sudan is the last male white rhino left in the world and he’s 90-years-old in human years.
He lives with the last two female white rhinos in Ol Pejeta Conservancy, north of Nairobi, Kenya – and is suffering from an infected leg.
While the 45-year-old is slowly recovering from the infection, caused by a deep wound on his right hind leg, he has spent most of the past two weeks lying down in his pen because of the pain.
https://i.imgur.com/kq2v6tm.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/YBgPA0O.jpg
His keepers had wondered whether it might be time to put him down but conservancy vetinarian Stephen Ngulu said they had managed to bring the infection under control with painkillers and antibiotics, and Sudan had regained his healthy appetite.
After all attempts at getting him to mate naturally failed, conservationists last year put Sudan on dating app Tinder, hoping to raise enough money to pay for a £6,500,000 million fertility treatment.
‘He is an animal that is showing the will to live,’ Ngulu said.
Sudan struggled to walk in his pen while his companions Najin, 27, and 17-year old Fatu played in the mud a short distance away.
While there are thousand of southern white rhinos still roaming the plains of sub-Saharan Africa, decades of rampant poaching have drastically cut numbers of northern whites.
https://i.imgur.com/qAC9Umh.jpg
Poachers can sell northern white rhino horns for £36,000 per kilo, making them more valuable than gold or cocaine.
Kenya, whose tourism sector is a huge source of foreign exchange, had 20,000 rhinos in the 1970s, falling to 400 in the 1990s. It now has 650, almost all of which are black.
Scientists are now working to help Sudan reproduce via in vitro fertilisation using eggs taken from Najin. The embryo would be implanted in a surrogate southern white, Ngulu said.
Reproductive experts from Kenya, Europe and South Africa hope to have designed a means of extracting the eggs from Najin by the end of this year, he said.
With the old male nearing the end of his life, Zachary Mutai, who has cared for him at Ol Pejeta for the last eight years, said the ravages of age were a source of sadness.
‘Sudan is my great friend,’ he said.
https://i.imgur.com/nNCZ6Tj.jpg
This is Sudan.
Take a good hard look at him, because this could be the last photograph ever taken of a male northern white rhino.
That’s because his spieces lies on the brink of extinction. Sudan is the last male white rhino left in the world and he’s 90-years-old in human years.
He lives with the last two female white rhinos in Ol Pejeta Conservancy, north of Nairobi, Kenya – and is suffering from an infected leg.
While the 45-year-old is slowly recovering from the infection, caused by a deep wound on his right hind leg, he has spent most of the past two weeks lying down in his pen because of the pain.
https://i.imgur.com/kq2v6tm.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/YBgPA0O.jpg
His keepers had wondered whether it might be time to put him down but conservancy vetinarian Stephen Ngulu said they had managed to bring the infection under control with painkillers and antibiotics, and Sudan had regained his healthy appetite.
After all attempts at getting him to mate naturally failed, conservationists last year put Sudan on dating app Tinder, hoping to raise enough money to pay for a £6,500,000 million fertility treatment.
‘He is an animal that is showing the will to live,’ Ngulu said.
Sudan struggled to walk in his pen while his companions Najin, 27, and 17-year old Fatu played in the mud a short distance away.
While there are thousand of southern white rhinos still roaming the plains of sub-Saharan Africa, decades of rampant poaching have drastically cut numbers of northern whites.
https://i.imgur.com/qAC9Umh.jpg
Poachers can sell northern white rhino horns for £36,000 per kilo, making them more valuable than gold or cocaine.
Kenya, whose tourism sector is a huge source of foreign exchange, had 20,000 rhinos in the 1970s, falling to 400 in the 1990s. It now has 650, almost all of which are black.
Scientists are now working to help Sudan reproduce via in vitro fertilisation using eggs taken from Najin. The embryo would be implanted in a surrogate southern white, Ngulu said.
Reproductive experts from Kenya, Europe and South Africa hope to have designed a means of extracting the eggs from Najin by the end of this year, he said.
With the old male nearing the end of his life, Zachary Mutai, who has cared for him at Ol Pejeta for the last eight years, said the ravages of age were a source of sadness.
‘Sudan is my great friend,’ he said.