Surveys on the ground and by air in 2008 did not find any live animals or carcasses and, with no verifiable sightings subsequently recorded, it is assumed that the wild population is likely extinct. At the time, the Lord’s Resistance Army and Janjaweed raiders were operating in the Park, and are often blamed for poaching the last Northern white rhinos. The last rhino conservation programme in Garamba National Park effectively closed in 2006, when fighting flared up again due to safety fears and the fact that the rhino population had declined to four, and was no longer a viable population with enough animals from which to breed. Harvesting ivory and rhino horn was one method these groups apparently used to raise funds for their operations. Garamba National Park, situated in eastern Congo, was the epicentre of violence during the Congolese Civil War, and suffered from multitudes of rebel and Janjaweed militia groups crossing its porous border. Realistically, this was the last chance to create a breeding population. When the Congolese government changed its mind, this plan also failed. Ideally, the two zoos would then have moved their NWRs to Kenya to join this founder population. The second, in 2005, foundered when a disaffected former Garamba employee stirred up regional dissent after the Congolese government had given its consent to a move of 4 or 5 animals from Garamba to Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The plan failed when the zoos decided not to move their animals. The first, in 1995, involved a proposal to move some animals from DRC to another African country, provided that the two zoos holding NWRs (Dvur Kralove in the Czech Republic and San Diego in the USA) sent their animals to join them. Two attempts were made to try and relocate animals to safer countries in Africa to create a second, “back-up” breeding population. Throughout the 1990s, numbers in Garamba National Park fluctuated between 20 and 30 rhinos. The last wild Northern white rhinos lived in a single population in the eastern DRC’s Garamba National Park until the early 2000s. As the poaching crisis took hold in the 1970s and 80s, fuelled by demand for Traditional Chinese Medicine and Yemeni dagger handles, Northern white rhinos (and black rhinos) became extinct in Uganda, the Central African Republic (CAR), Sudan and Chad. Rhinos across Africa first went into decline during colonial-era mass hunting and habitat loss as land was turned over for agriculture, livestock, plantations and urban developments. Northern white rhinos once roamed in Uganda, Chad, across pre-partition Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). ![]() Researchers point to their shorter legs relative to body length, higher head carriage, a less concave shape to their cranium, and the lack of the fine hair seen all over Southern white’s bodies though hair does appear on the tail, muzzle, ears, belly and other localised areas (Groves, Fernando and Robovsky, 2010 Groves 1972 and Owen-Smith 2013).Īccording to geneticists, the two sub-species geographically split around a million years ago (Groves, Fernando and Robovsky, 2010), with Southern whites based in Southern Africa and Northern whites living in Central Africa. ![]() Northern white rhinos are believed to be slightly smaller than their Southern counterparts, with less prominent folding in their skin. The two sub-species do, however, display small but consistent differences in the limited research conducted on the diminishing population throughout the 20th and early 21st Centuries. Northern white rhinos and Southern white rhinos ostensibly look similar and to the untrained eye are difficult to tell apart. Currently, the sub-species is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species and “Possibly Extinct in the Wild”. ![]() Also known as the Northern square-lipped rhinoceros, it has the scientific name of Ceratotherium simum cottoni. Northern white rhinos are one of two sub-species of the white rhino, the other being the Southern white rhino. We can learn lessons from the Northern white rhinos’ sad demise – and stop the same fate befalling their Critically Endangered Javan and Sumatran cousins. With small chance of healthy new calves, and limited place in their historic range to go, Save the Rhino believes that the best outcome will be to put our efforts and funding – including research into IVF – into saving the species that do still have a chance. With only two related females remaining, the death of the last Northern white rhino is only a matter of time. Even if much-hyped innovations like rhino IVF are perfected in the future, it will likely come too late to save this sub-species. ![]() Sadly, Northern white rhinos are now functionally extinct. When it comes to rescuing a species or sub-species from extinction, prevention is better than cure.
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