This rhino’s death should make us worry about all species

Last hope: Male rhino Tam is now one of the last of his kind.

LAST Sunday, zookeepers euthanised a 41-year-old rhino who was suffering from a painful bacterial infection at the San Diego zoo safari park.

Zoo animals perish all the time – and this one died largely of old age – so why is this worthy of global news? Because the rhino, a female named Nola, represented 25% of her subspecies’ global population.

With Nola’s death, only three ageing individuals survive, all under constant armed guard at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya – and all unlikely to reproduce.

This dismal story of the northern white rhino is both similar and very different from its closest cousin.

In the late 19th century, the southern white rhino was believed to be extinct. Then a tiny population was found. From this last, lucky group, conservationists built a population 20,000-strong, making it the most secure of the world’s rhinos.

The northern rhino has had several close calls as well, but now it seems its number is up.

Still, scientists debate what exactly we are losing. Taxonomists have long considered the northern and southern white as subspecies.

But a 2010 paper argued that northern white rhinos are actually a distinct species based both on their genetics and morphology (physical attributes); other rhino experts contested the paper, preferring the traditional classification.

While that debate goes on, it’s important to remember that the distinction is somewhat artificial (one might even argue arbitrary) as it represents our very human desire to classify things into hierarchies.

What’s decidedly true is that we are on the verge of losing another genetically, physically and behaviourally distinct rhino due to the lie that their horns cure hangovers.

In 2009, I was fortunate enough to meet Tam, a male Bornean rhino in a sanctuary in Malaysia. He made whistling sounds and rubbed his massive body up against the fence as he enjoyed his breakfast. He was as gentle as a 700kg lamb.

But like Nola, Tam, is now one of the last of his kind. There may be only three Bornean rhinos – a subspecies of Sumatran rhinos – left on our planet.

Today, saving the northern white rhino means turning increasingly toward science fiction.

Using frozen genetic material , San Diego plans to create a southern and northern rhino hybrid.

But what’s really notable about the northern white rhino’s current plight is not its steady march towards extinction, but rather the fact that we get to count down the remaining individuals one by one like some abacus-wielding Grim Reaper.

There are currently thousands – maybe millions – of species on the same track toward annihilation today, but the vast majority go unaided, unprotected and unnoticed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In an age of mass extinction – with unknown impacts on human society – wildlife conservation remains massively underfunded and unsupported.

Yet, aggressive actions to save our planet’s wild diversity would also mitigate climate change, clean up our oceans, and safeguard our food and water supplies, in addition to giving our children a world nearly as wild and diverse as the one we inherited.

After all, what makes the Earth unique in our solar system – and maybe the whole universe – isn’t just the northern white rhinos (or the Homo sapiens) but our whole wild panoply of life.

Nola’s death shouldn’t just make us concerned for rhinos, but for every species great and small, famous and inconspicuous. — Guardian News Service