The first harvest of semen from Tam by electro-ejaculation was done by a Malaysian team of veterinarians and technicians in 2015. — Photo credit John Payne
IMMEDIATELY after the deaths in 2019 of the last two Hairy rhinoceroses in Malaysia, a male named Tam and female Iman, the global response was of sympathy.
This was touching to people who had been close to the rhinos, that died of age-related illnesses under the care of NGO, Borneo Rhino Alliance.
But some basic points were missed.
A species does not suddenly go extinct. Long periods, typically measured in hundreds of years, may pass between the time when a species is already doomed and the particular year in which the last individuals die.
During that period, humans have ample time to identify what can and should be done to reverse the extinction trajectory, and implement recovery actions.
Recovery actions had worked for the white rhino in South Africa, which increased from a few hundred around the year 1900 to over 20,000 by 2000.
And for both species of bison. The European bison was down to a total of just 12 individuals in 1927, all in zoos. Now, there are over 8,000, mostly roaming in the wild in many European nations.
A breeding attempt between Puntung and Tam. — Photo credit John Payne
Why did those efforts succeed, but not those with the Hairy rhino?
Put bluntly, the success of those earlier efforts was down to small groups of passionate people from several nations, crucially with the involvement of private land-owners or zoos, but without the involvement of governments, and no NGOs or international institutions or laws.
I hope readers can see the obvious implications of this statement.
Readers may know the Hairy rhino as the Sumatran rhino, but that name derives from the fact that the first specimen sent to Europe was shot in Sumatra.
In fact, the species was originally widespread through South-East Asia, including large parts of China.
Naming it the Sumatran rhino was one of the contributory reasons why many Indonesians wrongly thought that this critically endangered descendant of the Pleistocene era was a wholly Indonesian animal.
International institutions and donors tended to think the same, and the bulk of the tens of millions of dollars that went towards efforts to save the species over the past four decades went to Indonesia, and not to the people who could (for example) safely capture and translocate Hairy rhinos from remote forests, or those who could create in vitro rhino embryos.
Over my own 45 years of involvement with the Hairy rhino, starting in Johor in 1977, and again in Sabah from 1980 to 1986, I repeatedly saw incorrect assertions that the Hairy rhino is endangered by poaching and habitat loss.
There is plenty of literature from the 19th century to clearly show that the species was already by 1920 in deep trouble: generally fewer than 10 or so individuals in any one place, widely scattered in separate forest blocks in four or five nations.
The problem to be addressed by the 1970s was not of excessive deaths, which had already happened over the previous millennia, and not of insufficient habitat, but of very few rhinos, and not enough breeding to reverse the trajectory towards extinction.
The approach should have been: launch a single programme of captive breeding in managed, fenced facilities to increase population density of fertile adults and boost birth rate.
But what should have been obvious was not to be.
The idea which would have saved the Hairy rhino was raised seriously within wildlife professional circles in 1982 by Thomas Foose, conservation coordinator of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums.
Following visits by Foose in 1983 to Sabah, Peninsular Malaysia and Indonesia, the then Sabah chief minister agreed in principle to collaboration with the US zoos.
Foose’s unpublished paper Captive Propagation of Sumatran Rhinoceros - A Proposal was finalised in September 1983.
He tried his best to proactively address inevitable pushback over such issues as the alternative of leaving the rhinos in the forest guarded by protection teams, the “need” to keep Sumatran and Bornean lines separate, safe capture methods, and where any captured rhinos should be maintained.
But the key underlying issue was stated in Foose’s paper: “These remnants cannot contribute to the survival of the species because the groups are too small to be viable genetically or even to permit reproduction.”
He outlined the various pros and cons, including a comparison of translocation into a single wild habitat to boost numbers and genetic diversity, with closely-managed captive breeding, summarising in favour of the latter approach: “a captive program for the Sumatran rhino could provide significant advantages against these problems... Animals would be easier to protect from poachers... Finally, recent advances in reproductive technology (artificial insemination, embryo transplantation, gamete storage) could perhaps productively be applied to the Sumatran rhino... Survival of the Sumatran rhino (and many other species) may well depend upon an interactive system of both wild and captive populations”.
It is almost incredible that all of this correct thinking was written by a zoo biologist four decades ago, but not addressed in the repeated expert and stakeholder meetings and plans thereafter.
I attended endless and all ultimately fruitless bilateral and international meetings on Hairy rhinos from 1982 up to 2022.
This is my plea for those who have or seek to have influence over other critically endangered species: let the few people who know the entire situation identify the issues that need to be addressed, and give them the support to make the interventions, rather than just repeat assumptions and opinions.
This plea is addressed to governments, mainstream NGOs and (perhaps most importantly) to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has repeatedly and misleadingly advised governments on addressing poaching and habitat loss over the past four decades
