‘If
the rhino was clever enough to submit to man and do a job of work as acombined
agricultural tractor and plough… there would be room for him. But he has a bad habit of
charging blindly, so the only answer to him is a rifle-bullet.’
The quotation comes from a 1927 book, The Zoo Unbarred by L. G.
Mainland of the London Daily Mail. Has any animal suffered as much from the pig-headed
ignorance of humans as the poor rhinoceros? In the Far East, millions still believe that
rhino horn possesses magical medicinal qualities, and in North Yemen a rhino horn handle
for a young man’s dagger is still supposed to enhance his virility. So rhinos are hunted
to within a whisker of extinction, and all the programs to ‘Save the Rhino’ become no more
than valiant attempts to hold back the tide.
Can zoos help at all? To answer this we should first define the
problem. There are five living species of rhinoceros (mankind has already dispatched a
European and a North American rhino).
White rhinos (the’white’comes from the Dutch word for ‘wide’,
referring to their wide lips) are fairly common in zoos. Whipsnade Zoo has a
magnificent herd that breed quite frequently. And they mix well in ranging mixed species
exhibits, like the spectacular one at Pretoria Zoo. They are a herd animal, and already
owe their existence to conservation management. At the beginning of this century the
southern race of the white rhino was down to a few dozen animals, all in the Umfolozi
Valley of Natal. Thanks to careful protection the descendants of that group make up most
of the white rhinos on earth. The exceptions are the dozen or so northern white rhinos,
now closely guarded in reserves, who are all that remain from a population of a thousand
or more less than twenty years ago.
Black rhinos (with
narrow lips) are now far more threatened. Their population has fallen from twenty thousand
to less than six thousand in a decade. They are solitary animals and have never bred
particularly well in zoos. In fact their captive population has been slowly falling as
their death rate has exceeded their birth rate. But research and careful management may
halt this decline.
Great Indian rhinos, once common in northern India and Nepal,
are now restricted to small populations in forest reserves. Their decline has been halted,
and now like so many wild species their future depends upon continued political stability
in their countries of origin. There are very few in European zoos. Nevertheless the
species seems to breed readily in captivity, and there is good reason to expect a safe
reservoir population will become established in zoos.
Until very recently you would have had to explore the forests of
Indonesia if you ever wished to see a woolly rhinoceros. There is a record of a
female woolly (or ‘Sumatran’) rhino arriving in London Zoo in 1872 (she lived for thirty
three more years); and a second was held at Calcutta Zoo in 1889. The only animal you
could perhaps have seen since was a male who died at Copenhagen Zoo in 1972. With a world
population numbered only in the hundreds, scattered in upland forests in Malaya, Thailand,
Bomeo and Sumatra, this the smallest of the living rhinos has been little known, and
rarely seen or photographed. But on Friday 24th May 1985 a historic agreement was signed
in Jakarta by officials of John Aspinall’s zoos (the Howletts and Port Lympne Foundation)
and the Indonesian government, for a project to conserve the Sumatran rhino. The project
centred around ‘doomed’ rhinos – animals in isolated forests due to be felled for
agriculture. A grim fate normally awaits such animals, but Aspinall’s plan was to capture
all the doomed rhinos and place them in breeding colonies in Indonesia and in Britain. So
it was that in April 1986 a young male woolly rhino, ‘Torgamba’, arrived at Port Lympne Zoo in Kent. It is doubtful whether any
zoo animal has ever been so cosseted. While a permanent twelve acre enclosure was being
prepared, Torgamba, and a mate that arrived in August 1986, were kept at a private farm
with their own heated swimming pools, luxurious mud baths, and sun ray lamps. They were
fed upon three buckets of exotic fruits a day (flown in twice a week at a cost of £1,000
a time), and even their fresh hay was dipped in pineapple juice to make it more accept
able. Branches were cut for them from a carefully tended, unsprayed woodland: deep
wood-chippings were provided to mimic the forest floor, and the animals were watched and
cared for twenty four hours a day. The rhinos became immediately tame, and greatly loved
by their keepers. But Aspinall’s bold experiment was not to be a success. After
several years, and considerable anguish, The Howletts and Port Lymnpe zoos made what must
have been the most selfless decision ever made by a zoo. They chose to return the rhinos
that had cost them millions back to a reserve in Indonesia. Torgamba is now back in
Indonesia in semi captivity at Way Kamba National Park. If the rhinos there breed, and
there is every chance that they will, then it will be a first for the species in any zoo,
and may well herald a safer future for one of the world’s most endangered mammals. You can
still see Sumatran rhinos at the Bronx Zoo, and at San Diego Zoo. But the real future for
this species looks to be in managed semi-captivity in Indonesia.
The fifth, and most endangered species of rhino is the Javan rhino. There
are perhaps fifty surviving individuals in the Udjung-Kulon reserve in Java, and a smaller
number in the Leuser reserve in Sumatra. There are no Javan rhinos in any of the world’s
zoos.
A controversy surrounds the recommendation of American zoologist, Dr
Ulysses Seal, that twenty rhinos should be captured from Udjung-Kulon and brought into
captivity. Seal argues that without captive management, there is only one direction that
the Javan rhino population can go, and that is towards extinction. His critics counter,
with some justification, that no one knows if the rhinos will breed in captivity, no one
knows how to keep and manage them, and no one knows how to capture them in the first
place. If zoos could fund a compromise project to capture a single pair and keep them
locally to put these reservations to the test, then this might help support a decision in
one direction or another. It might also demonstrate the good intentions of the zoos. The
worst decision would be one made purely for political or financial reasons.
The cruel contrast between mankind’s ignorant, systematic extermination of rhinos, and
the gentle nature
of the animals themselves is very
obvious when you see them well kept in a zoo. Zoo rhinos tend to become tame and
affectionate. They will often allow visitors to reach across the barriers and scratch
them, and they always develop a very close bond with their keepers. Rhinos, like gorillas,
are misunderstood, gentle giants. If good zoos can help to save them, then they deserve
our support.