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There are three northern white rhinoceroses left. The last male of this subspecies lives in Kenya and is already quite old for his kind of animal. He is ailing now.
But recently, a secondary and much deeper infection was discovered beneath the initial one and Sudan was taking longer to recover, "despite the best efforts of his team of vets who are giving him 24-hour care", the organisation said.
There are two other white rhinos left in the world – a female named Najin and daughter Fatu, both also living at the conservancy in Kenya. Health problems or their ages – around 28 and 17, respectively – have left them unable to reproduce.
Wildlife experts and conservationists expressed deep regret over the prospect of the northern white rhino completely dying out. Technically, the species is already classified as extinct because it no longer exists in the wild, conservationists said.
The last few there and elsewhere have been protected 24/7 by heavily armed guard to try to slow down poaching. However, poaching and the other underlying reasons for the impending extinction are unlikely to be solved within the next few decades.
Sources:
Last male northern white rhino Sudan falls ill as species edges closer to extinction. South China Morning Post
The world's last male northern white rhino is on death watch. CNN
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 05 2018, @12:54PM
Oh its not so bad; the dumb part was stacking cash on one side and wagging fingers and expecting for the first time in human history prohibition will work.
There are two "right" ways to do it.
Have the conservationists run the whole racket themselves and they get the profits for conservation purposes (If we did this, we'd probably have herds of northern white rhino bigger than cow herds roaming around in Africa, because people like money and the same people growing the herds are getting all the cash, instead of all the cash going to poachers). If its gonna happen, the government can NOT decide to stop it, but they can allocate the profits, and they really screwed up.
The other "right" way to stop it is find something the Chinese won't eat (well, in theory... good luck with this) and flood the market with fake rhino horn thats actually ground up tibet dirt or whatever if anything repulses the Chinese. Repeat for any other horn eating group. Or really F with them by putting viagra in the made up rhino horn mix. Refuse to have the local equiv of the FDA do any quality control either. I'm just saying... you can go to all the effort of going to Africa to get horns but if the market is beyond flooded with capsules of literal grass clippings then the market will die and nobody in the market can afford to go to Africa because they're too busy chasing microscopic margins on stuffing grass clippings into capsules. See the American supplement market and various chemical and DNA analysis over the years. You can't stop people from smoking tobacco or poaching rhino horns, but the war on cigarettes shows that its quite possible to destroy demand.