Years ago, I blogged about the deaths of Sudan and Suni, two of the last four remaining Northern White Rhinos on earth. New York Times writer Sam Anderson recently wrote on the plight of the two remaining individuals of this species, Fatu and Najin:
"Although Sudan was the last male Northern White rhino, he was not, actually, the last of his kind. He still had two living descendants, both female: Najin, a daughter, and Fatu, a granddaughter. They would live out their days in a strange existential twilight — a state of limbo that scientists call, with heartbreaking dryness, “functional extinction.” Their subspecies was no longer viable. Two females, all by themselves, would not be able to save it.
In his final moments, Sudan was surrounded by the men who loved him. His caretakers were veterans of the deep bush — not, on any level, strangers to death. The men scratched Sudan’s rough skin, said goodbye, made promises, apologized for the sins of humanity. Finally, the veterinarians euthanized him. For a short time, he breathed heavily. And then he died.
After he died, I could not stop thinking about the last two. What were they like? What did they do all day? I found their existence strangely cheering. Although their story was almost unbearably tragic, they themselves were not tragic — they were just rhinos. To meet them would be a chance to look mass extinction in the face.
After months of reading and imagining, I found myself out in the field — and there they were, in the distance, grazing: the last two northern whites. The real creatures. They stood together on a wide, flat stretch of tussocky grasses, heads lowered to the ground, and against the horizon they looked like parts of the landscape, like geological deposits. Comical flocks of guinea fowl scampered back and forth, twittering. One of the rhino caretakers brought out a large white bucket and, swinging it, scattered treats in piles near our feet: carrots, horse pellets.
Suddenly the rhinos were in motion, padding over, looking simultaneously clumsy and graceful, bulky but gliding, their skin folds bouncing, huge snouts wiggling to the rhythm of their clomping steps. Just like that, my imagination was overridden by their reality. The animals, approaching, became the animals.
I was allowed to stand very close. Close enough to hear their huffing breath, to see them blink their big mild eyes, to see that their ears were fringed with a rim of hairs that seemed as delicate as eyelashes, that their tails had little black tufts. Their horns, up close, were ragged, with scraggly fibrous patches, like shafts of splintering wood. I watched them press their great wrinkled mouths against the ground, snuffling and chomping. Sometimes they looked up at me, expressionless.
Today the northern white rhinos seem perfectly at home in Ol Pejeta, where everyone refers to them, affectionately, as “the girls.” They live in a state of supervised wildness, with a daily routine full of little rituals and pleasures. At dawn, the caretakers come clanking in through a series of gates, and the girls pad out of their pens to greet them. Rhinos have fairly weak eyes, but their noses and ears are powerful, and the girls can identify the men by scent and sound. White rhinos are surprisingly relaxed. They could kill you if necessary, but they would prefer not to. As Martin Booth, an English writer who spent part of his childhood in East Africa, put it: “Whenever one sees a white rhino in the wild, one cannot escape the impression of size, of incredible benign strength and of a strange inner passiveness. The creature looks peaceful, amiable and secure. If a creature can be said to have discovered transcendental meditation, then it must be the white rhino.”
The girls, having grown up in a zoo, are especially good-natured. Their morning often starts with a thorough scratch-down from one of the caretakers, an affectionate check-in. Najin, the older and milder of the two, particularly enjoys this — she will walk over and wait for it, then lean her big body in, exhaling softly from her nostrils as the caretaker rubs her forehead, neck, belly and ears with his hands. After this, both girls will walk off, under the low orange ball of the dawn sun, to take care of their other duties: to wallow in the mud, solemnly sharpen their horns and rub their bodies, systematically, for minutes at a time, against the nub of an old wooden fence post.
I spent one week out in the field with the girls. I would go to them at dawn and leave when the sun set. It was no time at all, in the scheme of things — not even a blink of evolution’s eye, and just the tiniest fraction of the girls’ big, wrinkled lives. But out there in the field, time hung thick like fog. Every day felt like a sliver of eternity.
Just down the road from the girls, Ol Pejeta has a rhinoceros memorial. It is a place of deep sadness. One tall tree stands alone in the middle of an open field, and around it sits a score of rough stone piles, each bearing a plaque with a rhino’s name. A few of the honored animals were famous and highly protected, and therefore able to die of natural causes: Suni and Sudan, for instance, the last two male northern whites.
But a vast majority were not famous, and their lives ended terribly, at the hands of poachers. They were shot by guns or poison arrows, their horns cut off. I saw markers for rhinos called Carol, Mia, Shemsha, Zulu, Kaka, Batian. Some died quickly, but others survived for weeks before succumbing to their injuries. I saw a plaque for Ishirini, a 19-year-old black rhino: “The security team found her writhing in pain with the horns already chopped off. She was 12 months pregnant.” A 28-year-old named Job: “Semi tame blind rhino shot dead in a rhino enclosure and both horns removed.” The names just kept coming: Mwanzo, Kiriamiti, Muigo, Chema. Max, a 6-year-old white rhino, had had his horns pre-emptively sawed off by rangers, to dissuade the poachers. But the poachers shot him anyway, perhaps just out of spite.
Even on a wildlife conservancy, it is impossible to protect every animal. Ol Pejeta is huge, and it is surrounded, on every side, by desperate poverty. The girls, in the absence of armed guards, would probably be killed immediately. Some billionaire would no doubt pay a fortune to own the horns of the last two northern whites.
In the face of all this gloom, and against very steep odds, there is still a last-ditch effort to save the subspecies. Both Najin and Fatu have reproductive problems-- neither can carry a baby to term. But their eggs, fertilized with frozen sperm and implanted into the uterus of a healthy southern white rhino, may still be able to create a viable calf. It is a reproductive hail Mary, but it is also the best option left.
Some months later, I was trying to write about the girls, trying to bring them to life on the page. I kept remembering, in particular, one moment. “Have you ever heard a rhino snoring before?” [caretaker] James Mwenda asked me one afternoon. We were sitting on the edge of a hole — an old aardvark den that had collapsed and was now used mainly by warthogs. The girls were napping nearby. All around us the birds were stitching their crazy quilt of songs: hooting, chipping, whirring, beeping, cooing, grinding, sliding.
And yes, in the midst of all that noise, like a distant tractor gently idling, one of the rhinos was snoring. It was, indeed, my first time. And yet the sound was familiar — exactly the same kind of rhythmic rasp you would hear coming out of your stepfather or your pet dog or your best friend. It was just a regular old snore: the universal soundtrack of a mammal deep in slumber. The noise was coming from Najin. Fatu was sleeping silently next to her, her big square snout mashed on the ground, her legs curled under her like a kitten’s. The two of them looked armored but defenseless, adorable and sad. Suddenly, in the midst of Najin’s snoring, another sound broke out over the field — a rumble even louder than the snore. This new noise went on and on. It sounded like a trombonist warming up, feeling out the acoustics of a very large concert hall. This was, it became clear, a rhinoceros fart. One of the girls was breaking wind in her sleep — emphatically, sincerely, admirably, without restraint.
Once the noise died down, I asked Mwenda if he could tell which of the rhinos had done it. He laughed. “The two of them,” he said. “The two of them together — they did it at once.”
This struck me, in that moment, as the very definition of magic, and I laughed with crazy joy. Life speaks to us in so many languages. The last two northern white rhinos, mother and daughter, had passed gas together, in perfect unison, in the middle of a happy sleep. Mwenda and I had just heard the rarest symphony in the world: one biological chord, rising, fading, dispersing, expanding."
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