After all the newborns arrived in recent times we have a bunch of sad news to share.
The first one is from Copenaghen (DK) where White Rhino bull Curt passed away during the summer. He was the only adult male resident in the facility. Causes of death are still unclear, but the male rhino underwent an intensive cure for three weeks and during this time he lost nearly 400 kg: he was totally unable to feed. He in fact developed a skin disease that affected especially his nose, face, mouth and feet. Despite every effort he was euthanized to end his suffering. He was described as a good fellow. In his last video dated back in November 2018 he was reintroduced to one of the females in the hope for new calves: you can see the video on the official Facebook page of the facility. Since his stay in Copenhagen he sired 3 calves with two different females, Minna and Zuri: the happy news is that both of them are pregnant again and expecting to give birth in 2020.
The second news is about female Indian Rhino Sani from Stuttgart (DE). She was one of the last wild Indian rhinos and was ~26 years old. She passed away a few weeks ago because of a cancer that extended on her whole organism. Since 2014 we thought something was not going well, since Sani and her longtime male companion Bruno suddenly stop having calves, and now we sadly know what the reason was. Sani leaves behind a big legacy since her 6 calves are alive and some of them already procreated: Sani had 10 grand-children up until now (and maybe more to come).
Another sad news and an huge blow for the Australasian breeding program for White Rhinos is the death of Imani, in Monarto (AU), one of the females born in 2018. It’s the second Umqali‘s young daughter that accidentally dies in the span of 3 years. In fact at the moment the death cause is not clear: it seems to be a blood loss but the reason of it is unclear. At the moment Umqali has no alive calves, one more reason to be extra-aware of the environment where the rhinos live because sometimes reintroduction schedule for male rhinos in crash mostly composed by females can be pretty violent, and more often than not are the youngest member of the group that pay the toll. Unless death cause isn’t a bacterial or viral infection, in that case they should immediately fix the problem in order to protect the other rhinos of the herd. It is really deprecable anyway that the young female had died: we cannot afford to lose these precious female for accidents like these.
