Witness to an extinction

 

 Laikipia, Kenya

  Before vets put him down in Kenya this week, I attended the deathbed of Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhinoceros, to observe up close what extinction looks like. Like a king he lay on his side, all 2,800 kilos of him. For millennia, his species had been one of the largest of land mammals. At the grand old age of 45, his back legs had given out, then he had developed a nasty lesion. Finally his vast grey bulk became covered with what looked like bedsores. I expected Sudan’s hide to be rough and petrified. I thought of Kipling’s rhinoceros, bad-tempered on account of the crumbs hidden inside his skin by the Parsee on the Altogether Uninhabited Island in the Red Sea. To my surprise, Sudan was soft to pat and stroke. Born in the wild, he had been captured as a baby. After a life with humans in zoos, he was as friendly as a pony. With a swish of his piggy tail, he laid his hairy long ears flat against the huge spatula skull and blew out of his square lips with stentorian sighs. He seemed fed up. Sometimes tears ran down his dusty face. Surrounding Sudan in the enclosure stood his weeping Kenyan retainers, Esokon, Jojo, Zachary and James. Here on Ol Pejeta Conservancy in the shadow of Mount Kenya, these men had stayed with him night and day since he arrived from a Czech zoo in 2009. That was when last-ditch human attempts had been ramped up to breed him with the only two surviving northern white rhino females, his daughter Najin, and granddaughter Fatu. Suni, Sudan’s son, was also around for a while — but then he died. The rhinos had not bred well in zoos and scientists believed they would do better in the wild.