By Avila Geraldine, NST Online May 27, 2019

KOTA KINABALU: Malaysia’s last remaining male Sumatran rhinoceros, affectionately called Tam, has died today.

Tam died at about noon at Borneo Rhino Sanctuary in Tabin Wildlife Reserve, Lahad Datu.

Sabah Deputy Chief Minister cum Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Christina Liew said the exact cause of death would be known after the autopsy.

“Invariably, everything that could have possibly been done, was done, and executed with great love and dedication.

“(Tam’s) last weeks involved the most intense palliative care as humanly possible, rendered by the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA) team under veterinarian Dr Zainal Zahari Zainuddin at the Borneo Rhino Sanctuary,” she said in a statement, here.

Liew said Tam’s death was related to old age and involved multiple organ failures.

It was reported that Tam’s appetite and alertness had declined significantly since the end of last month.

Urine analysis tests indicated that Tam was suffering from organ damage and poor kidney function.

It spent most of its time lying down, having received round-the-clock attention and medication from keepers as well as veterinarians.

In Aug 2010, a wildlife team captured the male rhinoceros at the Kretam oil palm plantation in Tawau.

At the time of its capture, the rhinocerous was thought to be in its mid-20s. Tam was taken to the Tabin Wildlife Reserve where it had lived ever since.

Liew said Tam’s living genome was now preserved in cell culture.

“We hope that with emerging technologies at cell and molecular levels, he may be able to contribute his genes to ensure the survival of the species,” she added.

With Tam’s death, Malaysia is now left with one female Sumatran rhinoceros, Iman. She was captured in 2014.

In 2017, another female rhinoceros Puntung was euthanised because she was suffering from a painful and incurable cancer.

Iman appears to be the last Sumatran rhinoceros that was found in the wild. Since her rescue, no other Sumatran rhinoceros has been detected in Sabah, indicating that the species may have become extinct.

The Star Online, 20 May 2019

KOTA KINABALU: The health of Malaysia’s last surviving male Sumatran rhino is fast fading.

Struggle to heal: Tam being cared for by his caretakers at the Tabin Wildlife Reserve in Sabah

Sabah Wildlife Department director Augustine Tuuga said serious concerns were growing over the health of the rhino named Tam, whose appetite and alertness had declined abruptly since late April this year.

“It is now well into old age for a Sumatran rhino,” he said in a statement yesterday.

“It is receiving round-the-clock attention and medication. Tests are ongoing but it seems that one or more of its internal organs are not functioning well,” added Tuuga.

After a week of being fed and befriended by the department staff, local non-governmental organisation SOS Rhino (now known as the Borneo Rhino Alliance) and WWF-Malaysia, Tam was coaxed into a crate, and brought to facilities in Tabin Wildlife Reserve, where he has lived ever since.

Tuuga said Tam had always been a favourite of the people who worked with it or visited it due to its calm and steady manner.

However, hopes to find a mate for Tam were dashed when female rhino Puntung, captured in 2011, was found to have multiple cysts throughout its uterus, and Iman, captured in 2014, was found to have massive uterine fibroids.

These illnesses are a reflection of too few rhinos and insufficient breeding success during the last decades of the 20th century.

Puntung was euthanised in 2017 because of painful and incurable cancer.

Since 2011, all efforts in Malaysia to save the species from extinction have focused on the application of advanced reproductive technology, including in vitro fertilisation attempts as well as collaborating with Indonesia.

To date, neither have met with success.

Rhinos have not been seen in Sabah’s jungles for over a decade.
Read the full article here

The Sumatran rhino captive breeding plan is poised for a re-evaluation — and a relaunch

• The Sumatran rhino captive-breeding program caught 40 rhinos from 1984 to 1995. To date, the program has produced five calves.
• Some view these figures as evidence of a colossal failure. Others point to the births achieved as proof of the program’s eventual success.
• Momentum has been growing to relaunch efforts to capture wild rhinos. The most significant step yet was the September announcement of a new initiative dubbed the Sumatran Rhino Rescue.

This is the final article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

There is a clip from the documentary Torgamba: the Last Rhino that I watch over and over. It shows Torgamba, the male Sumatran rhino who spent much of his life in the U.K. before being sent back to Indonesia, returning to his native country. Tom Foose and Nico van Strien are waiting for him. Neither of them are comfortable-looking TV presenters, but these are scientists, not celebrities.

Foose is as John Payne describes him: “nerdy,” with his slight build, thick glasses, short shorts and long socks. Van Strien is big-built and stiff. Both men try to look comfortable as Torgamba browses before them.  Foose calls the moment “gratifying.”

“I don’t think he’s much bigger now than he was,” van Strien says.

“No, but he was definitely a young animal — his horn was quite short and now it really is quite spectacular.”

In the film, you can see just how small Torgamba is when standing next to Foose and Van Strien. The littlest, strangest rhino.

In 2006, six years after the film was made, Tom Foose died. He was only 61. He’d lived long enough, however, to see the birth of two baby rhinos, long enough to see his life’s work bearing fruit.

Tom Foose in 2001, posing in front of the Cincinnati Zoo’s Sumatran rhino enclosure with Emi and young Andalas in the background. Photo courtesy of the International Rhino Foundation.

Re-evaluating the failure

 First, some numbers: the Sumatran rhino captive-breeding program caught 40 rhinos from 1984 to 1995. To date, the program has produced five calves. By any normal count this would look like a pretty spectacular failure.

“There weren’t as many rhinos as everybody anticipated. The rhinos weren’t as fertile as everybody anticipated. There were all those challenges,” says Terri Roth, head of Cincinnati Zoo’s Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife(CREW).

But given how close the program was to accomplishing nothing but death and tragedy — given that the last calf was just born two years ago; that the remaining population in the wild may be anywhere from 30 to 80 — the captive-breeding program starts to look like a prescient gift from its founders. And maybe even the best chance to save this unique genus.

“For a combination of reasons, the collaboratively-managed global population imagined by the 1987 IUCN group was never achieved,” John Payne and K. Yoganand wrote in a 2017 report on the future of Sumatran rhino conservation commissioned by the WWF. “The most significant reasons included insufficient knowledge of key elements of rhino breeding biology, poor husbandry, unwillingness to share rhinos, more than half the rhinos unable to breed due to age-related problems or reproductive pathology and no work done to apply advanced technology.”

Though all this is true (in fairness, Roth and her team did try and artificially inseminate a female rhino), it’s a glass-half-empty view.

The half–full view: Conservationists have succeeded in five captive births, and they have etched a template of how to produce more. Rhinos are also living longer in captivity than in those early days.

“From the pioneer project, we amassed a lot of information on how to set up and consolidate such a complex operation, devise new ways of capture, handle, provide health care, translocate and breed the Sumatran rhino in controlled environments,” says Francesco Nardelli, the former executive director of the Sumatran Rhino Project. “The events at Cincinnati Zoo and SRS” — the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Indonesia’s Way Kambas National Park — “are the living proof of the success of Sumatran rhino captive breeding.”

After the successful birth of five calves (three at Cincinnati and two at the SRS), there has been a shift away from the view that the 1984-1995 breeding program was a complete disaster.

“Today I consider obsolete and almost biased the rhetoric that the Sumatran rhino captive breeding project was a failure,” Nardelli says.

Tam under general anesthesia undergoing electro-ejaculation in Malaysian Borneo. Attending to him are staff from the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA), the Singapore Zoo and Peninsular Malaysia’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks. Image courtesy of BORA.

Other take a more nuanced stance.

“It was not a rousing success, but at the same time there was a hell of a lot learned,” says Susie Ellis, head of the International Rhino Foundation (IRF). “Everything that we’re relying on now … is sitting on the shoulders of all that work. What was perceived as a failure I think is actually going to be the thing that may provide the best hope for the future of the species.”

Without the trials and errors and eventual success — without Foose, van Strien, Roth, British zoo owner John Aspinall,  Malaysian conservationist Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan and many others — we wouldn’t know that a Sumatran rhino was an induced ovulator. We wouldn’t know that it didn’t graze on grass, like its African brethren, but that it fed on branches replete with the leaves, known as browse. We wouldn’t know that vicious fighting is part of their foreplay. We wouldn’t know that they need constant shade to prevent damage to their eyesight. We wouldn’t know how vocal the animal is — more so than any other rhino. We wouldn’t have any frozen semen samples.

This graph depicts the lifepaths of wild-captured Sumatran rhinos. The inner ring indicates the area where they were captured, while the outer ring shows their final place of captivity. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

In 1995, as the criticism peaked, the legendary conservationist Alan Rabinowitz wrote a landmark and scathing paper, “Helping a Species Go Extinct: the Sumatran Rhino in Borneo.”

In May this year, months before his death in August, Rabinowitz told Mongabay that things had definitely changed.

“I feel the same way in terms of the failure of that early program and the mistakes and short-sightedness that were part of the decisions,” he said, noting that there should have been more on-the-ground protection for rhino populations and more protected areas established. “I do not, however, feel the same way about the situation today.”

He said he had since come to believe that captive breeding was absolutely necessary. “I think captive breeding, ignoring perceived subspecies differences, and using the improved techniques that have been developed, are now definitely called for and worth the expense.”

Still, he said any captive-breeding efforts must be coupled with habitat protection and plans to re-release the rhinos one day.

“The success of captive-born Sumatran rhinos is definitely a good thing.  It does not diminish the fact that the early efforts were misguided,” Rabinowitz said.

Since the close of that program, conservationists have captured six more rhinos, four of which survive today. But these captures weren’t a part of any wider, coordinated effort to take rhinos out of the wild. Instead, they were either removing the very last rhino from an area, or incidental captures due to animals wandering into villages or oil palm plantations.

One of these rhinos, Ratu, has proven key in keeping the program going: she is the mother of the two calves born at the SRS.

“As heavily criticized as this breeding program was back in the 1980s, if we were starting now — where we started in the 1980s — we would not have time,” Roth says. “We’re not starting there. We’ve learned a lot.”

More than 30 years ago, during the 1984 meeting, Ulysses S. Seal, then chairman of the IUCN’s Captive Breeding Specialist Group, said the new rhino program would need to follow a “safe-to-fail strategy.”

This meant the ability to make “many mistakes without losing the species.” Animals would likely die, unexpected challenges would arise, and there would be, in Seal’s words, “repeated failures.” This prescience about needing an opportunity to fail looks undeniable today.

Indeed, fail, we did. A lot. But we also succeeded. Time will tell if those successes will prove enough to stave off extinction.

Epilogue: Najaq

Earlier this month, a group of conservation organizations — including National Geographic, IRF, IUCN, Global Wildlife Conservation and WWF — announced a plan endorsed by the Indonesian government to capture wild rhinos and build two additional facilities to house them. Nothing on this scale has been seen since the 1990s. The idea is to bring in wild rhinos to supplement and add much-needed genetic diversity to the current captive population. Dubbed the Sumatran Rhino Rescue, the new program is currently in the fundraising stage.

But, in many ways, this new plan actually kicked off more than two years ago — it’s a shame it started so tragically.

On March 12, 2016 a female Sumatran rhino stumbled into a pit trap, set by conservationists in central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. She was the perfect age to begin breeding and living, breathing proof of rhinos in Kalimantan, where they had been thought extinct for decades.

Within several weeks she was dead.

In thirty years, when looking back on the Sumatran rhino conservation program, the capture of Najaq in Kalimantan may be viewed as the start of the second capture program. For more than two decades — really from 1995 onwards — the shortcomings of the 1984 program halted captures of more rhinos from the wild.

“I think part of the reluctance in terms of allowing capture was this perceived failure of the earlier program,” Ellis says.

The other part of it is that catching wild rhinos is always risky, as the cases of Najaq, and Riau in 1986 and Linbar in 1987 and Lokan in 1988 and others unnamed, attest. Things go wrong; animals perish.

Mike Griffiths, founder of the Leuser International Foundation, says the “key policy makers” are “very sensitive” to catching rhinos due to the difficulty and risk.  Of course, there are many ways to mitigate that risk.

Officially and publicly, Najaq died of a snare wound she sustained six months before her capture. However, there’s another side to the story.

Payne and Yoganand’s 2017 study cites an unpublished report on the animal’s death that points to several mistakes made in the capture and subsequent care.

Najaq was kept in her pit trap for at least 54 hours — four and half days —“subjecting her to stress and over-heating,” according to the report. Living in deep forests, Sumatran rhinos are rarely exposed to direct sunlight and spend much of their days cooling off and avoiding insects in wallows. Sitting in a pit trap for days, with constant human presence and noise, meant that Najaq was likely not only highly stressed, but potentially overheating.

“The snare wound was not the primary cause of death,” Payne and Yoganand conclude.

If this was the case, how did things go so wrong? Why hadn’t we learned from the many failures of 1984-1995?

“Too many people and institutions were involved in the capture and translocation plan, the majority with no relevant skills or knowledge,” Payne and Yoganand wrote. “There was no clear structure of leadership, decision-making and responsibility, and people with Sumatran rhino capture and translocation skills were not involved.”

Herman Stawin, senior wildlife ranger, shakes hands with veterinarian Zainal Zainuddin in front of a crate used to transport captive rhinos. The two jointly supervised the BORA team in the field. Image courtesy of BORA.

Payne, who along with his vet, Zainal Zainuddin, has successfully captured several rhinos, elucidated six key points they’ve stuck to over the years: a small team; a clearly designated leader; one vet “experienced in capture of Sumatran rhino by pit fall trap” and another person dealing with all non-rhino issues; everything ready to go the moment the rhino is trapped; the trap itself, measuring 8 by 4 by 6 feet (2.4 by 1.2 by 1.8 meters); and avoiding the use of drugs on the animals, especially psychotropic drugs.

“If you look at the case of Najaq and her death, none of these six points were followed,” Payne says.

Many agree with him. Erik Meijaard, a conservationist with decades of experience in Indonesia, wrote an op-ed blasting not only the WWF’s handling of Najaq, but its subsequent unwillingness to admit anything went wrong. Griffiths echoed criticism heard from many who work in the region when he said, “At the basic level the organizational structure and control was not sufficiently professional.”

Margaret Kinnaird, an expert in rhinos with the WWF, admits that things did go wrong.

“When Najaq was rescued she had already suffered a wound from a poacher’s snare, an unavoidable factor that contributed to her death,” she says. “Other factors including temporary holding conditions, stress and the drugs administered [that] may have complicated her situation. Arguably, there could have been better coordination among all actors during the capture effort — something that we have streamlined for any future rescues. The decisions taken during Najaq’s capture and attempted translocation were made by the highest authority in Indonesia with assessment and consultancy from a host of wildlife experts around the world. All parties involved during the effort had a role to play in the chain of events that led up to the failed attempt at ensuring she didn’t succumb to these complications.”

Still, Najaq’s death hasn’t stopped conservationists from viewing captive breeding seriously — as the newly announced Sumatran Rhino Rescue program demonstrates.

There’s been a complete turnaround. I’m stunned,” says Roth, who notes that when she started, the captive-breeding program was widely regarded as a total failure. “Now you hear exactly the opposite, that all the rhinos should be brought into captivity.”

Foose’s Vision

Over the last 30 years, the Sumatran rhino population in the wild has collapsed far more quickly than many could have guessed. In some places, populations have gone from estimates in the hundreds to near zero in a matter of a few years. Quite simply, the Sumatran rhino is vanishing.

So conservationists have returned to Tom Foose’s vision from 1984; in many ways the Sumatran Rhino Rescue is Foose’s Vision 2.0.

“I certainly think that we should get more rhinos into the breeding program, if for no other reason than we need the genetic diversity,” Roth says.

According to new numbers released by the Sumatran Rhino Rescue Program there are only around 80 wild Sumatran rhinos in the world spread over eleven subpopulations.

Nearly everyone agrees that all the rhinos should be rounded up in Kalimantan and Bukit Barisan National Park in southern Sumatra, where new numbers released by the Sumatran Rhino Rescue Program show the population at up to ten and up to five respectively. However, there is more debate about Way Kambas National Park, also in southern Sumatra, where new numbers show less than 20, and the Leuser Ecosystem in northern Sumatra, where researchers estimate fewer than 50 animals spread out over six subpopulations. Some believe these areas may house enough rhinos to sustain a wild population, assuming they are protected from poachers and snares. But others think it necessary to take animals out of these populations — if only to ensure we are capturing some young, healthy, fertile females.

“If there are still rhinos in their forests, they are no longer in sufficient numbers to propagate the species scattered as they are. Those last ‘forest ghosts’ need our help to meet each other now,” Nardelli says.

Ara, a male Sumatran rhino, at Sungai Dusrun. Caught in 1994 in Peninsular Malaysia, Ara survived just over nine years in captivity. He perished in 2003 when disease struck the facility of Sungai Dusun. Ara was the last wild rhino ever caught in Peninsular Malaysia. The species is now believed to be extinct there. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

But Roth, who was instrumental in making the captive breeding a success, says we shouldn’t go so far as to bring all the rhinos into sanctuaries like the SRS.

“Now, I almost find myself in the opposite part of that spectrum where people are saying, ‘We have to bring them all in and [a managed] breeding program is the only way to go,’ and I’m kind of arguing, ‘No, I don’t think so, look at the Javan rhino,’” she says. The Javan rhino today survives in a single site with a stable, albeit small, population. Roth says she doesn’t see the dilemma as a binary — all captive or all wild — but a situation that requires “multiple strategies.”

“I’m not ready to give up on the wild populations,” she adds.

Griffiths says there are plans to catch some animals for captive breeding from the eastern Leuser population. But he believes conservationists should not take animals out of the western Leuser population, which he thinks is viable in the long term.

“The population of rhinos in Western Leuser is increasing in numbers and range,” he says, noting that they have evidence of recent births. Griffiths believes that if this area can be protected it could one day be home to “several hundred rhinos.”

Rainforest in the Leuser Ecosystem. Situated in northern Sumatra, the ecosystem is home to tigers, elephants and orangutans as well as rhinos. New estimates put the number of Sumatran rhinos in Leuser at high as 50. Photo by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

What about Way Kambas? Roth says she’s not against taking animals out of Way Kambas — with a new estimate of less than 20 animals — to contribute to genetic diversity of the captive population.

But even as conservationists’ plans to capture more rhinos are coming into fruition, the question remains: Are we doing enough?

“Things don’t move fast enough. There’s no question. Again, deciding on what should be happening and then making it happen, those are two different steps,” says Roth, who calls the decision to catch rhinos “a huge step forward.”

In the meantime, she says, more can be done with the rhinos available. For example, she thinks that Tam, the last male rhino in Sabah, should be sent to Indonesia for attempted breeding.

“I know they’re concerned that Tam maybe is subfertile. I’m not sure that he is. I think he’s maybe just like all the other Sumatran rhinos,” says Roth, who notes that sperm samples taken from other Sumatran rhinos have been poor, even for proven fathers like Ipuh and Andalas.

Tom Foose, Nico van Strien and veterinarian Marcellus Adi at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in the early 2000s. Image courtesy of IRF.

“As Tom Foose used to say… [we] need to maximize our options and minimize our regrets,” Ellis says. “And I think that’s where we’re trying to go, just to be sure we’re doing everything we can.”

We’ve come a long way from the meeting kick-stared by Foose in 1984. We know more than we ever have about Sumatran rhinos. And that knowledge may, in the end, be the only thing that saves them.

“Tom was the most visionary of all of us in the 1980s,” Payne says.

Without Foose, Sumatran rhinos probably would have never made their way to Cincinnati Zoo and our whole story would be very different — and likely all the more tragic.

“He was the one who obviously encouraged us all along,” Ed Maruska, former head of Cincinnati Zoo, says of this “dedicated rhino man.”

Read the full article on Mongabay.

After 17 years, researchers finally unlock the mysteries of Sumatran rhino reproduction.

An article by Jeremy Hance published in Mongabay on 28 SEPTEMBER 2018

• As the 20th century drew to a close the Sumatran rhino captive breeding program, launched in 1984, had yet to produce a single calf.
• Home to the last two Sumatran rhinos in the United States, the Cincinnati Zoo made several key discoveries about the species’ reproductive behavior, including the fact that females only ovulate when they have contact with males.
• Andalas, the first Sumatran rhino bred in captivity in more than a century, was born in Cincinnati in 2001. This success, and the subsequent birth of four other calves, has led to a re-evaluation of the program as a whole.
• Now, attention is turned to breeding centers in the rhinos’ original habitat as the future of captive breeding efforts.

This is the third article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” Read Part One and Part Two.

As we walk out into the zoo enclosure, Cossatot comes over to greet me. Cossatot is a capybara, the size of a very big dog; his species is the world’s largest rodent. He quickly determines from smelling my hands that I’ve neglected to bring him a treat. Looking a bit put out, he goes back to lounging in his one-man kingdom. But where Cossatot reigns was once the domain of an even larger, far more endangered animal. Little does Cossatot know, but his kingdom has made history. I’m visiting the old Sumatran rhino enclosures of Cincinnati Zoo with Terri Roth, head of the zoo’s Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW), and Paul Reinhart, leader of the team that cared daily for the rhinos.

Terri Roth inside one of the two enclosures at the Cincinnati Zoo that once housed Sumatran rhinos. Today the enclosures house a regal capybara named Cossatot and two emus. Image by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

Roth jokes that the enclosures have fallen far from their glory days when they housed arguably the rarest large terrestrial mammal on Earth.  The two enclosures — one for the male rhino, Ipuh, and the other for the female, Emi, and her calves — are now the domain of Cossatot and a pair of nervous emus. Above them are half-million-dollar metal structures that look like giant rectangular umbrellas, built to shade the rhinos’ eyes from the sun, just as the canopy does in the rainforest, and prevent severe eye damage.

“Every day we walk in here and I look at those pictures,” Reinhart says, pointing to photos of all the rhinos — Ipuh and Emi, Andalas and Suci, and, most beloved of all, Harapan — that once called Cincinnati home.

“I miss all of them,” he says.

Last Chance for the U.S.

In February of 1995, one year before Terri Roth would take the job as director of CREW, two Sumatran rhinos died within five days of each other at San Diego Zoo. This left just three Sumatran rhinos in the whole of the United States: Rapunzel, Emi and Ipuh, the sole male.

Over a decade before, in 1984, conservationists had kick-started a grand plan to capture Sumatran rhinos in the wild and breed them in facilities in Indonesia, Malaysia, the U.K. and the U.S. The bill for this large-scale undertaking was paid by the U.S. and U.K. zoos. Although conservationists were able to capture 40 rhinos over 11 years, the program had turned into a catastrophe. By 1995, nearly half of the 40 rhinos were already dead due to poor feeding practices, disease, accidents and simple ignorance. Moreover, not a single rhino had been bred in captivity. Now, there would be no more rhinos coming to the U.S. Due to a lack of success, the catching had ground to a halt, with the last rhino caught in Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, in 1995.

By this time, the U.K. had only one rhino, a male named Torgamba. Peninsular Malaysia had eight, but no luck breeding. Sabah had five, but only one female. Indonesia had two in captivity, both females.

One problem the program faced was a shortage of breeding pairs. In many cases, facilities had either an unbalanced sex ratio or single, mateless animals. This diagram shows the country (center ring) and facility (outer ring) where rhinos were held. Blue represents female rhinos and red, males. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

The U.S. zoo community, down to its last three rhinos, had one final shot at doing what it promised it could back in 1984: making a baby rhino. But the U.S. rhinos were scattered: Ipuh was at Cincinnati, Rapunzel at the Bronx Zoo, and Emi at L.A. Zoo.

Roth says it was the Cincinnati Zoo director, Ed Maruska, who convinced the other zoos to send their females. “They thought, ‘Well, if anyone will do it, then Maruska will do it.’”

By August 1995, just months after San Diego lost its two rhinos, the three survivors were all brought together at Cincinnati.

“I’d become very much smitten by the beast,” Maruska remembers of seeing his first Sumatran rhino. “It was a hairy animal. It was very unusual, very primitive looking. I thought in every shape or form, Cincinnati’s going to be a part of this program.”

Maruska then made his second big move: he hired Roth in 1996.

“Ed said, ‘We have got to breed these rhinos. It’s the last chance,’” Roth remembers.

No pressure.

Cracking it

Terri Roth’s office is full of rhinos: sculptured metal rhinos, stuffed toy rhinos, plastic rhinos, wood rhinos, and cinema-sized rhino posters. She doesn’t have an unnatural obsession with rhino replicas: nearly all of these are gifts, she says. Roth, who owns a small cattle farm over the border in Kentucky, has become something of a celebrity in the small circle of rhino people, because she accomplished something that many had begun to despair would never happen.

It’s not that no one had been trying to breed the rhinos from the time they were brought into captivity — they had. But the animals would fight, sometimes viciously, whenever they were brought together. And even when mating happened, something was off: the females weren’t getting pregnant.

The first thing Roth wanted to figure out was what was going on with the reproductive cycle of the females. They trained the two females, Emi and Rapunzel, to undergo ultrasounds without anesthesia, which would have been too risky.  They quickly discovered that Rapunzel would never have children: she had a large mass in her uterus. So now the U.S. was down to an Adam-and-Eve scenario: Emi and Ipuh.

They focused all their energy on Emi.

“We were working on her, three times a week, ultrasounds, conditioning her for blood collection, monitoring her for about eight months and I still couldn’t figure out her reproductive cycle,” Roth says. “You’re beating your head against the wall.”

Basically, Emi wasn’t ovulating.

It was in the summer of 1997 that Roth made a risky, but fateful, decision. She decided to put Emi and Ipuh together, even though they didn’t know Emi’s ovulating schedule. Solitary in the wild, males and females will frequently fight like hell when brought together. Sometimes the fights result in injury to one of the animals — not something you generally want to risk with a species on the edge of extinction.

Ipuh enjoys a meal of browse next to the pool in his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

To mitigate the risk, Roth and her team decided to do all they could to make sure Ipuh and Emi weren’t too ornery.

“We thought, ‘Let’s do it when it’s hot. Let’s do it after the male has had its breakfast.’ We put them out. Ipuh would eat his browse. He’d go into the pool, sink down and then we put Emi in.

“The keepers were all on alert. They were ready to jump in if they’re needed to. It actually worked pretty well because [Ipuh] was not really interested in picking a fight,” Roth says. “He was just in the water … Sometimes, Emi would go over to the pool and blow at him.” There were “no big skirmishes,” Roth recalls. “For the most part, they ignored each other.”

Reinhart adds that “it could have gone wrong every single day,” but they kept going.

And they did, for 42 days. Forty-two days of keepers having to put two near-one-ton, critically endangered animals into a potentially perilous situation.

“Then one day, there was just this total difference,” Roth says. “We put [Ipuh] out there and [Emi] went towards the pool and he started coming out of the pool.

“It was the most agreeable situation, shockingly. There was no chasing. There was [no] sparring, he just came out of the pool, started following her around and after a while started mounting her. We were ecstatic.”

But Ipuh was not exactly a seasoned lover.

“He tried … we even got lights out and left them together as late at night as we possibly could,” Roth says. “He mounted her and mounted her and mounted her and finally got exhausted but never was able to breed her.”

But that first encounter did lead to something historical.

“Two days after that … I did the ultrasound where I saw she ovulated for the first time,” Roth says.

A light bulb went off. It turns out the Sumatran rhino is an induced ovulator, which means the female needs something to kick-start her reproductive cycle. In the case of this species, Roth believes it’s the interaction with a male that allows a female to ovulate. Roth says they don’t even have to copulate to ovulate — they just need to spend time with a male at the right time in their cycle.

“We’ve even seen situations where the males run her around but not even [mount] her, and she’s ovulated. I think the ovulation is partly a response to the excitation of being with the male,” Roth says.

Researchers at the Cincinnati Zoo trained female rhinos to accept ultrasounds without anesthesia, allowing every stage of ovulation and pregnancy to be carefully monitored. Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

Still, the team didn’t know how long Emi’s cycle would be, so they started up again with the daily introductions, and 21 days later Ipuh and Emi tried again.

“She conceived on that one. That was the first pregnancy, which was shocking because it’s pretty quick,” Roth says. “We saw the little fetus developing. We saw a heartbeat. We sent out the press release. A week later, the embryo was gone. We thought, ‘At least we knew he was fertile. We knew things were working.’”

Indeed, the team had the information they needed: they knew Emi needed interaction with a male in order to ovulate, they knew her cycle was around 21 days, and they knew how long the follicle would grow during the cycle. Breeding had started to go well; pregnancy, not so much.

“Then she lost the second one, then she lost the third one and it actually became more challenging for me because people started saying, ‘It’s because of the ultrasound exams that she’s losing the pregnancy,’” Roth says. “I was forced to reduce the amount of work I was doing with her, instead of increasing it. Then we were learning less.”

At this point, Roth started to run lots of blood tests to see if she could find anything amiss, comparing them with blood samples from other captive rhinos in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Then Emi lost her fourth pregnancy, and her fifth.

“Finally, I just said, ‘Let’s just put her on the progesterone supplement because we don’t think it will harm anything, and it seems like it could only help and not hurt,’” she says. Progesterone is a hormone produced in the ovaries that becomes elevated during pregnancy. This was in 2000, four years after Roth was hired.
It worked — the sixth pregnancy finally stuck. But no one had any idea how long it would last.

“The only thing I could find was somebody had at some point said it was a seven-month gestation, which we didn’t believe because no rhino is that short,” Roth says.

In fact, 16 months later, Emi gave birth to a baby boy: Andalas. He was not only the first Sumatran rhino born in captivity in 112 years, but the first tangible success of that tragedy-filled program launched in 1984.

The Cincinnati effect

Cincinnati Zoo, the second-oldest in the country, sits smack-dab in the city among the rolling hills surrounding the Ohio River. Generally considered one of the world’s top zoos, it has a long history of breakthrough captive-breeding successes, from giraffes to trumpeter swans to bison.

But perhaps none of the zoo’s past glories could compete with the birth of Andalas.

In many ways, Tom Foose, conservation coordinator for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and the driving force behind the 1984 meeting to launch the captive-breeding program, had a point about why U.S. and U.K. zoos should have a crack at breeding Sumatran rhinos: the world’s best zoos had both the expertise and the technology to have the best chance of success.

“That’s what I love about the Sumatran rhino story because it’s a perfect example of how zoos can contribute,” Roth says. And Cincinnati was even more distinct than many zoos. Not only did it have a long history of captive breeding and expertise, but it also had an entire research facility, CREW, devoted to this kind of work.

“We often have a discussion here at CREW about the disconnect between the reproductive sciences and conservation. There is so much power in that kind of technology, but it’s used so little in real conservation efforts,” Roth says.

Andalas, the first Sumatran rhino bred and born in captivity in over a century. Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

At the same time, Cincinnati Zoo, and the zoo community in general, suffered relentless criticism over the program.

“We felt it constantly. Partly because westerners, partly because zoo, probably partly because female,” Roth says.

Maruska says they took “a lot of fire” even from the wider zoo community. They were accused of taking wild animals out of their habitat just to exhibit them; they were told they’d never succeed.

“We faced the same with the California condor,” Maruska says. “We had people from the Audubon Society saying, ‘Let the birds die in dignity.’ Well, there is no dignity in extinction. Come on.”

Roth remembers that the zoo was even accused of making up pregnancies during the period when Emi was losing one after another.

“And then the negative stuff about, ‘They’re losing pregnancies, they must be doing something wrong there. Cincinnati is a bad environment,’” she says. “But we just kept at it. I just kept our eyes on the goal, and this is what we need to accomplish.”

Roth and the Cincinnati team may be the single most important reason for the eventual success. Roth was able to make astoundingly difficult decisions and then, perhaps even more importantly, stay the course when the criticism became overwhelming.

“Terri was the person that really did the job,” Maruska says.

It just took them — and everyone, in fact — much longer to produce calves than anyone could have expected at the 1984 meeting.

“Hell, I think we did a yeoman’s job with a handful of animals,” Maruska says. “I believe that if we had our full complement of animals, we’d [have] been a lot farther than we are today. I really do.”

The next step for Roth, however, was proving that Andalas wasn’t a fluke, and that Emi and Ipuh could replicate their little miracle.

In this 2017 image, Zulfi Arsan, head veterinarian at Indonesia’s Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary, hand feeds US-born rhino Andalas. Photo by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

Fast forwarding

In 2004, Emi gave birth to her second calf, Suci. Then, in 2007, she gave birth to her third, Harapan. She successfully carried both these calves without the use of synthetic hormones.

“People thought it was really risky, but I really wanted to prove that they could do this themselves in a managed breeding program,” Roth says. Still, she believes the progesterone was vital for that first pregnancy in getting Emi over the “hump.”

“Once they’re producing, just keep them producing because everything is healthy, and everything is working right, you don’t want to stop that,” she says.

Unfortunately, Emi died in 2009 of iron storage disease, though at the time the team had no idea what was wrong. It’s an “insidious” disease, according to Roth, that can only be diagnosed after death.

In 2013, the zoo decided to euthanize Ipuh. Suffering from cancer, Ipuh had stopped eating and was barely able to walk.

Detail of Ipuh, whose taxidermed remains are currently housed at the University of Cincinnati. Photo by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

“It’s hard to describe when they were born, it’s even harder to describe when an animal passes away,” says Reinhart, who spent 22 years caring for Ipuh. “[He] contributed so much to the species and the knowledge and the propagation of these animals and he stayed with us to the very end.” Today, his preserved body rests at the University of Cincinnati.

An even bigger heartbreak came a little over a year later when Suci, Emi and Ipuh’s daughter, died from iron storage disease, the same sickness that took her mother.

“With Suci, we suspected it when she started showing the same symptoms that Emi did,” Roth says. For a while, Suci, just 9 years old, improved with aggressive treatment, but a few months later her health worsened. “Her liver was just too damaged,” Roth says.

She believes iron storage disease was an issue at Cincinnati because the rainforest rhinos have evolved to live with multitudes of parasites and biting insects that constantly drain them of blood.

“They’re trying to absorb as much iron as they can from what little iron they get on their diets because they have this constant load of parasites. They’re bleeding, and they’re having to build up tissues that parasites have chewed down, so they need it all the time,” she says. “We bring them into our zoos or our facilities and we get rid of all the parasites, and they don’t have that outlet anymore, so they’re not losing iron anymore.”

By the time of Suci’s death, the Sumatran rhino program had shifted significantly. During the period when Cincinnati Zoo was struggling to produce just one calf, many experts began to feel the best thing for the species would be to bring them into managed sanctuaries in their local environment. This way, the rhinos would have direct access to their wild, natural foods and, many experts believed, this might help induce mating and decrease the chance of disease.

Harapan, born at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio, now lives at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park in Lampung, Indonesia. Photo by Rahmadi Rahmad/Mongabay-Indonesia.

In 1998, Indonesia opened the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary (SRS) deep in Way Kambas National Park, a park also home to some of the last wild Sumatran rhinos on Earth. Two females were brought from zoos in Indonesia that year, as was Torgamba, all the way from the U.K. Unfortunately, breeding between these pairs was never successful.

Still, by the late 1990s, the SRS and the Sungai Dusun rhino center in Malaysia — where six rhinos would die in 2003 — were beginning to be seen as the future of the program.

In 2007, the U.S. sent Andalas, the first calf born in captivity, thousands of miles to the SRS in the hope that he could find an unrelated mate. It was time for the Cincinnati staff to transfer what they learned overseas.

“We really work hard here, that whatever we develop here it’s not about ‘mine, mine, mine,’” Roth says. “That’s why I was just so pleased that they were able to do it in Indonesia.”

Andalas mated successfully with Ratu, a wild rhino found roaming near a village in 2005 and brought to the SRS for her safety. Their union produced Andatu, a male, in 2012, and Delilah, a female, in 2016.

“It is a really good template; the hardest thing is to get people to follow it,” Roth says of the subsequent breeding successes. One of the most challenging bits is simply allowing the animals to spar, which Roth believes is a natural part of their breeding process.

“You have to have confidence that you knew what you’re looking at,” she says. “And to hold your ground and say, ‘No, keep them together, keep them together, keep them together,’ because after an hour or two, they’re going to settle down and they’ll breed.”

Cincinnati then made one of its toughest decisions yet: to send Harapan, its last rhino, and the public’s favorite, to Indonesia.

“Many of us really wished we could just get more rhinos. We wished we could have gotten a female from Indonesia and bred her with Harapan, and kept the program going. That was hard,” Roth says. But it was clear that the best thing for the species was to let Harapan go.

In 2015, Harapan, took the same journey from Cincinnati to Sumatra as his elder brother, in the hope that he, too, would breed successfully with one of the females at the SRS. Harapan was the last rhino in Cincinnati — and the last Sumatran rhino in the U.S.

Zookeepers load the crate in which Harapan will travel from Ohio to Indonesia. Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

“We miss him here,” Reinhart says. “He’s in a better place, but he was our last born and we really loved him here. I do miss him still.”

Harapan’s arrival in Sumatra marked not only the last Sumatran rhino leaving the Western Hemisphere, but also 20 years since the close of the original captive-breeding program. The 1984 program was still a long way away from achieving a sustainable population in captivity that could, if nothing else, ensure the species wouldn’t go the way of the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly rhino. However, conservationists had ensured that by 2015 there was still a chance to do so.

Read the full article on Mongabay.

Capturing Sumatran rhinos was one thing. Keeping them alive turned out to be another thing entirely. 

An article by Jeremy Hance published in Mongabay by 24 SEPTEMBER 2018

• An agreement to launch a captive breeding program was brokered in 1984. By 1985, key participants began pulling out, including the Malaysian state of Sabah.
• Despite the setbacks, efforts to capture rhinos quickly got up and running. Keeping the animals healthy proved to be a much greater challenge.
• By 1995, nearly half of the 40 rhinos caught were dead, and none of them had successfully bred in captivity.

This is the second article in the Mongabay four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” Read Part One here.

No one knows when humans first encountered the Sumatran rhinoceros, the smallest, hairiest, most loquacious and arguably strangest of all living rhinos. But that initial face-to-face probably occurred some 60,000 or 70,000 years ago as humans first pushed their way across the Asian continent and reached what are today the forests of northeast India.

It probably didn’t go well for the rhino. Those early migrants must have been adept hunters to survive, and their first real interaction probably ended with rhino meat roasting over a fire.

Early human hunting of Sumatran rhinos isn’t speculation. Scientists have found their bones in the Niah and Madai caves in Borneo, leftovers from a Pleistocene hunt. A recent study also found that Sumatran rhino populations plummeted during the Pleistocene. While the researchers believe the decline was due to climate change and subsequent habitat loss, they also note hunting may have played a part. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t, given the role of human hunting in wiping out other megafauna worldwide. Whatever was responsible, by the end of the Pleistocene, only 500 to 1,300 Sumatran rhinos were left.

Nine thousand years later, a small group of humans were doing something very different from their forebears. They were trying to catch Sumatran rhinos — not to roast them over fires or chop off their horns for sham medicine, but to breed them in captivity. They hoped to ensure the survival of this ancient mammal that had split off from all other living rhinos a shocking 20 million plus years ago.

“The Sumatran rhino is in all essence, in all sense a living fossil. It’s been around relatively unchanged since the Oligocene period,” says Ed Maruska, director of Cincinnati Zoo from 1984 to 1994, when it ran a rhino captive-breeding program.

This means losing the Sumatran rhino cannot be compared to the potential extinction of any other rhino species, as it represents a distinct genus, evolutionarily cut off from all other living mammals by around 25 million years.

Things Start to Fall Apart

At the conclusion of a 1984 meeting in Singapore on Sumatran rhinos, conservationists had a bold, international, cooperative agreement that they hoped would establish a large and secure captive population for the species, ensuring it would never vanish from the face of the Earth — even if it vanished from the wild.

Teams in Peninsular Malaysia, the state of Sabah on Malaysian Borneo, and in Indonesia’s Sumatra Island would attempt the capture of so-called “doomed” rhinos, i.e. those left over in forests, often slated to be cleared, where they were unlikely to survive in the long term. These animals would then be split up into breeding pairs between Malaysia, Indonesia, two zoos in the U.K. and four in the U.S. The agreement included funding and technical assistance from the U.K. and U.S., and was predicated on the idea that decisions were always to be made with an eye toward what would be best for the species.

“There was a lot of optimism, hope and expectation in the early days that a captive propagation program … could be successfully developed,” said the plan’s architect, Tom Foose, in a 2000 Animal Planet documentary titled “The Last Rhino.” “We were reproducing three other species of rhinos in captivity and so there was every reason to expect we would be able to achieve the same kind of success with the Sumatran rhino.”

But this grand plan began to unravel with remarkable rapidity.

First, two of the zoos that had initially showed interest — Miami Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. — dropped out due to the high costs.

Then things went sour in Sabah. In 1985, elections sent the ruling party, in power for nine years, out into the cold.

A rhino captured in Malaysia crated and loaded on a truck for transport. Within a few years of the 1984 meeting, Malaysia decided not to send rhinos to zoos in the U.S. or U.K. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

“All the new ministers decided, ‘We don’t need to work with foreigners, we’re perfectly able to do things ourselves, we’ll save the rhino,’” says John Payne, who was with WWF-Malaysia at the time in Sabah, and now runs the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA).

Sabah’s Forestry Department had favored the plan and argued for preserving it. But once the news broke that Sabah would be sending a few pairs of rhinos abroad, several local NGOs protested, the public raised a fuss, and eventually the new government pulled out of the agreement.

“Sabah was the first to blink,” Payne says. “Basically, it was a disaster, right? It meant … all the previous discussions are a waste of time, at least as far as Sabah was concerned.”

Next, Peninsular Malaysia, which already had one rhino housed at Malacca Zoo, showed no interest in sending any of its rhinos to either the U.S. or U.K. At the time, experts estimated Peninsular Malaysia had 50 to 121 rhinos, though the real number was probably lower.

“I was in favor of sending our rhinos to the States,” says Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan, at the time the director general of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks of Malaysia. “[But] the Malaysian public and many in the department were against [it]. They are still. The hue and cry was too great. They were wrong as the Americans were really good friends and very closely worked with me.”

This graph depicts the lifespan in captivity of Sumatran rhinos that ended up in facilities in Malaysia, according to their final place of residence. Of this group, the only rhino to give birth in captivity was Rima, who was pregnant when she was captured. Tam and Iman are still alive, and are currently the only Bornean rhinos in captivity. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay

The reluctance in both Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia to share rhinos meant that, in the end, U.S. and U.K. zoos could only depend on one population of rhinos: those from Sumatra. John Aspinall, who owned two zoos in the U.K., already had a deal with Indonesia. After losing access to Malaysia’s rhinos, the newly formed Sumatran Rhino Trust, based in the U.S., signed a similar agreement.

But who would get the first rhinos? There were four U.S. zoos with a stake in it, all clamoring for a chance.

The zoo directors did the only thing that seemed fair: they drew straws. Cincinnati got the longest, then the Bronx Zoo, then San Diego Zoo. Los Angeles Zoo drew the short straw.

“Warren Thomas [director of L.A. Zoo] was infuriated that we got the pair of animals and he didn’t,” Maruska says. “In fact, he called me on the phone. He said, ‘I want that female.’ I said, ‘No way.’ ‘Well, I want to breed rhino,’ he said. I said, ‘So do we and we will.’”

The first rhino arrived in the U.S. in November 1984, wintering in L.A. before heading on to Cincinnati.

The U.S. zoos hoped to get 20 to 25 rhinos; they ended up with seven.

Catching rhinos

Even as the cooperative plan unraveled, one thing progressed: catching rhinos.

On Peninsular Malaysia, Khan and his team caught two rhinos in 1985 and two more in 1986.

Led by mammal-capturing expert Tony Parkinson, teams in Sumatra caught their first rhino in Riau province in 1985, just 11 months after the meeting. The rhino, dubbed Torgamba, was a massive male who would survive an astounding 26 years in captivity, making his way to the U.K. in 1986 and eventually back to Sumatra.

Parkinson and his team caught five more rhinos in the wilds of Sumatra the next year, though one died during capture.

Sabah was far slower in capturing rhinos, in part due to its political changes. The first rhino in Sabah was caught in March of 1987. But it was injured in the trap and died at the scene.

“There was no expertise at all,” Payne says of the team put together to catch the first rhinos in Sabah, which had eschewed all international assistance and advice. “So, the first rhino died in a pit trap. It was sort of around that time that I lost interest and thought there was no point to continue.”

Payne would take a break from rhinos until he got involved again in 2007.

A transport crate prepared for one of the rhinos captured in Peninsular Malaysia. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

A second rhino was caught nearly four months later; this one survived.

“We were scared as no one had seen [a] Sumatran rhino in the wild [for] more than a few minutes,” says Khan of the early days trapping the one-ton animals. “Capturing these animals will put them in great danger.”

Of the 40 captures from 1984 to 1995, three rhinos died due to injuries from the traps: two in Sabah and one in Sumatra. Khan didn’t lose a single rhino in a trap.

However, those rhinos that survived capture did not thrive in captivity. Even as more rhinos were being caught, the death toll was quickly mounting.

By Jan. 1, 1990, eight of the 26 captured animals were already lost — a mortality rate of 30 percent.

This graph depicts the lifespans in captivity of wild-caught rhinos held in facilities in Indonesia. Bina is the only survivor of the original capture program. She lives at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas along with Rosa, Ratu and her two calves, and two male rhinos bred in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

Stacking mortalities

The “cause of death” column for the Sumatran rhinos caught between 1984 and 1995 makes for some grim reading: strangulation, hindgut obstruction, cancer, fallen branch, poor diet.

While conservationists could catch rhinos, they had a far harder time keeping them alive. In the wild, the species is estimated to have a lifespan of 35 to 40 years; on average, the animals caught during this period survived less than nine years in captivity.

There is only survivor left from this period alive today: Bina. Residing at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary (SRS) in Way Kambas National Park today, she’s been in captivity for 27 years. Conservationists are still trying to get her to breed.

But why did so many rhinos die? Experts point to several reasons. First, because conservationists were catching only so-called doomed rhinos, many of the rhinos caught were probably older and part of populations that had long been facing genetic decline and catastrophe.

“’Doomed rhinos’ tend to be the last dregs, right? The very last one, two or three before the [population] dies,” Payne says.

This graph illustrates the date of capture, and time and place of death, of the Sumatran rhinos that were captured in Indonesia and brought to the United States as part of captive breeding efforts. Ipuh (male) and Emi (female) were the only pair to successfully breed. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

Making matters worse, zoos and sanctuaries fed the rhinos all wrong in the beginning. They were accustomed to caring for black and white rhinos, grazing species that do well on hay, were ignorant of how to cater to the Sumatran rhino’s particular needs. “I think there likely was a sentiment that a rhino was a rhino was a rhino,” says Susie Ellis, the head of the International Rhino Foundation.

Keepers at first fed the Sumatran rhino as if it were a white rhino, a species not even in the same genus.

“San Diego immediately lost their animal due to … twisted gut syndrome,” Maruska says. “It’s the same thing that happens in horses when they’re overfed grain. They were feeding their animals buckets of grain.”

Maruska’s zoo, Cincinnati, faced the same issues. Paul Reinhart, the zoo’s Sumatran rhino keeper at the time, says the first rhino sent to the U.S., a female named Mahatu in 1989, “didn’t thrive here.” She died just three years after her arrival.

“We didn’t know much about the Sumatran rhino, not many people did,” Reinhart says. “We assumed you could keep them like Indian rhino and like black [rhinos], feed [them] high-quality alfalfa grain, browse … and that was not the case, not even remotely the case … The animals didn’t thrive in captivity until we logged on to feeding them large amounts of browse, which we got from San Diego and Florida.”

As tropical rainforest animals, Sumatran rhinos, it turned out, didn’t eat grasses, but leaves and branches whole. They tend to pull vegetation into their mouths, and just chomp away until it’s all gone.

Ipuh lived at the Cincinnati Zoo for 22 years until his death in 2013. His remains are still on display in Cincinnati. Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

In 1991, Ipuh, a male, arrived at Cincinnati Zoo. He was already looking wan, so Cincinnati Zoo called San Diego Zoo to ask for some “browse,” i.e. trimmings of ficus trees growing around the zoo.

Reinhart says that when the keeper hosed off the branches, Ipuh responded immediately: standing up and coming over to smell the fresh branches.

“It took him about a year and a half to really come back to where he needed to be,” Reinhart says.

Another issue was disease. The rhinos, probably older and genetically inbred, were dealing with cancer, eye problems, iron storage disease, parasites, and in some cases bacterial infections. In a 2013 paper, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, John Payne and Zainal Zahari Zainuddin argued that some of the mortalities to disease could have been avoided.

“Most egregious of all, basic hygiene was generally poor [in Malaysian facilities], with at least some Sumatran rhinos kept for long periods in facilities that lacked basic hygiene protocols and biosecurity measures, and lacked experienced veterinary care,” they wrote.

As an example, the paper noted that treated piped water was only brought into Malacca Zoo for the Sumatran rhinos after two animals had died.

“I think a lot of … rhinos died through bacterial infections that could have and should have been treated with antibiotics but never were,” Payne says.

There were also accidents. A female named Melintang accidently strangled herself in an improperly constructed fence after being gifted to Thailand. A male named Tanjung was killed by a fallen branch — something that could have happened in the forest as well. Another male, Bulud, escaped his captors after only four months; he was never caught again.

Sungai Dusun

The worst 18 days for Sumatran rhino conservation came in October and November 2003. Five rhinos, four females and one male, died at the Malaysian Sumatran Rhino Centre in Sungai Dusun.

A male rhino, Shah, had died there a year earlier, followed by a female, Rima, just that April. Then, on Oct. 28, Seputin, a female, was found dead. Eleven days later, Ara, the only male, died. The next day, a female named Panjang died. The last two females, Minah and Mas Merah, died the following week.

With them went the entire captive population in Peninsular Malaysia.

“It was most painful to watch the great sufferings leading to the deaths of these precious animals,” Khan says.

No one knows for certain what happened. But two competing theories have taken root. One: that the animals died of trypanosomiasis, a type of parasite spread by biting flies.

“I would say that we have a lot of evidence indicating they died of trypanosomiasis,” says Terri Roth, a rhino expert and head of CREW, a research facility at Cincinnati Zoo, who was co-author of a paper that laid out the evidence a year after the tragedy. Roth and others believe that nearby water buffalo, which often waded in a canal that ran adjacent to the center, may have been the source. Flies may have bitten the water buffalo and then bitten the rhinos as well.

The other theory is that the animals died of bacterial infections, such as E. coli and pneumonia. According to the paper by Ahmad, Payne and Zainuddin, trypanosomes probably only infected the animals after their immune systems had already been weakened by E. coli and pneumonia due to allegedly poor management at the facility. Otherwise, they argued, why didn’t trypanosomiasis kill these animals during the 18 years prior?

“The conclusion that trypanosomes were the cause of the [Sungai Dusun] deaths may have been reached erroneously, in order to allow parties involved to avoid responsibility for chronic poor hygiene in the facilities,” the paper concluded.

Officially, the cause of death has been listed as trypanosomiasis.

All but one female mated with a male at Sungai Dusun, notes Terri Roth who visited the facility and says the rhinos appeared to be well cared for. Image by Terri Roth.

“I visited the Sumatran Rhino Conservation Centre at Sungai Dusun several times,” Roth says. “In general, the facility was nice, the rhinos appeared healthy, well cared for and in good body condition.”

She says the staff had succeeded in mating the males with the females, but without a successful birth due to fertility problems.

“I believe Sungai Dusun has received much undeserved criticism due to its tragic ending,” she adds. “Sure, it was not perfect, but it was a decent facility where rhinos frequently mated.”

After the center lost all of its rhinos, Sungai Dusun switched to housing Asian tapirs. In 2010, seven tapirs died of E. coli and pneumonia.

Whatever, the cause of the tragedy at Sungai Dusun, it highlighted a salient point: housing too many endangered animals in one area is incredibly risky.

“That’s why we worry so much about something like that happening at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary [in Way Kambas] because those rhinos are close enough [in] proximity that if one gets sick with something like that, it could spread very quickly,” Roth says.

The fallout for Malaysia was swift and large.

“Tom [Foose] thought that we were sabotaged and withdrew the [U.S.] funds,” Khan says. “I crawled to find money and by 2010-2011 our rhinos were thought extinct.”

Where Did it All Go Wrong?

By 1995, the captive-breeding rhino program looked doomed. Forty animals had been caught — 12 from Peninsular Malaysia, 10 from Sabah and 18 from Sumatra. And a shocking 19, nearly half, were dead. And this was before the disaster at Sungai Dusun.

Exacerbating this failure, the program hadn’t produced even a single calf 11 years after the landmark meeting in Singapore — even though the entire goal of the program ostensibly was to create baby rhinos. In 1993, the Sumatran Rhino Trust, once such a promising endeavor, went belly-up.

Not only did the program look doomed, it looked like a conservation embarrassment.

Payne says he believes the original sin of the captive-breeding program was its commitment to only taking animals out of populations that were already destined to vanish because of either too few rhinos or impending logging and agriculture. This, he says, was at once politically expedient and a good cover against critics who argued rhinos shouldn’t be removed from the wild. But it also meant conservationists were removing rhinos that were more likely to be old, genetically inbred, and hadn’t seen another living rhino in ages.

“It was a fateful flaw right from the beginning to only catch doomed rhinos because it was all the trash, old, [reproductively] unfit ones that were then going to be captured,” Payne says.

Puntung, pictured here with veterinarian Zainal Zainuddin shortly after her capture in 2011, was euthanized in 2017. Suffering from cancer, she was estimated to be around 25 when she died. Image courtesy of BORA.

Many of the females caught already had or quickly developed reproductive issues, including uterine tumors, likely due to going without breeding for so long. Rhinos, even in large protected areas, had simply become too few to find each other, according to Payne.

“People assume the rhinos know where each other are, and they’re humping each other. Of course they don’t … They just live out their life there … without ever breeding,” he says.

Over time such tumors made the females totally infertile. The males, meanwhile, may have arrived already aged, with low sperm counts.

“You can’t have a successful breeding program if you don’t have reproductively viable animals,” says the International Rhino Foundation’s Ellis, noting that when the SRS in Way Kambas started in 1996 it didn’t have any breeding success until 2005, when it got a young female, Ratu, from the wild.

A bridge and crate used to transfer captured Sumatran rhinos during the original program in 1984. Image courtesy of Francesco Nardelli. Targeting such small populations for captive breeding also led to extreme gender imbalance in captivity. In Peninsular Malaysia, only two of the 11 adult rhinos caught were male. The situation was nearly the exact opposite in Sabah, where six males were caught (plus another two that died during the trapping), and only two females.

The trapping program in Sumatra was the only one that didn’t result in a gender imbalance: seven males to 10 females (not including one that died in the trap).

This gender imbalance was worsened by an unwillingness both to share the rhinos internationally or to combine subspecies. Had Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia been willing to mix their two different subspecies, they may have had more luck breeding, since Sabah had mostly males and Peninsular Malaysia mostly females.

Although the groups pledged cooperation and to do the best they could for the species, this didn’t always happen. For example, Malaysia, which had refused to send any rhinos to the U.K. or the U.S., sent one of its female rhinos as a gift to the king of Thailand in 1985. She died after one year, mateless, when she got caught in her fence at Bangkok’s Dusit Zoo and accidently strangled herself.  Sometimes, a single rhino would linger for years at a facility without a mate.

Melintang was captured in 1985 in Peninsular Malaysia. She was then sent to Thailand as a gift to the nation’s king. She died less than a year and a half after her capture due to unintentional strangulation in the fenced enclosure at Dusit Zoo. The bars were not the right width apart. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

The decision by both Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia meant that zoos in the U.S. and U.K. had, at best, only a couple of rhinos to attempt any captive breeding.

“We didn’t have enough animals to work with. We had a small handful of them, but we had to learn all of this from these few animals,” says Maruska from Cincinnati Zoo, the first institution to actually achieve a birth. “If we could have had our full limit of the 25 animals, the program would have been … more apt to be successful.”

At the same time, feeding the animals the wrong food and trying to overcome disease meant many animals didn’t survive long. Erong, a male calf caught in Peninsular Malaysia in 1984, was an extreme example.

“Full cream milk was given by a ranger and he was told to stop it,” Khan says. “Erong was so young and could not digest the milk. I believe it was the cause of death … We looked and shudder[ed] in great fear as it died in front of us.”

Erong, a male calf caught in Sumatra was given full cream milk by a ranger. He died shortly after. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

Much of this, of course, isn’t exactly shocking, given so little was known about this species in the wild. But the situation was exacerbated by what Payne calls “unhealthy competition” among institutions and an unwillingness to share information — a problem that some sources say continues to plague conservation efforts today.

Maruska also says they waited too long.

“It’s the same thing they did with the California condor, they wait till there’s a small number of animals and then it’s the last, last ditch attempt to [breed the species]. Instead of looking ahead.”

In 1995, at the height of the program’s problems, a new paper hit like a bomb. Alan Rabinowitz’s now classic “Helping a Species Go Extinct: the Sumatran Rhino in Borneo” eviscerated the decade-long strategy. A hugely respected conservationist, Rabinowitz, then with the Wildlife Conservation Society, harshly criticized the approach to Sumatran rhinos, which he wrote focused “time, money and effort” on captive-breeding efforts over protection in the wild.

“In Sabah, the easiest, most palatable, and most visible steps … were taken first,” he wrote. Habitat was only protected when it was “not controversial” and “caused minimal interference with ongoing logging activities and agricultural development plans.”

In the paper, Rabinowitz disputed the idea that many of the rhino populations were already doomed, calling such research “removed from the real world.” Instead, Rabinowitz said successfully protecting the species required tackling the threats of habitat destruction and poaching via more protected areas and more boots on the ground.

“The implication that captive breeding can save the Sumatran rhino makes the failure of in situ conservation less serious. This, in turn, helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy that wild [populations] have a low probability of survival,” he wrote.

Conservationists relied on makeshift bridges to capture rhinos in remote areas. Critics argue that more should have been done to protect these habitats. Image courtesy of Francesco Nardelli.

In the paper, Rabinowitz pointed out that by 1995 we still didn’t know how many rhinos were actually left — a fact still true more than 20 years later.

“While some of the blame … must be placed on the Indonesian and Malaysian governments, the rest of it falls squarely in the lap of international funding and conservation organizations,” Rabinowitz wrote, saying that NGOs had refrained from calling for anything difficult in order to avoid “becoming an unwelcome guest.”

Basically, conservation NGOs had bent over backward to agricultural and logging interests, a fact that still often proves true today.

In May this year, shortly before his death in August, Rabinowitz told Mongabay that his opinion of that early program hadn’t changed. However, he said what had changed was the situation today, both in terms of captive-breeding success and rhino populations on the ground.

In 1995, the last rhino for the captive-breeding program was caught in Sabah. His name was Malbumi. He would be dead in less than 18 months. The cause? Uncertain.

Read the full article on Mongabay.