Saturday, June 14, 2008
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A Blog designed for discussion of topics related to, but not limited to, Circus, Zoos, Animal Training, and Animal Welfare/Husbandry. Sometimes opening up the dialog is the best starting point of all. And if for nothing else when people who agree and don't agree, get together and start discussing it, it will open up a lot of peoples minds. Debate and discussion even amongst themselves opens a window where there wasn't one before.
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4 comments:
This is the young pair of Northern White rhinos that arrived at Antwerp zoo on April 7, 1950. They were the very first white rhinos seen alive outside Africa. They were obtained from the Game Preservation Dept., Khartoum, Sudan after having been captured near Shambe, Bahr el Ghazel Province, Sudan.
The northern white rhino is now almost extinct. A small breeding group is maintained at Dvur Kravlove, Czech Republic, one of the world’s great zoos of today.
RJR,
Great stuff, thanks. I assumed they were just white rhinos, not "the" white rhinos.
Wade
The St. Louis Zoo had a pair of Northern White Rhinos in the late 1950s and 60s. The National Zoo acquires a pair at the same time. In the early 70s STL lost their female and NZP lost their male. The remaining animals were sent to the San Diego Wild Animal Park but I don't believe they produced any offspring.
The very first white rhino (of either the northern or southern types) ever in captivity was an orphaned female calf that was taken in Umfolozi Game Reserve, Zululand, South Africa. It was sent to Pretoria Zoo arriving there on July 29, 1946. It died there on March 21, 1987, after 40 years and 8 months in the zoo. This was of course a Southern white rhino, the type which is now so common in America and elsewhere, including a number of circuses.
Why white rhinos were so late coming to zoos is hard to understand. They do not seem to have been scarce in their native haunts 50 and more years ago. It was once said that they were almost wiped out in Zululand but that seems hard to comprehend, given the huge numbers of them that were brought out beginning in the 1960s. They had become too numerous for the reserves to support. Without a doubt the southern white rhino is one of conservation’s great success stories.
Not so the northern white rhino. It lives (or once lived) at the juncture of the Sudan with Uganda and the Demo Rep of Congo, nee Zaire, nee Belgian Congo. At last estimate there were only about 10 of them left, not enough to make it. Unrestrained poaching and civil unrest in those areas took their toll.
White rhinos were on the “want list” of the Bronx zoo for many years in the early 20th century and Barnum & Bailey also wanted one as far back as the turn of 19th into the 20th century.
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