Pushing Back Extinction

When I meet an animal for the first time, seeing a species that I've never seen before, it can be a pretty exciting experience for me.   For some species, especially ones that I'd always heard or read about but never expected to see in person, it can get a little emotional for me.  There's only one situation I can remember when the overriding emotion after the fact was depression.

That was Cincinnati Zoo, 2014, when I finagled my way for a one-on-one meeting behind the scenes with the last Sumatran rhino outside of its native range.  Prior to the meeting, I knew that Sumatrans were rare - I just didn't appreciate how rare they were.  Cincinnati had been met with a small amount of success breeding the species (the rhino that I was visiting was Ohio born and bred), and there had recently been talk about importing a few more to try breeding more in the states.  During that visit in the back of the rhino barn, I learned that the reverse was actually true.  The prospects for the species in the wild were so dire that this animal was going to shipped back to Indonesia.  No one really expected the Sumatran rhino to be around much longer.  The keeper who was showing me around admitted that she expected the species to be extinct in her life time - and she was older than me.

Scratching that surprisingly woolly backside though the barns, contemplating the big, brown eyes of the rhino, I tried to process the fact that I might be one of the last people to see a Sumatran rhino - certainly one of the last to see one outside of Indonesia.

That\s why the announcement of the birth of a new rhino calf in Indonesia (descended from a Cincinnati-born rhino, no less) is such tremendous news.  Not because it means that the species is out of the woods - far from it.  Not because what it means for the breeding program there, though it is great news.  But because this rhino's birth, assuming it hopefully lives a long, full life, pushes back the extinction of this species that much further.  The longer we can keep Sumatran rhinos - or any other endangered species - alive and with us, the better the odds of us being able to somehow reverse the trend of its decline, whether its through new conservation methods, improved technologies, or new knowledge about their natural history and biology that enables us to better breed and manage the animals in their closely-guarded reserve.

Every day, every year that we hold onto Sumatran rhinos is a little victory in itself, an act of defiance against the seemingly-unstoppable onset of extinction.