Reflections on the Death of a Rhinoceros

Sudan the rhino (1973 - 2018) 

Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, is dead [insert sad face emoji here].

The 45-year-old beast, who had lived almost his entire life in captivity, was euthanised by his keepers yesterday after suffering from a number of age-related complications.

Now there are just two females left alive; Najin and Fatu, both his offspring and which, like Sudan, live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, under 24-hour armed guard in order to protect them from poachers. 

It's pretty much the end of the line, then, for this subspecies of rhino.

Having said that, there are ongoing attempts to bring them back from the very brink of extinction using the latest IVF techniques; i.e. harvesting eggs from Najin and Fatu and fertilizing them with supplies of Sudan's frozen semen. The resulting blastocysts would then be implanted in the wombs of female southern white rhinos.   

One might wonder, however, if there's any real point in the scientific resurrection of a species if the animals are simply going to be studied as specimens and displayed as living fossils ...?

I genuinely wish there were tens of thousands of these magnificent creatures still charging about in the wild. But, sadly, that's no longer a possibility in the world today. And so maybe the next best thing is to let them die with dignity and then rest in peace in the great void of non-being. 

For even if the rhino vanishes forever, the earth will keep on turning. For the rhino is, like man, but one expression of the incomprehensible, as Birkin would say. There will be further utterances and life will continue to evolve in magnificent new ways when they've gone - and when we've gone - just as it did after the death of the dinosaurs.

Perhaps the rhino, like the ichthyosaurus and the dodo, was one of the mistakes of creation - or, rather, let us say, an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment; lacking in the fourth dimensional perfection of the bluebell and the butterfly.

And so, to paraphrase the immortal words of Ogden Nash:

Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,

I'll hope for something less prepoceros.

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Birkin discusses his thoughts on the evolution of life with Gerald in Chapter V and, later, with Ursula in Chapter XI.