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White Rhino Dies: Nola, One Of Four Remaining Northern White Rhinos, Dies At San Diego Zoo

By Aaron Homer
Published on: 04:01 PST, Nov 23, 2015

One of four remaining Northern White Rhinos in the world has died, Fox News is reporting.

Nola, a 41-year-old female Northern White Rhino, had called the San Diego Zoo her home since 1989. At 41, she was at the upper limit of a rhino’s life expectancy, zoo officials said. For the last few years, she’d been suffering declining health, including arthritis and frequent bacterial infections. She’d recently been treated for an abscess in her hip, but the infection returned, and she couldn’t fight it off. After she became listless and refusing to eat, zookeepers made the decision to humanely destroy the rhino.

In a statement, zoo officials described the impact that Nola had on bringing attention to the plight of northern white rhinos in the world.

“Nola was an iconic animal, not only at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, but worldwide. She was one of only four northern white rhinoceros on the planet. Through the years, millions of people learned about Nola and the plight of rhinos in the wild through visits to the Safari Park, numerous media stories and social media posts. Nola leaves a legacy that her keepers and animal care staff hope will continue to help rhino conservation for years to come.”

Now that Nola has died, only three living Northern White Rhinos remain. Those three — all in advanced age, like Nola — live in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a heavily-guarded nature preserve in Kenya.

Northern white rhinos, as well as other species of rhinoceros, have been hunted to near extinction by poachers who kill the animals for their horns. In some cultures, a dagger with a handle made from a rhino horn is a prized possession.

Similarly, rhino horns are in demand in parts of Asia, where the horns are believed to have medicinal properties that can treat a range of ailments, from hangovers to cancer. In fact, rhino horns are made of keratin — the same substance in your hair and fingernails, which has little to no medicinal value, according to PBS.

In order to help stem the extinction of rhinos, various conservation efforts have been put into place, with varying degrees of success, according to Save The Rhino. The trade in rhino horns is banned under international law. However, poachers have gotten more sophisticated — and more violent — in trying to secure their contraband.

“Poachers are now being supplied by international criminal gangs with sophisticated equipment to track and kill rhinos. Often they use a tranquiliser gun to bring the rhino down and hack off its horn, leaving the rhino to wake up and bleed to death very painfully and slowly. Poachers are also often armed with guns, making them very dangerous for the anti-poaching teams who put their lives on the line to protect rhinos.”

Other efforts include injecting the rhinos’ horns with dye, which doesn’t harm the animal but makes its horn worthless to poachers (a similar tactic is being used on elephant tusks to stem the illegal ivory trade).

Biologists are hoping to revive the Northern White Rhino species through in-vitro fertilization. Breeders have collected genetic material from the rhinos and intend to use the closely-related Southern White Rhino (which is still threatened but, with an estimated population of 20,000, is not yet extinct and is actually showing signs of recovery) as surrogates. Six new Southern White Rhino females have been taken into the San Diego Zoo’s breeding program, and researchers hope that a Northern White Rhino calf will be born in 10-15 years.

[Image via Shutterstock/Danita Delmont]

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