Rare Rhino Baby Dies at 5 Days Old

A tiny baby rhino has died a mere five days after it was born in a zoo, as a result of internal injuries it received shortly after birth.

Southern white rhinoceros Kipenzi gave birth to the calf after a 16-month pregnancy at the Werribee Open Range Zoo in Australia, but failed to bond with her, and the calf died as a result of injuries suffered in "interactions" with the mother, the zoo said.

The female calf had a neurological episode, the zoo said in a statement, and died from a subsequent cardiac arrest on Saturday night. Zoo vets attempted to resuscitate the infant but could not save her.

"The death of any animal is challenging for all involved, but we can find comfort in the knowledge that every action was taken to ensure the calf was receiving the best care possible," zoo director Mark Pilgrim said in a statement from Zoos Victoria, the owners of Werribee Open Range Zoo.

Southern white rhinos are a subspecies of white rhinoceroses, the other being the much rarer northern white rhinoceros. Southern white rhinos, which are found nearly entirely within South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya in the wild, nearly went extinct in the late 19th century as a result of mass hunting and land clearance. It is thought that there was a mere 20 to 50 individuals left in the world, limited to South Africa in 1895.

This population has now grown to 17,500 as of 2007 and 18,064 as of December 2017, across multiple African countries and in many zoos around the world. Their populations are currently in decline, however, and the southern white rhino is now classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as "near threatened", with the species' major threat being poaching by hunters wanting to sell their characteristic horns in the ivory and traditional medicine trade.

Their northern white rhino cousins, on the other hand, are inches away from extinction: after the last male died in 2018, there are only two female rhinos of this subspecies left in the world.

The struggles of these species puts the tragic demise of the calf into perspective, especially as a female rhino carries each calf for nearly a year and a half, and only reproduce once every two to three years. This calf was also the first Southern white rhino to be born at the zoo in almost a decade.

"The birth of this calf is a major milestone for the Zoo and the conservation of Southern White Rhinos in the Australasian region. There is an estimated 10,080 remaining in the wild with significant threats including poaching and the illegal trading of rhino horn," wrote Zoos Victoria in a Facebook post announcing the birth of the calf on March 23.

The necropsy of the calf, performed by the University of Melbourne Veterinarian School, revealed that her cardiac arrest was likely as a result of blood clots formed by a broken scapula (collar bone). This was the first calf that the mother, Kipenzi, had birthed. Zookeepers reported that the Kipenzi and the calf had failed to bond properly in the hours after the birth, with the calf receiving injuries from her mother, including the broken bone.

While the calf was removed from her mother for checks and extra feeding and was due to be slowly re-introduced to her mother, her injuries contributed to the lethal blood clots.

"We know this news will bring sadness to our zoo members and community," Pilgrim said in the statement. "Our kind thoughts are with them and all who cared for this precious calf, and particularly with our vet and keeping teams who worked tirelessly to care for the calf over the past five days."

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