Horny male seeks mate: Kenya's last northern white rhino joins Tinder

Record ID: 735195

  • Title: Horny male seeks mate: Kenya's last northern white rhino joins Tinder
  • Date: 26th April 2017
  • Summary: OL PEJETA, KENYA (FILE) (REUTERS) TWO FEMALE WHITE RHINOS GRAZING
  • Embargoed: 10th May 2017 17:26
  • Keywords: rhino rhinoceras
  • Location: OL PEJETA AND NAIROBI, KENYA
  • City: OL PEJETA AND NAIROBI, KENYA
  • Country: Kenya
  • Topics: Environment,Nature/Wildlife
  • Reuters ID: LVA00A6DWEIC9
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Like many guys using the Tinder dating app, Sudan loves the outdoors and travels widely. The catch: he's the world's last male white northern rhino and desperately needs to mate.
    "I don't mean to be too forward, but the fate of my species literally depends on me," reads his profile. "I perform well under pressure. I like to eat grass and chill in the mud. No problems. 6 ft tall and 5,000 pounds if it matters."
    Conservationists are hoping that Sudan's Tinder profile will help them raise enough money for $9-million fertility treatment as all attempts at getting him to mate naturally have failed.
    Scientists would use Sudan's sperm to fertilise an egg from one of the two last northern white rhino females: 17-year-old Satu or 27-year-old Najin. The embryo will be implanted in a surrogate southern white rhino, a far more common species.
    "Rhinos weigh about two tonnes, they are semi-wild, they are not domesticated and in order to able to do this we have to develop techniques to remove eggs from the two remaining females, we have to then mature those eggs which in itself is a very difficult thing to do for various reasons which I do not need to go into, fertilise those eggs with stored semen luckily there is quite a lot of stored northern white rhino semen around the world in various zoos to create an embryo and successfully freeze and store the embryo and then in time find a technique to re-introduce that embryo into surrogate southern white rhino females because the northern white rhino females are incapable of conceiving," said CEO of Ol Pejeta Richard Vigne.
    All three white rhinos at Ol Pejeta conservancy are accompanied by 24-hour armed guards.
    Poachers sell northern white rhinos horns for $50,000 per kilo, making them more valuable than gold or cocaine, and his keepers fear that Sudan, who at 43 is ancient for a rhino, may die or be killed before they can raise enough money.
    "There's always that fear. He's old, he might die soon," said Richard Vigne. "As long as the demand for rhino horn in the Far East persists, there will always be an ever-present threat."
    A swipe right on Sudan's Tinder profile - available in 190 countries and 40 languages - directs users to the Ol Pejeta donation page.
    Just hours after he went online, the number of hits was so high that the Ol Pejeta website crashed.
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