Called by some the square-lipped rhinoceros due to their square upper lip, they have a longer skull than black rhinos and a larger shoulder hump. They have two horns.
There are over 20,000 of them left, a big conservation win, but if you read environmental accounts they are going extinct, only two remain.
How can there be 20,000 of a species and yet only two?
They are making a science error that even high school zoology students would not. What only has two remaining is the white rhino in the north, but it is not a distinct species, they are just in a different geography now separated from the southern population. Only two of those remain. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature does allow geographically separated members of a species to be listed as subspecies, so there can be a southern white rhino and a northern white rhino since they can no longer be together in what was once their extended range, but if a subspecies "goes" extinct, it will just disappear from a region. The species will not be gone.
Angalifu, male Northern White Rhinoceros at San Diego Wild Animal Park. By Sheep81 - Own work, Public Domain, Link
We wouldn't say the Irish Setter is extinct if Irish Red and White Setters stop being bred nor do we say Buffalo are extinct because they no longer roam in Florida there but it has become common to lament that this white rhino is going extinct.(1) It isn't.
There are over 20,000 remaining members of the White Rhino species. And all it takes to keep white rhinos in the north is (a) ship a bunch of white rhinos from the south to the preserve in Kenya or (b) take sperm from a white rhino in the south and inseminate the females in the north.
And the latter is what is happening. Yet instead of a science story, we get fever dream narratives about how veterinarians are "racing against the clock" to save this virtually extinct subspecies at tremendous cost. They used sperm from a northern white rhino they gathered before it died (how successful will that be? Plus, the females don't seem to be able to carry to term) when it would have made no difference to use a southern one. Or use that white rhino sperm from the northern one in a southern female. They are the same species.
The International Rhino Organization and the World Wildlife Federation remind people who want real answers of this over and over, so why don't Treehugger and New York Times and everyone who engages in this kind of crisis inflation give readers the science instead of the hype? The white rhinos in the south were down to 200 and are now back to 20,000. which is fantastic, and that means it is easily achievable in the north as well. The need to create an extinction distinction seems to be part of a cultural agenda.
In James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans", written in 1826 but set in 1757, Uncas, the foster nephew of Natty Bumppo (Hawkeye) is called the last Mohican because to elder Mohicans there were no pure Mohican women left for Uncas to marry. The Iroquois seem to have believed their young women were no longer the same species. Claiming that the Iroquois were extinct by 1757 is as arbitrary as claiming a northern white rhino is going extinct now.
Since this is not a species going extinct, wouldn't it be smarter to mobilize public concern for an actual species in danger, the way the white rhino once was?
NOTE:
(1) Botanists allow ranking even farther down than subspecies, such as variety, and media would not declare a rose in danger of extinction if purple roses stop being created, but they are doing that with this geographically isolated rhino. It's just bad science.
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