Rhino Bachelor Takes to Tinder
Credit: Michael Dalton-Smith or Digital Crossing Productions.
Finding love is tough, but it’s even harder — and the stakes are higher — if you happen to be a Northern White Rhino.
Sudan, the last male Northern White Rhino, lives in OL Pejeta Conservancy, a wildlife conservancy in Kenya. There are only three of his kind left and two are females. That means it’s up to Sudan to save his species.
So it’s no surprise he took to Tinder to find a match. And on his profile, Sudan lays it all out.
“I don’t mean to be too forward,” his profile reads, “but the fate of the species literally depends on me.”
Tinder partnered with Sudan’s conservancy to, as Matt David, Tinder’s Communications Head said, help out the “most eligible bachelor in the world.”
A swipe right will send users to a donation page. So far, the website has crashed due to all the visitors; that’s a lot of matches for the 43-year old rhino. Donations go to researching fertility in the hopes that the two female northern white rhinos, both of whom are incapable of natural birth, can be made fertile. The Tinder campaign aims to raise $9 million towards Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ART), including in vitro fertilization (IVF).
The Northern White Rhino is not the first species to face extinction because of man. A total of 11 animal species have gone extinct due to the actions of humans, including the West African Black Rhino, the Passenger Pidgeon, the Tasmanian Tiger, and many others. Eight extinct subspecies are the victims of poaching and over-hunting.
Poachers rhinos for their horns, which sell for a high price in countries like Vietnam, where they are viewed as a status symbol. Sudan’s horn was cut off to deter poachers from going after him. A conservancy member told animal news website The Dodo, “if the rhino has no horn, he is of no interest to poachers.”
Ol Pejeta Conservancy keep Sudan under guard 24/7 so he doesn’t join the list.
Throughout all of history, it is estimated that 99.9% of all species have gone extinct. The vast majority of them died out naturally, but these 11 signal a rise in man-made extinction. According to an article in Science magazine, the extinction rate has jumped 1000% because of humans.
Yet progress is being made to save these animals; the practice of “citizen science,” like Tinder playing rhino matchmaker, is becoming popular. A sergeant on tour in Iraq uploaded a picture of a frog to the app iNaturalist. It was quickly identified as a lemon-yellow tree frog, a subspecies thought to only be found in Kurdistan. Citizen science has the ability to make hobbyists all around the world vital instruments in learning more about species and potentially saving them.
