Malaysia's last female Sumatran rhino seriously ill

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The last female Sumatran rhino in Malaysia, Iman, is seriously ill, dashing hopes for artificial breeding efforts underway for nearly three decades to revive the critically endangered rhino population.

Wildlife experts had been also trying to mate them with their counterparts in Indonesia and the US. There are only 100 Sumatran rhinos surviving globally.

According to the Sabah Wildlife Department, Iman's ovarian tumor has ruptured causing severe bleeding. In the last few days, she has refused to eat anything, further complicating the medication process.

Three Sumatran rhinos – one male and two females – were captured from the wild in Malaysia for breeding in a captivity program.

Iman is the second female Sumatran rhino. The first, named Puntung, was also captured from the forest in 2011 but was euthanized in June this year because of skin cancer.

Iman was captured from the wild in 2014, a year after, the Sabah state cabinet decided to speed up an artificial breeding program with international cooperation to save Sumatran rhinos from extinction.

Hopes for breeding endangered rhinos in Malaysia ignited after a male Sumatran rhino, Kertam, was captured and airlifted from the forest in 2008. Kertam and Iman were kept in the same enclosure under the supervision of the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA).

A veterinarian attends to Puntung, a newly captured female Sumatran rhinoceros in Lahad Datu, in Malaysia's state of Sabah on Borneo island in this January 12, 2012 file picture. /Reuters

But a few months after Iman and Kertam failed to mate, a medical examination showed the former suffering from ovarian cancer, and the latter having a low sperm count. The Sabah Wildlife Department and BORA started negotiations to procure frozen sperm from Indonesian Sumatran rhinos. The plan was to initiate Iman's pregnancy.

Before the arrival of Iman, authorities were planning to fly Kertam to the Cincinnati Zoo to mate him with a female rhino named Suci.

“We tried our best to get bilateral cooperation with Indonesia for the artificial breeding of Sumatran rhinos, but bureaucratic delays proved catastrophic,” Suan Hor of BORA told CGTN.

The population of Sumatran rhinos has been decimated in the last few decades, and there are barely 100 individuals left in the Sumatra and Borneo forests, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimated.

Rampant poaching and habitat loss are the main reasons behind near extinction of these rhinos. At present, Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in Indonesia has the most extensive single population of Sumatran rhinos.

International agencies had been trying to boost the Sumatran rhino’s population through captive breeding programs since 1984. In the 1990s, 40 rhinos were captured from Malaysia and Indonesia as a part of the program and flown to the US, UK and Thailand.

Only the Cincinnati Zoo in the US has been successful in breeding Sumatran rhinos in captivity with the birth of three calves. Suci, a female, was born in 2004, and in 2007, Harapan, another male. However, Sumatran rhinos have lost their battle against survival in their homeland.

Iman’s critical health is a major jolt to Malaysia's wildlife department. Not only Sumatran rhinos but other species of rhinos are facing an extreme threat from poachers across the globe.

Governments in India and Africa have launched protection plans to save rhinos from poachers. Rhinos are poached for their horns.

“We raced against time for reviving the Sumatran rhinos numbers in Malaysia,” Suan said. “We just needed frozen sperm from Indonesian male Sumatran rhinos to boost their population.”