Kolbert recalls when she viewed the Cincinnati Zoo and met Sumatran rhino named Suci who was being cared for by the director of the zoo, Dr. Terri Roth. She goes on to talk about how the Sumatran rhino is one of only five rhino species left in existence. Due to the low amount of Sumatrans left, Roth is trying to get Suci to become pregnant, but fails. The breeding of endangered animals to preserve their specified has been in effect for decades. This the main reason the rhinos haven't become extinct. Kolbert then transitions to how the cause of the extinction of large animals is due to climate change and the over-hunting of those animals by humanity. Kolbert states, “Asian elephants have declined by fifty percent over the last three generations. African elephants are doing better, but, like rhinos, they’re increasingly threatened by poaching”(223). It’s scary to think that these magnificent creatures are going to be put into wildlife areas and they won’t roam the world anymore. This connects to humans altering natural systems because important animals are being hunted solely for the commodities their bodies possess such as ivory, medicinal potential, and skin. With poaching, it leads to a great decrease in the number of animals and if this trend continues these animals will go extinct.
To go back to he Sumatran Rhino, they were once so abundant in numbers it was considered an agricultural pest. However, as Southeast Asia’s forests were cut down, the rhino’s habitat became fragmented. In the 1900s, the rhino population had been shrunk to just a few hundred. A captive breeding program was widely regarded as a failure and resulted in the deaths of several rhinos, and it was decades before a single baby was born. Today, there are only forty living rhinos. When is enough? It’s interesting because I just wanna know when humans will realize what they’re doing and stop because at this point I think they will only realize when these species actually go extinct.
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