TRANSCRIPT: Rhino warrior
MELISSA DOYLE: Zoologist Kes Hillman Smith has literally gone to war to save the rarest of Africa's rhinos - the majestic northern white. They've been pushed to the brink of extinction by decades of civil unrest and a ruthless trade in their horns, and despite Kes's battles and best efforts, there are just three northern whites left in the world. Tonight, she'll take us to meet the last of a kind, and as Steve Pennells discovers, beyond their heavily armed enclosure, the northern white's best hope for survival now rests with dedicated scientists and their Frozen Zoo.
STEVE PENNELLS: Why Africa? What was the attraction?
KES HILLMAN SMITH: I'd always felt, being in England, things were mediocre. Things were constrained, you know. Whereas here, it's extreme. Wide open spaces, extremes of climate, you know, and challenges in life. It just felt right somehow. It just felt, "Yes, this is the sort of feeling "of freedom and space that just feels good."
STEVE PENNELLS: Kes Hillman Smith is taking me to visit some old friends, and this is their stunning, sweeping domain. And this is what you mean by wide open spaces? This is it?
KES HILLMAN SMITH: Yep, this is it.
STEVE PENNELLS: Spectacular. Almost 40,000 hectares, five hours from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, a haven called Ol Pejeta. And on this hilltop, the final refuge for two of the rarest animals on earth. Northern white rhinos.
So, here are our two girls?
KES HILLMAN SMITH: Yeah.
STEVE PENNELLS: Introduce me. Who are they?
KES HILLMAN SMITH: OK, well, the bigger one is Najin, the older...the mother of Fatu, the younger one.
STEVE PENNELLS: Naine and Fatu have got plenty of room, but what they don't have is time. They are the last two female northern white rhinos left anywhere in the world.
You get excited every time you see them, don't you?
KES HILLMAN SMITH: Yeah, I love seeing them, but it's an excitement attached to a bit of sadness.
STEVE PENNELLS: Why the sadness?
KES HILLMAN SMITH: Well, this is a kind of last-ditch stand. But, you know, there's still hope.
STEVE PENNELLS: And hope is what has sustained Kes in a battle against overwhelming odds to save the northern white rhino. At a compound nearby, she takes me to meet the very last surviving male.
Here he is.
KES: Hey. Hey, Sudan. Good boy.
STEVE: Hey, big guy.
KES: Hey, boy. Mmm.
STEVE: The last male.
KES: Yeah.
STEVE: Sudan's legs are weakened by arthritis. He's almost blind in one eye. A lonely, gentle giant, long past his prime and unable to reproduce.
KES: Sudan seems to be too old to mate himself. But it's nice to be with him.
MAN: When you're down to the last remaining three northern white rhinos left on the planet, you are talking about a technically extinct species, because the chances of recovery from such low numbers is pretty small.
OK, so, they would have to be brought in every single evening?
MAN: Yeah.
MAN: OK. That's Fatu and Najin?
MAN: Yeah, Fatu and Najin.
STEVE: Richard Vigne is the CEO of the rhino sanctuary and he shares Kes's deep frustration that only three remain.
RICHARD: And you can separate them from the other rhinos before they...
MAN: Southern white. Yeah.
MAN: Yeah, OK.
STEVE: He's implemented high-security measures around the perimeter of Ol Pejeta to protect the last three northern whites and keep the other rhino species safe.
RICHARD: If you're a poacher right now, if you are able to get a hold of a set of reasonably-sized rhino horns, you can sell them for probably, I don't know, the equivalent of US$50,000. We get threatened by poachers on a regular basis. We lost a rhino a week and a half ago and we've lost four in the last six months.
STEVE: You've come against battle after battle after battle in your fight to save these rhinos.
KES: It's rather what conservation is like, I'm afraid. You're always up against something, and if you feel it's worth it, you just keep fighting for it. It's good to have something meaningful that you want to fight for. And you look at these amazing areas and these incredible animals, and that's worth fighting for.
STEVE: For Kes, it's been a long and difficult fight that began more than 40 years ago. Kes was part of a wave of zoologists that came to Africa in the '60s and '70s. Among them, the legendary Dian Fossey, who devoted her life to protecting mountain gorillas. Kes was never as famous as Fossey, but her work as the global guardia of the northern white rhino was just as important.
KES: They were very, very low numbers. They were seriously threatened. They needed a lot of help. But they also represented incredible areas of habitat.
(CAR HORNS HONK)
STEVE: As Kes began her work to stop the poaching, on the other side of the world, in San Diego, California, a revolutionary approach to saving species from extinction was also just beginning. A scientist was collecting cells from endangered species and freezing them.
WOMAN: And he at that time had no idea how these cells could be used. He just knew it was imperative to save them. What a brilliant idea to start the Frozen Zoo in 1975.
STEVE: And how many samples do you have now?
(SIGHS)
WOMAN: Tens of thousands. Maybe 100,000.
STEVE: Reproductive specialist Dr Barbara Durrant and geneticist Dr Oliver Ryder...
RYDER: Those look good!
STEVE: ..are part of a small team at the San Diego Safari Park working on ways to use state-of-the-art cellular and IVF techniques to save species from extinction.
We are now down to the last three northern white rhinos.
DURRANT: That's right. We've just watched the one by one by one disappear, first from the wild and then in the captive populations. We realised in the last couple of years that our efforts had to step up significantly if we were going to save any of the species at all.
This is a Burmese python.
STEVE: The lab has had success in saving other species. The work here helped bring back the majestic California condor from the brink of extinction. There were around 20. Now there are 450. But saving the rhinos will be an even greater challenge. In addition to the three living rhinos in Africa, the Frozen Zoo has tissue samples from 12 others.
Can it restore the northern white rhinos?
DR OLIVER RYDER: We have a big effort under way to evaluate whether the material we have saved will be sufficient. We believe it will. You know, there's nothing cuter than a baby rhino.
STEVE: Back at Ol Pejeta, four-month-old Ringo is proof that a rhino species can recover. He's an orphaned southern white rhino with an enormous appetite. Almost a century ago, they were on the brink of extinction. Now, thanks to a conservation effort, there are 20,000. It was Kes's hope all those years ago that she could do the same for the northern white. She was a young British zoologist with a very English name - Alison Gibbons. She got a new one from a Masai tribe.
KES: They gave me the name 'Kesinyunye', which means 'live in peace'. I've been 'Kes' ever since.
STEVE: Kes worked in one of the most spectacular parts of Africa, Garamba National Park, in the north-east Congo.
(ELEPHANTS TRUMPET)
She married a park ranger and raised a family.
KES HILLMAN SMITH: Life revolved around the park and the bush and animals. And our way of transport was flying.
STEVE: From the air, Kes was able to study the movement of the rhinos and their numbers.
KES: You know, it's a sort of soap opera of who is mating who and, you know, who has had a baby recently and who is where and who has taken over this territory, and, yeah, it was like a soap opera. Quite exciting - every time you go out, something's changed. (LAUGHS)
STEVE: To understand their mating patterns, she would go in the field... ..and, from a safe distance, fire a well-aimed dart. The rhino is alarmed but unhurt. Kes walks away with valuable DNA.
KES: When you're down to a last-ditch stand like this for such an important and charismatic large mammal subspecies, you've got to do everything you can.
STEVE: Her team helped the northern white rhino population increase from 15 to 32. But then this. War broke out in the Congo.
(GUNFIRE)
RICHARD VIGNE: She was fighting against overwhelming odds in a part of Africa which has been through some really turbulent, tumultuous times. I have massive admiration for people who do that kind of thing.
REPORTER: This was the biggest poaching camp they'd found in the park.
STEVE: With the stakes raised, the conservationists turned commando. Kes led a campaign of guerilla warfare against the poachers.
KES: Basically, the poachers were winning. They were coming in in bigger and bigger groups. They were coming in armed with grenades and rocket launchers and everything else.
STEVE: Did you lose people?
KES: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you lose people. And...and you eliminate poachers, uh, but you definitely... yes, you lose people.
STEVE: By 2008, the battle to save the wild rhinos had been lost. The only ones left anywhere were in zoos.
RICHARD: They weren't breeding - at least, breeding had been problematic - so we agreed to bring the last four potentially reproductive animals out to Kenya... So we're going to put both females in that... ..in the hope that in a more natural environment, in more natural social circumstances, they would start to breed.
KES: It was great to see them. It was wonderful. We also slept out there, listening all night to the sound of the rhinos munching. And really think, "Wow, this is it. "This is, you know, another stage "of being able to save northern white rhinos."
STEVE: But the plan hit a significant obstacle. Najin and Fatu could not reproduce. And then the younger male died of a stroke, leaving just Sudan. Kes is holding on to the faint hope that science might now come to the rescue.
KES: There's a lot of stuff going on now with genetics, with, kind of, cloning and developing stem cells and all sorts of things which sound very exciting. You know, it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
BARBARA DURRANT: So, we think there's enough of a genetic base to bring back the species. We're applying all of our efforts towards assisted reproduction and cellular technologies. We've put together a truly wonderful international team of experts to work on this problem.
STEVE: One approach is to make stem cells from rhino skin tissue and create an embryo - a living rhino - from nothing more than rhino skin. The other is to harvest eggs from Fatu and Najin and then fertilise them with sperm from Sudan. In both cases, the embryo would be implanted into one of these healthy southern white rhinos in San Diego.
DURRANT: Oh, oh, oh. Look. We're developing some new techniques altogether and some techniques that have been used for decades in cattle and horses and pigs - and humans - but we're applying for the first time to rhinos.
STEVE: So is it too late to save them?
DURRANT: We don't think so.
STEVE: What an amazing achievement that would be for all those who have worked so hard to save them.
RYDER: She devoted herself and risked her life to try to save these rhinos. I think her efforts are heroic.
STEVE: What do you hope... What are the prospects for the rhino now?
KES: I think it's hopeful. It's definitely hopeful. It's very... You know, we're right on the edge. We've caused the problem. We need to do something about it.
