The Sunday Read: 'A Mother and Daughter at the End'

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Without many predators or any prey, rhinos flourished for millions of years. Humans put an end to that, as we hunted them down and destroyed their habitat. No rhino, however, is doing worse than the northern white. Just two, Najin and Fatu, both females, remain. In his narrated story, Sam Anderson, a staff writer at The Times Magazine, visits the pair at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, speaks to the men who devote their days to caring for them and explores what we will lose when Najin and Fatu die. This story was written by Sam Anderson and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Sam Anderson and I am a staff writer for the New York Times magazine.
0:05.9	And this week I wrote a cover story about my time with the last two Northern White
0:12.1	Rhinos on planet Earth.
0:16.8	So this story really started with sadness.
0:20.4	I was sitting around feeling doomed and gloomy about the state of the world.
0:26.2	You know, I was looking at these huge problems, climate change, systemic racism.
0:32.3	I was feeling really hopeless.
0:35.6	And in that cloud of gloom, I remembered a story I had read about this subspecies of rhinoceros
0:43.0	in Africa that was going extinct.
0:46.2	The last male Northern White Rhinow died in 2018.
0:49.7	His name was Sudan.
0:51.5	And this was a huge deal because when the last male dies, suddenly you can't reproduce
0:57.8	anymore.
0:59.1	And so the species tipped over into a category called functional extinction.
1:05.9	You know, there may be one or two left, but they're not really, they don't have a future
1:09.8	in the world.
1:11.3	I thought a lot about this functionally extinct rhino.
1:15.0	And then the fact that my mind really seized on was there were still two of these rhinos
1:22.1	left, both female, a mother and a daughter.
1:26.8	And I just had this overwhelming urge to go and see them.
1:32.1	And so I went to Kenya and I spent a week out in the field with the girls.
1:37.9	Everybody calls them the girls, the last two.
	...

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