Story By: Koen Berghuis, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
Picture Credit: CEN
This zoo has welcomed two older female rhinos to teach a young male how to have sex and the keeper says “they do at times say that you have to learn it from someone mature.”
The two older Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) females arrived at Dierenrijk zoo in Nuenen, a town in the province of North Brabant in the Netherlands, after being temporarily lent out to the Dutch animal park by a zoo in Berlin.
Rinos Narayani, 29, and Jhansi, 31, will only be kept in the newly opened rhinoceros enclosure of the Dutch zoo for two years.
In the same week the pair arrived, Dierenrijk zoo also welcomed two-year-old male rhino Gainda from a zoo in France.
Zookeeper Jeroen van Maastrigt said: “In Berlin they will renovate [the zoo] so they asked us if we could temporarily house them. In two years from now they will return and we will get a younger female.
“Hopefully she will be a match for our male Gainda and we can breed with her.”
Gainda will be permanently housed at the Dutch zoo, but is not yet sexually mature.
The zookeepers hope that he will learn how to have sex from the two older rhinos and zookeeper Stephan Rijnen said jokingly: “They do at times say that you have to learn it from someone mature.”
Rijnen said that the they are all “very happy to be granted the chance to house this animal species” of which there are some 70 others in zoos across Europe.
Narayani and Jhansi, who already know each other and have a good bond, have so far been separated from Gainda.
Zookeeper van Maastrigt said: “We have to win their confidence and take careful steps. The Indian rhinoceros lives a solitary life and males and females do not always go together. That is why they are held apart. However, they saw each other and above all smelled each other.”
The large rhino enclosure at the Dutch zoo, which the three animals share with Nilgai antelope, Visayan warty pigs and Indian hog deer, consists of an inner and outer area and has several water features for the rhinos to cool down.
Zookeeper Rijnen said: “They like water. They want to bathe in it. They don’t really swim because the water is too shallow for that and they are not too hulking for that.
“The new residence is already fully equipped to accommodate an entire family, making it the only enclosure in the Netherlands where young can be born.”
The Indian rhinoceros is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species with an estimated 3,000 of them living in the wild in the northern part of the subcontinent in India and Nepal.
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