I BEGAN MY CAREER covering conflicts. Starting at
26, I found myself in places such as Kosovo, Angola,
Gaza, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. My reason for
going, I told myself, was to document the brutality. I
thought the most powerful stories were those driven
by violence and destruction. While the importance
of shining a light on human conflict shouldn’t be
minimized, focusing only on that turned my world
into a horror show.
But slowly, as I covered conflict after conflict, it
became clear to me that journalists also have an
obligation to illuminate the things that unite us as
human beings. If we choose to look for what divides
us, we will find it. If we choose to look for what brings
us together, we will find that too.
Those years in war zones led me to an epiphany:
Stories about people and the human condition are
also about nature. If you dig deep enough behind
virtually every human conflict, you will find an ero-
sion of the bond between humans and the natural
world around them.
These truths became personal guideposts when I
met Sudan, a northern white rhinoceros and, even-
tually, the last male of his kind.
I saw Sudan for the first time in 2009 at the Dvůr
Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic. I can recall the
exact moment. Surrounded by snow in his brick
and iron enclosure, Sudan was being crate trained—
learning to walk into the giant box that would carry
him almost 4,000 miles south to Kenya. He moved
slowly, cautiously. He took time to sniff the snow.
He was gentle, hulking, otherworldly. I knew I was
in the presence of an ancient being, millions of years
in the making (fossil records suggest that the lineage
is over 50 million years old), whose kind had roamed
around much of our world.
On that winter’s day, Sudan was one of only eight
northern white rhinos left alive on the planet. A cen-
tury ago there were hundreds of thousands of rhinos
in Africa. By the early 1980s, hunting had reduced
their numbers to around 19,000. Rhino horns, like
our fingernails, are simply keratin, with no special
curative powers, yet they’ve long been valued by
people around the world as antidotes for ailments
from fever to impotence.
When I met Sudan, the remaining northern white
rhinos were all in zoos, safe from poaching but with
limited success at breeding. Conservationists had
hatched a bold plan to airlift four of the rhinos to
Kenya. The rhinos, it was hoped, would be stimulated
by their ancestral habitat’s air, water, food, and room
to roam. They would breed, and their offspring could
be used to repopulate Africa.
When I first heard of this plan, it sounded to me
like something out of a children’s story. But I quickly
realized that this was a desperate, last-ditch effort
to save a species. Dvůr Králové Zoo, Ol Pejeta Con-
servancy, Kenya Wildlife Service, Fauna & Flora
International, Back to Africa, and Lewa Wildlife
Conservancy worked hard to make the move possible.STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMI VITALE
THE LAST MALE
NORTHERN WHITE RHINOCEROS
TAUGHT A PHOTOGRAPHER THAT
WE CANNOT IGNORE
OUR CONNECTIONS TO NATURE—
OR TO EACH OTHER.
OCTOBER 2019 35