Community Rhino Conservation Initiative<\/a>, with support from Imvelo Safari Lodges, engages local communities to reintroduce southern white rhinos to communal lands for the first time in the nation\u2019s history.<\/p>\nPalm Beach Zoo CEO and President Margo McKnight was visiting the area last year when Imvelo Safari Lodges managing director Mark Butcher told her a health scare with a male rhino named Thuza could jeopardize the future of the program.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis rhino had bleeding eyes. He was rubbing his eyes,\u201d Butcher said. \u201cAnd I was looking at a potential where this guy was gonna lose his eyesight. And this is in a pilot project that\u2019s got fantastic vision for a future for conservation throughout Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Thad and Angi Lacinak, founders of\u00a0Precision Behavior, traveled to Zimbabwe to work with the anti-poacher scouts. They developed a plan based on lessons learned at Palm Beach Zoo, where animals are taught to voluntarily participate in their own care.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this few animals in this location in Africa, it was essential that we save all of them,\u201d Angi Lacinak said. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo when they called and said, Thuza is going to lose his eye, a blind rhino is a dead rhino. So no matter what it took, we were going to go over there and try.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this few animals in this location in Africa, it was essential that we save all of them,\u201d Angi Lacinak said. AP<\/p>\n
The idea was to coax Thuza into a tight space with his favorite foods and then to desensitize him to humans touching and squirting water on the face.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithin about a week, we were actually putting the eye drops strategically in his eyes while he held for it,\u201d Lacinak said. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd by the end of two weeks, we had transferred that skill set to not only Daniel, who was in charge of leading their guards, but to the guards.\u201d<\/p>\n
The conservation status of southern white rhinos is listed as near threatened, with about 16,000 animals living in the wild. <\/p>\n
Poaching<\/a> and habitat loss remain significant sources of danger. So while Thuza and other rhinos continue to face challenges in the wild, at least the animal\u2019s eyes have been protected.<\/p>\n\u201cThey\u2019re consistently getting the medications into his eyes every day,\u201d Lacinak said. \u201cAnd the rhinos are just thriving now and they feel really, really confident that this solved their problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. \u2014 Corralling a wild rhinoceros into a small chute to give it eyedrops might…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1926,1147,2808,40244,79,201,965,30519],"class_list":["post-476834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-africa","tag-animals","tag-florida","tag-rhinos","tag-science","tag-wildlife","tag-world-news","tag-zoos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}