Two rare white rhinos have died within a day of each other at a New Zealand zoo after eating contaminated hay, authorities said Monday.
Auckland Zoo veterinarian John Potter said female rhino Mazithi and her daughter, Mbili, died over the weekend from what is thought to have been a soil bacterium infection.
Potter said special ryegrass-free hay, regularly shipped to the zoo and fed to the rhinos, may have contained higher than normal levels of a common soil bacterium after lying in storage for at least a month.
Staff noticed all five rhinos were off their feed last week but while the others recovered, Mazithi, 17, and Mbili, five, continued to refuse to eat.
The two were given antibiotics for a suspected bacterial infection but did not respond.
Potter consulted wildlife experts overseas but the treatment that might have saved the animals, an intravenous drip, was impossible to administer.
”There’s no way you can put a rhino on a drip,” Potter said, explaining the rhinos would have had to have been anaesthetised and the volume of fluid needed would have taken hours to administer.
”It was frustrating because we were unable to do what we would have liked just because of the nature of the animals.” The toxin from the bacterium mostly affects horses but can cause illness in other mammals, including humans.
The two rhinos were brought to Auckland Zoo in 1999 because breeding success and conservation measures meant there was an excess of the once critically endangered animals. Mazithi had a second calf, Keto, born in June 2000.
White rhino numbers dropped to just 100 animals in the 1950s but several thousand are now held in South African game reserves. – Sapa