Nairobi, Kenya: A tenth critically endangered black rhino has died after being moved from Kenya's capital to a new wildlife park and the sole survivor has been attacked by lions, wildlife authorities said on Thursday in what some conservationists have called a national disaster.
The Kenya Wildlife Service's acting director has been fired and several other officials have been suspended after "clear negligence" was found in the rhinos' transfer last month to Tsavo East National Park Rhino Sanctuary, Wildlife Minister Najib Balala said.
Transporting wildlife is a conservation strategy used to help build up animal populations, and Kenya's wildlife ministry has called the rhinos' deaths "unprecedented" in more than a decade of such transfers.
It has said it transported 149 rhinos between 2005 and 2017, losing just eight of them during that time.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), black rhino populations declined dramatically in the 20th century, mostly at the hands of European hunters and settlers. Between 1960 and 1995 numbers dropped by 98 per cent to fewer than 2500.
African Parks, a Johannesburg-based conservation group, said earlier this year that there are fewer than 25,000 rhinos in the African wild, of which about 20 per cent are black rhinos and the rest white rhinos.