the Javan Rhino is now extinct A Sad Day For Mother Nature as Our Javan Rhino Are Officially Extinct Credit to tigervalley98 for the article, but this is very sad news for everyone that cares about conservation
This refers specifically to Malaysia, where the species has been extinct since the mid 20th century. Javan rhinos still remain on Java itself, in Indonesia. Not to mention this article seems to be full of mistakes- referring to 'three species of Javan Rhino"?
This article is badly written. The Javan rhino remains with us and it is doing well last time I checked. It is Sumatrans that we need to worry about.
While it is certainly not extinct, no critically endangered species restricted to a single tiny population within it's large historical range, can really be described as doing well.
Reading the article, it wasn't at all clear whether by "three species" it was meaning "three subspecies" or "three individuals". The passage reads: "Datuk Dr. Hamim continued to say that the presence of Javan Rhinos in the wild was in a past record from 2010. At that time, the Department of Forestry had recorded three species of Javan Rhino but this year the species failed to be tracked and recorded." The way the article reads, it seems like the suggestion was that three individuals were known from Malaysia in 2010, which is nonsense. I think that the original article's author (or Hamim himself) has mixed up the Vietnamese rhinos (last individual was killed in 2010) with the Malaysian rhinos (extinct c.1930s).
Obviously, a total mix up of both readily identifiably different species and locations as well as countries. The journalism is also far and away and I believe lost in translation may also have something to do with this. It almost seems an Pinglish translation from Bahasa Melayu.
The original article (in Malay) says much the same thing. The English version is just repeating it. So it is either the original author getting confused, or Hamim himself. My thinking is that there is a general conflation of there being three subspecies of Javan Rhino, the last Javan Rhino in Vietnam being killed in 2010, the Javan Rhino in Malaysia being already extinct, and the Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia being as good as extinct. Throw it all in a blender and you might get what the article says about Javan Rhinos in Malaysia.
I think its more a case of Hello, Javan Rhino, Farewell Sumatran Rhino....given the Javans are better protected, consolidated in one area where they can meet and interact and calves are regularly recorded. Contrast with the Sumatran which has almost none of these measures in place at present.
I think the responsibility for that rests largely with the Indonesian government- to date inaction still seems the keyword.
My apologies for the confusion everyone, I definitely should have looked into this a lot more before posting the article
I seem to remember some fifty years ago, it was suggested that the Javan Rhino, with a relatively concentrated but tiny population, was more secure than the Sumatran, with more animals but widely scattered. Maybe a parallel situation with lions -- the widely scattered African Lion is in free fall, while the much smaller numbers of Asian Lions are comparatively secure.
The rhino situation seems very similar now to as it was then, except now the numbers of Sumatrans may be perilously low, the result of over-estimations of their number(or not) in recent years. At the worst estimate they could even be lower in number than Javan(or not as the case may be)- nobody seems to know.
