Sudan, last male northern white rhino, dies in Kenya

Image copyright
AFP

The world’s last surviving male northern white rhino has died after months of ill health, his carers said.

Sudan, 45, lived at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. He was put to sleep on Monday after age-related complications worsened significantly.

His death leaves only two females – his daughter and granddaughter – of the subspecies alive in the world.

Hope for preserving the northern white rhino now lies in developing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) techniques.

Skip Twitter post by @OlPejeta

End of Twitter post by @OlPejeta

Why is this kind of rhino so rare?

Rhinoceroses – of which there are five species – are the second-largest land mammal after elephants. The white rhinoceros consists of two sub-species: the southern white rhino, with an estimated 20,000 living in the wild, and the much rarer and critically endangered northern white rhino.

Sudan, who was the equivalent of 90 in human years, was the last surviving male of the rarer variety, after the natural death of a second male in late 2014.

The subspecies’ population in Uganda, Central African Republic, Sudan and Chad was largely wiped out during the poaching crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Poaching was fuelled by demand for rhino horn for use in traditional Chinese medicine in Asia, and for dagger handles in Yemen.

The last few dozen wild northern white rhinos in the Democratic Republic of Congo had been killed in fighting by the early 2000s.

By 2008, the northern white rhino was considered extinct in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

What did Sudan die from?

The elderly rhino was being treated for degenerative changes in his muscles and bones, combined with extensive skin wounds.

Unable to stand up and suffering a great deal in his last 24 hours, Sudan was put down by veterinarians at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, according to an official tweet.

Image copyright
EPA

“Sudan was the last northern white rhino that was born in the wild,” said Jan Stejskal of Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic, where Sudan lived until 2009.

“His death is a cruel symbol of human disregard for nature and it saddened everyone who knew him,” Mr Stejskal said, according to the AFP news agency.

Is there any prospect that the subspecies could survive?

In 2009, the four remaining northern white rhinos, two males and two females, were transferred from the Czech zoo to Ol Pejeta in Kenya.

The hope was that the new environment, reflecting their native habitat, would encourage breeding.

However, there were no successful pregnancies and Sudan was retired from his role as a potential mate four years ago.

An account was created for him on the dating app Tinder last year, not to find love, but to help fund the development of IVF for rhinos.

The move won him fans across the world – fans who will now be mourning his death and the northern white rhino’s proximity to extinction.

Sudan’s genetic material was collected on Monday, conservationists said, to support future attempts to preserve the subspecies.

The stored semen, and eggs from the remaining younger females, still gives conservationists hope that Najin and Fatu will be able to have their own calves one day.

Skip Twitter post 2 by @OlPejeta

Sudan will be remembered for his unusually memorable life. In the 1970s, he escaped extinction of his kind in the wild when he was moved to Dvůr Králové Zoo. Throughout his existence, he significantly contributed to survival of his species as he sired two females.

— Ol Pejeta (@OlPejeta) March 20, 2018

End of Twitter post 2 by @OlPejeta

---

Do you have any questions about this story? Please get in touch by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.

You can also contact us in the following ways:

• Tweet: @BBC_HaveYourSay
• WhatsApp: +44 7555 173285
• Text an SMS or MMS to 61124 (UK)
• Please read our terms conditions

Share and Enjoy

Face-To-Face With Cambridge Analytica’s Elusive Alexander Nix

Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive officer Alexander Nix.

“The big mystery of Big Data,” said Alexander Nix, “is causation versus correlation.”

He paused and looked out of the second-story window of his office.

On the street below, red, double-decker buses snaked around a corner through London traffic. He lightly tapped a Swiss Army knife on his desk and continued.

“Look, fundamentally the more you know about someone, the better you can communicate with them at a human level, or a mass-communication-advertising level.”

Nix knows a lot, about a lot of people.

Some time in 2014, his company Cambridge Analytica secretly collected data from tens of millions of Facebook users, and used it to persuade many of them to vote for Donald Trump as President, according to multiple reports over the weekend citing an ex-contractor.

His interview with Forbes took place in March 2017, when we recorded him for our weekly technology podcast, an interview you can listen to again here:

In it, he explained in vague, sometimes evasive terms about how his company honed its data-driven marketing technology on Ted Cruz’s primary campaign, and then conducted “attitudinal surveys” across the United States to help Trump win the election.

Nix was trim and wore a dark-blue vest and black-and-gold tie. He had thick, black-rimmed spectacles and dirty-blonde, wavy hair that he occasionally smoothed over with his hand.

He had the air of a busy executive, typing on his MacBook while occasionally answering questions.  He would often start his answers with a defensive-sounding, “look.”

When asked about where the company’s headquarters were and that of its parent company, SLC, he mumbled that journalists were “coming in here with their suppositions,” then added, curtly, “It’s an affiliate.”

For the head of one of the most notorious data analytics firms in the world, Nix worked from a modest office. Dark smudges lined the wall behind him, and the old MacBook he was typing on had smudges on its lid. A yellow sticky note on his office phone had the words “Bannon” and “Lobbying” scrawled across it, each underlined.

Papers were arranged neatly on his desk, including a letter from House Garden magazine, while a copy of Time with Donald Trump on the cover was the only overt reference to Nix’s most famous client.

Trump didn’t pay very much for Cambridge Analytica’s services when he hired them, Nix admitted, adding, “He’s a good businessman.”

What Nix didn’t say during his tense interview with Forbes, and what has transpired over the weekend from reports in The Observer and The New York Times, is that Cambridge Analytica had siphoned profile data from more than 50 million users of Facebook, in most cases without their knowledge, ahead of its work on Trump’s campaign.

The company did this by posting a survey app on Facebook called MyDigitalLife,” in 2014. Billed as a “research app used by psychologists” and designed by a Cambridge academic, it promised to help users better understand their own personalities.

Around 270,000 people downloaded MyDigitalLife, giving Cambridge Analytica a backdoor to their data and that of all their friends, more than 50 million other people who, according to Facebook, “had their privacy settings set to allow it.”

A former contractor with Cambridge Analytica revealed how the data mining worked to The Observer and New York Times: “With their profiles, likes, even private messages, [Cambridge Analytica] could build a personality profile on each person and know how best to target them with messages,” said the former contractor, Christopher Wylie in a video interview with The Guardian.

“What you’re susceptible to, and how many times we need to touch you with that to change your mind on something,” Wylie explained. “We created content, websites and blogs. Then they see that and they click it and they go down the rabbit hole. It’s how they start to think differently.”

Such details from Wylie now cast a new and uncomfortable light on Cambridge Analytica’s methods. Facebook says that in 2015 it told the firm to destroy the user data it had secretly scraped.

Cambridge Analytica says it complied and deleted the data, but reports in the last few days from The New York Times, Wired and The Guardian/Observer, suggest it didn’t.

When Nix spoke to Forbes he took issue with reports that his firm used a method called psychographic profiling to target American voters. “This was not a campaign that was driven by psychographics and certainly not used in the creative engagement,” he said. 

When asked about Cambridge Analytica’s reported work for the Leave.Eu campaign for Brexit, Nix flatly denied any involvement. 

“We didn’t do Brexit,” he answered, while moving to type something into his MacBook again. He then leaned back in his office chair. “We didn’t get money for it. We didn’t do work for it. We didn’t sign a contract.” 

Nix became most animated when complaining about his company sullied reputation, and how Trump’s victory should have vindicated its work.

“None of the vendors wanted to work with Trump,” he said, referring to other analytics firms for political campaigns that, he suggested, were regularly giving kickbacks to politicians. “We have wealthy investors, so we don’t need to take bribes,” he added, referring to his firm’s primary backer, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.  

What was his reaction to criticisms that his methods didn’t even work? “Look.” Nix gave a hefty sigh. “Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. It’s very difficult for too many people to claim credit on the Trump campaign because there weren’t too many people involved. When we joined the Trump campaign, there were 30 people in Trump Tower. Hillary had about 800 working for her.”

Despite the company’s success, it’s reputation had suffered. “Trump became the villain,” he said, “so now we’re the villain.”       

Nix went on to boast about the data science credentials of his team, saying that only four of his workforce of 200 were “creatives.” “Everyone has got a masters and PhD’s,” he said. “My PA has got a masters.”

During a brief tour of the company’s open-plan office, Nix showed off two of his data scientists, who sat side-by-side in the company’s open-plan office gazing at vertically-tipped screens. One had been on the company’s front-line profiling team in Austin, Texas and during the night of the Presidential election, was busy feeding the system information about how the American electorate were voting.

Beside them, a white board was filled with mathematical formulas while a poster bearing the Trump / Pence logo hung on the other wall. It was filled with signatures of people from the Trump campaign team, and balanced on top was a small American flag. Pressed into another corner was a old, wooden foosball table. The overall impression was that this was not a particularly enjoyable look place to work.

Back in his office, Nix was asked about Trump’s campaign strategist, Steve Bannon. Had Bannon been a board member of Cambridge Analytica? Nix nodded. “I talked to him everyday for five years,” he said, without elaborating.

Nix, whose regularly unguarded comments got him featured in a British television news expose on Monday that touched on bribes and sex workers, had quickly segued to an anecdote: “Last night I was at a dinner with some people who own newspapers,” he said, “They were saying why they didn’t like Steve Bannon. I said, ‘Have you met him?’ They said, ‘No.’ Well then!”

For Nix, it was hard not to take criticism personally, but he admitted this was part of the win-lose job of working on political campaigns.

“If you help one candidate win, you’re going to piss the other one off,” he said. “You’re going to to piss a lot of people off.”

Today’s criticisms have little to do with who Nix helped bring into the White House, though, and everything to do with how it mined voter data.

That’s an issue that goes beyond politics, and one that will likely haunt Nix for some time to come.

Share and Enjoy