Rare captive-born rhino arrives home in Indonesia from US (Roundup)

Feb 20, 2007, 12:59 GMT

Jakarta - The first Sumatran rhino born in captivity in more than 100 years arrived in its native home of Indonesia Tuesday to take part in a breeding programme to help save the severely endangered species from extinction.

The 5-year-old male rhino named Andalas landed at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport onboard KLM aircraft from the Los Angeles Zoo, said Inov, an Indonesian conservationist welcoming the arrival at the airport.

He said after a checkup, the young rhino would travel by truck and ferry to his new sanctuary in the Way Kambas National Park in the southern Sumatra province of Lampung.

'After his arrival in Jakarta, we will drive him directly to the [West Java] coast and put him on a ferry to Sumatra Island,' Marcellus Adi, site manager of the sanctuary park, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Marcellus said Andalas would arrive at his new home in Way Kambas, a 100-hectare rhino sanctuary early Wednesday after a 12-hour journey.

Andalas, whose name comes from the ancient moniker for Sumatra, is the first Sumatran rhino bred in captivity since 1889 when one of his kind was born at the Calcutta Zoo in India.

Andalas is to join three female rhinos that live in the park as part of its captive breeding programme.

'Let's just hope he will be able to produce offspring with the females there to help save this endangered species from extinction,' Marcellus said, adding that Andalas' arrival in Indonesia was vital to the future of Sumatran rhinos.

Rampant poaching of rhinos for their horns, combined with the destruction of their forest habitat through farming and illegal logging, has rendered the Sumatran rhino among the world's most endangered species.

Environmental groups estimated that there are fewer than 300 rhinos left in the wild.

'Poaching is the main threat for the survival of the Sumatran rhino due to the high demand for their horns,' which are used in traditional Asian medicines, Marcellus said.

Andalas was born in September 2001 at the Cincinnati Zoo, and later moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. His parents were captured in a national park on Sumatra in 1990 and sent the following year to Cincinnati under a programme aimed at saving the species.

Sumatran rhinos live within the massive island's dense tropical forests, but they are also found on peninsular Malaysia and Borneo. The Indonesian government and zoos around the world have long been struggling to keep the Sumatran rhinos from becoming extinct.

They are the smallest and hairiest of the five rhino species, all of which are endangered. Although the population of Javan rhinos is the smallest - from 60 to 80 - they are fairly well protected within a remote national park in West Java, environmentalists said.