Contributor: Jessica Knauss
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“Good girl,” said Shelley, patting a Javan rhinoceros on her round rump.
She pulled on long gloves, grasped the cartridge-sized ultrasound camera, and inserted her arm into Kunthi’s rectum. Kunthi had behaved just as patiently during the painstaking ultrasound and insemination attempt three days before, which had used up the last of their supply of male Javan DNA. Kunthi was twenty-two, about two-thirds the maximum estimated age of her wild counterparts, and had never given birth.
Kunthi’s name, meaning “motherly” in Indonesian, had been an act of optimism that looked more pathetic every day. The Javan rhinoceros was the world’s rarest large land mammal. Pushed down by poaching, palm oil crops, and human settlement, after millions of years on Earth, Kunthi’s wild relatives numbered only thirty. She had...
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Author:
Jessica Knauss
