Eight rare rhinos die after moving to Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya – Eight critically endangered black rhinos are dead in Kenya, the government said Friday, calling the toll "unprecedented" in more than a decade of such transfers.

Preliminary investigations into salt poisoning in the new world, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife said, describing how the animals became dehydrated and drank more salty water.

The loss is "a complete disaster," said prominent Kenyan conservationist Paula Kahumbu of WildlifeDirect.

Preserving the Asian market to protect them from the Asian market.

Tsavo East National Park in Nairobi, Kenya Wildlife Service. The government agency has not said how the rhinos died. Fourteen of the animals were moved in

"Moving rhinos is complicated," says Kahumbu said in a statement. "Rhino translocations also have major welfare considerations and I believe that they suffer from these diseases before they die."

Transporting wildlife is a strategy used by conservationists to help build up, or even bring back, animal populations. In May, six black rhinos were moved from South Africa to Chad, restoring the species to the country in north-central Africa

Kenya transported 149 rhinos between 2005 and 2017 with eight deaths According to WWF, black rhino populations dramatically declined in the 20th century, mostly at the hands of European hunters and settlers. Between 1960 and 1995 numbers dropped by 98 percent, to fewer than 2,500.

Since then the species has rebounded, although it remains extremely threatened.

African Parks, a Johannesburg-based conservation group, said this year that there are fewer than 25,000 rhinos in the African wild, of which about 20 percent are black rhinos and the rest white rhinos.

The last remaining male in the world died in March in Kenya, leaving conservationists struggling to save that subspecies using in vitro fertilization.

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