From the President’s Desk

Allen Monroe, President/CEO

For the past three years, we have been working on an exciting new project for The Living Desert with the design and construction of the new Rhino Savanna. This four-acre habitat will be complete and open to guests later this fall. If you have ever built or even remodeled a home, you know there are hundreds of details that must be considered and integrated into the design. My office is filled with stacks of blueprints ensuring that each feature is correct down to the last detail.

Usually there is one client who provides the input that the architects factor into the design. In our case, we have three clients whose needs must be considered, the animals living in the habitat, the staff with the support facilities, and our guests and how they will enjoy this new experience. Our challenge is to blend and optimize the needs of these three clients to build the perfect space to tell the conservation story of black rhinoceros and work to prevent their extinction. We are often asked where our animals come from and the black rhinos are a great example of how zoos work collaboratively. Animals are rarely taken from the wild and only under exceptional circumstances. Our goal is to increase the population of wild animals so the animals under human care at zoos are carefully managed to build sustainable populations of genetically healthy species. Generally, each species has a coordinator for their Species Survival Plan (SSP) who serves as a program manager, or matchmaker, and makes recommendations on when individuals can breed and which ones should be relocated to other facilities to ensure genetic diversity. Three years ago, we notified the SSP Coordinator for black rhinos that The Living Desert would be adding our new facility to the resources dedicated to rhino conservation. That information was factored into the breeding recommendations of the species and the results are the two rhinos we will be receiving to begin our breeding program. In zoo lingo, that is 1.1 black rhinos meaning 1 male and 1 female. The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo will be sending us Nia (pronounced Ny-a), a three-year-old female rhino. The Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, Michigan will send along three-year-old Jaali (pronounced Jolly), which means powerful in Swahili. We will be sharing more information about these two rhino ambassadors as their arrival approaches. It is our hope that this will be the start of a successful breeding program here at The Living Desert. There are only about 5,600 black rhinos left in the world; each one is precious and the work of conservation organizations like The Living Desert are critical to preventing their extinction.