Two female white rhinos, Alice and Hazina, arrived at the Granby Zoo in Quebec on April 17 after a road journey of 4,882 kilometers from the San Diego Zoo. The move had been in planning for more than a year.
How you drive two tonnes of rhino across a continent
The zoo is unusually candid about the logistics, and they are worth walking through, because moving a protected species between countries is mostly paperwork and precision rather than muscle.
Permits come first: everything has to be in order before a departure date can even be discussed. The transport itself went to a company that specializes in moving animals. Road was chosen over air. Four drivers worked in relay to cover the distance continuously in a 53-foot tractor-trailer, stopping only for fuel and to check on the animals.
Alice and Hazina traveled in individual containers with food and water available throughout. They left San Diego at noon on Tuesday, April 15, and arrived at 7 p.m. on the Thursday. The zoo’s summary of the trip is one word: sans anicroche, without a hitch.
A keeper came with them
The detail that says the most about how this is done properly: one of the keepers from San Diego made the journey too, and spent several days with Granby’s animal care technicians.
The point was not supervision. It was knowledge transfer. Each rhino has her own personality and her own particular habits, and all of that was handed over in person to the people who would be caring for them from now on. There is no document that carries that.
Meeting the neighbours
Alice and Hazina join K.C., the zoo’s male white rhino, who the zoo describes as extremely curious about the new arrivals. He will be introduced to them gradually.
They will also eventually share space with red river hogs and blue wildebeest. Those introductions will be staged slowly as well, to let the rhinos get used to their new housemates with as little stress as possible. As the zoo puts it: you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Long-distance animal transfers under a breeding plan are routine but rarely explained; Utah’s Hogle Zoo brought an Amur tiger from Saint Louis on the same kind of recommendation this year.
The point of the move
This was a breeding transfer. Rhinos are threatened with extinction because of the illegal trade in their keratin horn, used in traditional Asian medicine, and the zoo is explicit that Alice and Hazina are meant to become central to its contribution to the species.
Which means the sentence Granby is not quite saying out loud is the interesting one: the plan involves calves.
Visiting
Granby is about an hour east of Montreal. Two adult female white rhinos and a curious male are a substantial thing to have arrive in Quebec, and worth building an afternoon around.
