The southern white rhino is the second largest animal in size and weight after the elephant. Note that the southern white rhino is not white but gray.
It is displayed in a large custom glass case in the biodiversity gallery on the second floor. The entire rhinoceros is 4 meters long from the end of its snout to its rump. It is 1.8 meters tall from the ground to the top of the muscular hump above the shoulders. The rhino, whose name was Bull, weighed about 2 tons when he was alive, the same as an average car.
He had a huge body, a big head, a short neck, a broad chest, and four short and thick legs. His skin was leathery, with lots of wrinkles and creases. There are two horns on his nose. The front horn is longer and thicker than the other horn, about 40 cm long. The horns have a broad base that curves slightly upward and narrows to a point.
Each of his four legs ends in three stubby, wide toes. There is also a slender short tail about half a meter long, extending downwards along the buttocks.
Bull was introduced to North America from South Africa in the early 1970s. As part of a plan to increase the rhino population. In 1974, Bull was transferred to the Toronto Zoo, where he lived until his death in 2008.
The southern white rhinoceros was once hunted to the brink of extinction. In 1890, only 50 were left. Conservation efforts then began, and a hundred years later, by the early 2000s, their numbers had reached around 18,000.
Unfortunately, poaching of southern white rhinos has increased dramatically over the past two decades. All this is because their horns are used in traditional medicine in some countries. Although rhino horn is only made of keratin, just like our fingernails and hair. And there is no evidence that it has any health benefits. From 2012 to 2017, poaching surged and the white rhino population declined by 15%. At the same rate of loss, these rhinos will be gone in just over 30 years.