Animal News (III): Ohio Zookeepers Red-faced Over Hungarian Frozen Rhino Semen Claims

Remember those cute little stories on Caboodle.hu about Lulu the artificially-inseminated Hungarian rhinoceros? Okay, neither do we. But just get a load of this sort-of-menacing letter that arrived in the Cab mailbag after the publication of the most recent story about Lulu (top left), which mentioned the fact/claim that she is the first rhino ever to get knocked-up using deep-frozen sperm from another odd-toed ungulate:

I wanted to bring this to your attention.

The Cincinnati Zoo announced the world's first successful artificial insemination (AI) procedure in an endangered rhino species July 23, 2007. The pregnancy of the Zoo's 15-year-old Indian rhino "Nikki," is important not only for the captive population of Indian rhinos, but for the monumental scientific achievement it represents. Nikki's pregnancy is not only the first successful AI pregnancy in the endangered Indian rhino, but also the first pregnancy produced in any rhino species using frozen-thawed sperm.

Thank You,
Chad Yelton, Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden

And thank you, Chad, especially for bolding the important part of your letter. Now, onto the matter of frozen-thawed rhino sperm...

So why, you may ask, does there appear to be an international incident brewing over the question of whether a zoo in Budapest or Ohio can lay claim to be the first to successfully use frozen-sperm artificial insemination on a rhinoceros? One answer is that, even compared to normal rhino sex (top right), holy cow is it ever a bitch. Just consider what one Monica Stoops, who heads the rhino program at the Cincinnati Zoo, had to go through to get Nikki (above center, with Stoops) in the motherly way:

Stoops had to fashion a tube two meters long to reach Nikki's uterus, to deposit ["donor" rhinoceros] Himal's sperm that was recovered - as in the domestic cattle industry, by electro-ejaculation - using a two-foot-long, low-voltage device to shock the donor's genitals.

Naturally, we'll be following this story closely, and will bring you up to date on the mounting dispute between the Budapest and Cincinnati zoos over which can legitimately claim to be the first to use a cold load of thawed-out spunk to forcibly impregnate a rhino with a suspiciously porn-star sounding name. In the meantime, we'd urge both sides to stay civil, and keep those two-foot electro-ejaculation genital-shocking prods sheathed, or else things could get really messy.