#KENYA’S RHINO DEATHS – SALINE WATER OR BOTCHED MEDICATION OR …
(Posted 21st July 2018)
(The critically endangered Eastern Black Rhino)
The initial silence of KWS and government officials, when first seven, and then two more rhinos died after a routine relocation from the Nairobi National Park and Nakuru National Park to Tsavo, immediately raised suspicions and led to the grapevine and rumour mill go wild in Kenya and elsewhere.
Dr. Paula Kahumbu, one of Kenya’s leading wildlife activists spoke of a ‘catastrophe‘ and was not alone in condemning both the initial silence but also the general fact that this should have happened in the first place.
Sources who have regularly been in the know in the past when events like this went down, and not just in regard of animal deaths, were initially tight lipped but the wall of silence has now cracked.
Suggestions have been made, and that of course needs to be very carefully looked at, that it was medication administered to the rhinos which may have led to their death, as one of the sources put it ‘try feed your domestic animals saline water and they leave it no matter how thirsty they are. Try give your dog or cat salty water, same thing. Game has good cognitive abilities to establish if water is good for them or not so we ought to treat that explanation with a good level of doubt and demand the results of a full independent medical exam or post mortem to be produced as quickly as possible. Holding back again and trying to shush this issue will only deepen suspicions that there is more to hide from the public eye‘.
The matter was first reported here on the 13th of July when the news broke that a relocation had gone bad in a big way.
Eyes now will be on the Kenyan government to produce the results of an independent post mortem on all the nine dead rhinos to avoid any suggestion of collusion or a cover up – as it was the case with the death of the son of a British aristocrat, Alexander Monson, in Ukunda a few years ago, when only the post mortem commissioned by the parents then brought out the truth – that he was murdered six years ago while in police custody and that no drugs were found in his system after previous tests were falsified.
