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Bull came to Toronto in 1974 and lived at the Toronto Zoo was due for thirty
four years until 2008. At that time the senior veterinarian at the Zoo
called and said that
he was a ailing and they were going to euthanize the animal and would we have any interest
and having him
and he was taken to the taxidermist and
about a year and a quarter to a term we were presented with Bull the White Rhino that stands
behind me
Bull actually came from south Africa
after being here at the Zoo he did sire four kids
Shaboula being one of them
and she's been with us at the Zoo since she was born here
almost thirty years now and because Bull was a wild caught animal
we can only make an educated guess as to how old he was. So we put at about nine or ten
when he ended up coming. And when he passed away our guess put a matter of forty five
forty six, which is a really good age for these guys.
And they have that name White Rhino because of what their face looks like it's flat right
across the front
and weit W-E-I-T was a dutch-africans word meaning kind of flat faced, square faced, wide faced.
the outside skin os
Bull is whole and the rest of it is more less man made starting with an inside styrofoam core
paper mache is the next layer to build up the size of the styrofoam followed by a
layer of modeling clay used to shape the muscles
and finally the skin is sewn and stapled into place and painted and at the same time they're
applying a new fiberglass horn
his original horn was mis-shapen because as he aged he wasn't able to keep it trimmed
by rubbing it on enclosures or rocks and that's what
give it that natural shape that you see in a wild animal
the most distinctive thing about the rhino is that horn. They've got the two horns on their
head that actually grows out of the skin
and it's me to carotene
so since the same stuff that our finger nails are made out of
back in the late nineteenth century they were pretty much
hunted to extinction because of that Bull
in this gallery is because he's a success story as far as conservation us concerned. The White
rhino's numbers were reduced by the late eighteen hundred's to a herd of
fifty or so animals
today some people claim there's many as seventeen thousand in the world now these animals have
being protected in Africa that also being sent to zoos around the world so that the
species would continue on if something happened to the main populations in Africa.
Because he was so special the keepers that took care of Bull it was kind of a an honor
for us there's not that many of these guys left on the planet
But to have him almost live on at the ROM and kind of carry on that message is
a very important thing