By Jeffrey Felshman
Schaffer’s specialty is the physiology of rhinoceros reproduction, and no one in the world knows more about it than she does. She’s written or cowritten close to 100 professional articles on the subject. She’s given numerous presentations, ranging from “Overview of Procedures and Results of Semen Collection From Ambulatory Rhinoceroses” (at the Milwaukee zoo in 1988) to “Gross Anatomy of Reproductive Structures and Their Ultrasonographic Images in the Rhinoceros” (at the First International Symposium on Physiology and Ethology of Wild and Zoo Animals, in Berlin in 1996). Her fieldwork has been groundbreaking, the results she’s achieved unique. Yet outside her field she’s unknown. She’s never been on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel or a National Geographic special. She hasn’t even been on Wild Chicago.
Much of the rhino’s traditional habitat has been broken up by development. “When they start dividing up these areas–you’ll have a little sanctuary here and a little sanctuary here and one over here, and you have all these people in between–the rhinos can’t get to each other. That’s a fragmented ecosystem.” And transporting animals from one of these areas to another so they can breed isn’t easy or cheap.
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Rhino populations are declining everywhere but South Africa, which has aggressively protected its white rhinos. The illegal trade in powdered rhino horn in Asia has been a catastrophe. Rhino horn, crushed and bottled, is a folk remedy for a variety of ailments, though it’s used mainly for impotence. Demand has a lot to do with its price, and in China one horn can sell for several thousand dollars. Studies show the powdered horn has no effect–which isn’t surprising, given that it’s made up of keratin (the same thing that makes up human fingernails) and compacted hair.
And even when captive rhinos do get pregnant they’re more prone to complications than wild rhinos. In 1992 Schaffer went to Wichita to manage the pregnancy of an older rhinoceros named Bibi, a 31-year-old black rhino who’d had several spontaneous abortions (rhinos in their mid-30s are considered old). Bibi had given birth to two calves in her teens, but she hadn’t delivered in 15 years. She’d been on loan from the Detroit Zoo since 1988 and had been bred regularly to the same male. She got pregnant three times but aborted each time. Pregnancy in a rhino usually lasts between 14 and 16 months; Bibi’s most recent pregnancy, in 1991, was over within 4. The zoo separated her from the male for a few months, and as soon as she was put back together with him she was pregnant again. Worried that she would abort again, the zookeepers called Schaffer.
Given all the difficulties of breeding captive rhinos, and worried that time was running out–every time a rhino dies or is killed, one more unique set of genes is gone forever–Schaffer in 1981 began researching the potential for artificial insemination. But what seemed simple turned out to be not so simple after all.
In her last year at school Schaffer was working with male gorillas, many of which were having a hard time breeding in captivity. They simply didn’t know what to do with the females, she says. “They’d been raised alone and couldn’t adjust to a female in the cage. Others were exposed to females they didn’t like.” As part of her research she collected semen samples to see if sperm counts were part of the problem, but she found that “some males had low sperm counts but managed to breed anyway.” She found plenty of reasons for the gorillas’ breeding difficulties, but no overall solution. Yet she came out of the experience with a specialty: reproduction.
