Beluki the Asian Rhino stands proudy with her newly born baby Miracle after keepers at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire hand-reared the calf to save her life.<\/p>\n
Miracle was a breech birth, emerging bottom first, leaving her traumatised and unable to suckle properly.<\/p>\n
Zoo staff, fearing for her life, camped out in sleeping bags in the next door hay barn and took the rare step of intervening to bottle fed the calf with the vital colostrum she needed, sourced from local cows.<\/p>\n
Keepers and vets worked round the clock for three days to monitor the calf\u2019s condition as she battled to survive, and their efforts were rewarded when Miracle started feeding by herself from her mother.<\/p>\n
It is the second rhino birth at Whipsnade in three months following the arrival of 13-stone Ajang in September.<\/p>\n
The greater one-horned rhino calf was just ten days old when he made his public debut and, once mature, he will tip the scales at around 425 stone.<\/p>\n
Greater one-horned rhinos are critically endangered in their native homelands of northern India and southern Nepal,so Ajang\u2019s birth was much heralded by conservationists.<\/p>\n
Keeper Veronica Watkins said at the time: \u2018It\u2019s great to build the population in captivity, but these animals aren\u2019t doing so well in the wild where their species is under constant threat. We hope visitors who see Ajang will want to help us protect the last of his kind in the wild.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beluki the Asian Rhino stands proudy with her newly born baby Miracle after keepers at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire hand-reared the calf to save her life. Miracle was a breech birth, emerging bottom first, leaving her traumatised and unable to suckle properly. Zoo staff, fearing for her life, camped out in sleeping bags in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}