Rhino

Ask anyone what their favourite animal is and chances are it won't be rhino. White rhino population is shrinking. And fast. It's now endangered. 

Ask poachers and aphrodisiac black market customers and they will tell you rhinoceros horn is the most precious Viagra.

The maths is hard to ignore. Having been decimated by poaching, the northern white rhino population is now down to two individual females. After the death of Suni and Sudan, the world's last two male northern white rhino in 2014 and 2018 respectively, scientists have been working incredibly hard to achieve in vitro fertilisation rhino pregnancy.

First things first, why are people in China so obsessed with the sex symbol of male rhino? Their lightning bolt penis, I mean. Thanks to (or perhaps because of) the two-and-a-half-foot long penis of the rhino male, rhinos have been erroneously believed – at least by some stupid guys – to be the king of sex.

A long time ago, people have witnessed the typical two and a half hours of rhino mating. My goodness, that sounds like extremely impressive sexual prowess of the male rhinos. Except that it isn't.

Ask any evolutionary scientists and they will tell us that rhinos are terrible at reproducing themselves. Rhinos take long to complete copulation – but not in the way you might think. The true story is that a female rhino has a very convoluted vagina that the rhino male has difficulty in delivering their sperms. So much so that the rhino males have evolved a long penis and taken a clumsy difficult time to make the darn things work. That explains the two and a half hours error-prone mating. 

When we know more about the reproductive disadvantage, it is not hard to see why the rhinos need IVF. There's nothing wrong (and plenty right) with stopping the horrible trade of rhino horn. Which, as we know, does nothing but to make people impotent and sterile.