When will we count the last wild animal?

Our conversation lasted an hour, but Mr. K'Giang could not remember how many rhinos he had seen. Sometimes he said five, sometimes only two or three.

The scientific reports I've gathered indicate there were seven, eight and then nine rhinos in the southern national park.

But when the body of a female Javan rhino was discovered in the Cat Loc sub-region on April 29, 2010—with a bullet wound in her leg and her horn missing—all hopes faded.

Genetic analysis of 22 dung samples collected by the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) and Cat Tien National Park's survey team in 2009 and 2010 revealed that all belonged to the rhino whose body was found in April 2010.

This confirmed it was the last individual and meant millions of dollars in funding and decades of conservation efforts had gone down the drain.

Equally tragic, Vietnamese tigers have also vanished from the wild, leaving only some held in captivity or preserved in jars of wine or tubes of ointment, which are occasionally discovered and seized.

The Central Highlands' wild elephants, once numbering in the thousands, are now down to fewer than 120.

Many have been captured for tourism purposes and are no longer capable of reproducing.

Wild elephants in central Vietnam in 2022. Photo by Chi Hai

I am still haunted by the bitter words of Dr. Tran The Lien, director of the Department of Nature Conservation, about the situation of elephants being killed, at an emergency conference on elephant conservation held in 2015: "There were cases where guns and bullets were seen, but the elephants died for unknown reasons, and the culprits were never found."

He warned that, without effective conservation plans, elephants would share the same fate as wild tigers and Javan rhinos.

The Sao La, an endangered animal native to central Vietnam forests, often referred to as the "Asian unicorn," has not been sighted in the last three decades.

Red-crowned cranes, the symbol of Ramsar site Tram Chim National Park in Dong Thap in the Mekong Delta, now have to be imported from Thailand for experimental breeding.

I remember when Tram Chim first opened for tourism decades ago. The motorboat that took us on a tour zipped around, and the sky was filled with birds. At that time there were countless birds, with flocks of red-crowned cranes leisurely foraging in the vast reed fields.

But when I visited Tram Chim recently with Mr. Choi, a Vietnamese-American who loves to photograph wild birds, the scene was completely different.

After just one session Choi made an excuse and returned to Ho Chi Minh City instead of staying for two days as planned. The group of photographers knew he was disappointed because there were so few birds. That day Mr. Choi only managed to photograph a few water birds.

The tractor-trailer boat carrying the group of photographers was loud and scared away the already-scarse birds, making it impossible to get a decent shot. The tourist boats around us had people eating, drinking and singing, creating a commotion in the bird sanctuary.

When Mr. Choi returned to HCMC, he was amazed to find he could photograph many rare bird species in the Phu My Hung urban area and Dong Ho.

It turns out that good places attract birds, which will flock to sites where there is a friendly natural environment.

But unlike wild birds that choose their own habitats, many beautiful and precious birds are now kept in captivity in the city.

After the "White Pheasant" incident (a Nghe An resident was prosecuted for raising white pheasants as pets), people in Ho Chi Minh City also unexpectedly caught a white pheasant and a peacock.

It’s unlikely that wild chickens or birds would wander into the city and be caught so easily. It is more likely that breeders, afraid of fines, try to release them.

Data from the Ho Chi Minh City Forest Protection Department shows that in August 2025 alone, in addition to peacocks and white pheasants, the department received three primates (a yellow-cheeked gibbon, a long-tailed macaque and a pig-tailed macaque) and several species of turtles, pythons, etc.

Through advocacy, the department receives hundreds of wild animals handed over by breeders each year.

According to the Vietnam Center for Education for Nature, in 2024 there were more than 3,100 cases of wildlife law violations in the country, from captivity, trading to advertising.

However, only about 1,200 animals were confiscated or handed over.

The overall picture is clear: we often begin conservation too late.

The death of the Javan rhino exposes the grim reality that as forests shrink many animals are pushed to the brink of extinction.

And when the last animal falls, human habitats are also at risk.

*Trung Thanh is a journalist.