Wildlife managers in Africa tend to take a big-stick approach to combating poaching. Vast sums have been poured into militarized ranger patrols, advanced surveillance technologies, sniffer dogs and helicopters. Many of those efforts are aimed at protecting rhinos, whose horns are still in demand in China and Vietnam.
For all the resources invested in rhinos, however, a relatively affordable and straightforward tactic seems to be most effective at preventing their killing: removing their horns.
According to research published on Thursday in the journal Science, dehorning resulted in a 78 percent decline in rhino poaching in eight reserves in Southern Africa. Law enforcement efforts, on the other hand, showed less success. Despite the arrests of hundreds of poaching suspects, the researchers found that aggressive law enforcement did not translate into significant reductions in rhino deaths.
“For decades, tackling wildlife crime has involved catching and arresting poachers,” said Timothy Kuiper, who teaches statistics and nature conservation at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and who was the lead author on the paper. “Our study suggests that we need to strategically rethink whether that’s sustainable and is really making step changes.”
The new research also answers an urgent need for robust data about dehorning, said Vanessa Duthé, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University who studies rhinos and was not involved in the paper. “Although dehorning is widespread, it is also met with a lot of criticism regarding its true efficacy and cost,” Dr. Duthé said. “This study shows that the benefits of dehorning largely outweigh the costs.”
Rhino dehorning became a common strategy in Southern Africa as poaching ramped up a decade or so ago. The procedure, which is thought to be painless, involves sedating rhinos and then sawing off the tops of their horns, above the nerves. Like trimmed fingernails, the horns grow back. In the case of rhinos, they usually do so within about 18 months.
The study focused on Kruger National Park and nine other reserves in South Africa, as well as one in Mozambique. Between 2017 and 2023, those areas lost 1,985 rhinos to poaching, despite spending $74 million on various anti-poaching measures, including dehorning, and arresting more than 700 people.
Eight of the protected areas dehorned their rhinos and three did not, allowing the team to measure how that change affected poaching rates over time, between and within areas. They also analyzed the effects of various law enforcement interventions.
Poaching rates, they found, were reduced by more than half in places where dehorning took place. In the year after dehorning took place, the researchers estimated that 70 to 134 rhinos had been saved across the eight reserves. Dehorning efforts accounted for just 1.2 percent of anti-poaching budgets.
It has not been a perfect solution, however. In Kruger National Park, for example, more than 100 dehorned rhinos were poached between 2022 and 2023 for the stump of horn that remained or had started to regrow, Dr. Kuiper said, and that trend seems to be increasing. Some evidence also suggests that dehorning rhinos in and around Kruger may have displaced poachers to other reserves where rhinos were not dehorned.
Dr. Kuiper and his colleagues did not have access to data from protected areas where no law enforcement was present to use as controls. But based on the data they did have, they found that law enforcement had no significant effect on poaching rates. Poverty, corruption and a weak justice system probably all contribute to the explanation, Dr. Kuiper said.
Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, a conservation economist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the research, said the study showed “strong empirical evidence” that reducing the value of poachers’ expected earnings is a more powerful deterrent than the typical “war against wildlife crime” approach.
Rhino poaching rates remain high in Africa, and dehorning will not solve that crisis or address its systemic drivers, Dr. Kuiper said.
“Tackling the root causes of poaching is easy to say but very difficult to do,” he said.
Rangers and other park personnel need more support and training, he said, and the best rangers need to be empowered to become leaders. Governments need to address socioeconomic inequalities that push people, including rangers, into poverty and make them more likely to get involved in organized crime. Wildlife managers should also strive to include communities next to wildlife reserves in decision-making and ensure that they benefit from conservation.
Tackling demand for rhino horn is also essential, Dr. Kuiper said, since without it, there would be no reason to poach.
“Dehorning is not a long-term solution,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s a small thing that can be done to hopefully buy time for the broader work that needs to happen.”
The post There’s an Effective Way to Deter Rhino Poachers, a New Study Finds appeared first on New York Times.
