Dehorning rhinos sharply cuts poaching, study finds

What happened

The most effective way of reducing the widespread poaching of rhinoceroses is cutting off their horns, conservationists and researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science. The study, covering seven years at 11 nature reserves in Southern Africa, found that dehorning reduced rhino poaching by 78% while other, more expensive efforts had no measurable impact.

Who said what

Rhino horns fetch tens of thousands of dollars in Asia, where they are "falsely believed to be effective at treating fevers, pain and a low sex drive in traditional medicine," said The Guardian. Dehorning rhinos — sedating the animals and cutting off their keratin horns with a chainsaw — is believed to be painless and has been used to combat poaching in Africa for decades. But until this study, there wasn't much hard data on whether it works.

Some previous studies have found that dehorning makes critically endangered black rhinos more timid and reduces their home range, but it doesn't have an adverse effect on rhino breeding or mortality rates. "It is a big part of what a rhino is, having a horn," Tim Kuiper, a biodiversity scientist at South Africa's Nelson Mandela University who led the new study, said to The Associated Press. "So having to remove it is kind of a necessary evil, if I can put it that way. But it's very effective. There's no doubt it saved hundreds of rhinos' lives."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What next?

Some poachers still kill rhinos for stubs or partially regrown horns, and "dehorning is not a long-term solution" or a "silver bullet," Kuiper said. But "it's a small thing that can be done to hopefully buy time for the broader work that needs to happen."