Dehorning rhinos tips the balance against poaching

BLACK and white rhino populations in the Greater Kruger (Kruger National Park and surrounding reserves) in South Africa have plummeted from over 10 000 rhinos in 2010 to around 2 600 in 2023. Hundreds of rhinos are killed each year by poachers for their horns. These are sold on the illegal global market.

- TIMOTHY KUIPER

Nature reserve managers, rangers, international funders, and local non-profit organisations have invested millions of dollars in anti-poaching interventions. These include tracking dogs to track poachers, artificial intelligence-enabled detection cameras, helicopters to monitor reserves and, more recently, dehorning (removing rhinos' horns reduces the incentive for poachers).

To see if these were working, the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation set up a research project involving several reserve managers, rangers, and scientists from UCT, Nelson Mandela University, Stellenbosch University, and the University of Oxford. The South African National Parks, World Wildlife Fund South Africa, and the Rhino Recovery Fund were also involved.

Together, managers and scientists gathered seven years of rhino poaching data across 2.4 million hectares in the north-eastern region of South Africa and western Mozambique. During this time, we documented the poaching of 1 985 rhinos across 11 reserves in the Greater Kruger area. This number is about 6.5% of the rhino populations in these reserves annually.

This landscape is a critical global stronghold that conserves around 25% of all Africa's rhinos.