De-horning black rhinos is changing their behaviour

Given the scant evidence that removing the horns of rhinos reduces poaching, is it worth it?

- Stuart Blackman

NEW RESEARCH SHOWS THAT REMOVING the horns of black rhinos to make them less attractive to poachers is reducing their territory sizes and making them less sociable with each other.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, found that de-horned South African rhinos have home ranges that are 45 percent smaller than those of intact animals, and that they were 37 percent less likely to engage in social interactions.

"The big, dominant bulls that used to have very large territories that overlapped with a lot of females may now have much less territory and much less reproductive success," says Vanessa Duthé, who led the work at Switzerland's University of Neuchâtel.