Study reveals cutting off rhino horns significantly reduces poaching
Donors from Friends of African Wildlife during a rhino conservation experience.
Image: Southern African Wildlife College
The best and cheapest way to protect rhinos, whose population has plummeted over the last 15 years because of poaching, is to cut off their horns, according to researchers who carried out a seven-year study in southern Africa.
The analysis of poaching before and after the de-horning of almost 2,300 rhinos showed that removing the keratin-based protrusions cut the crime by 78%. The researchers are from three South African universities - Nelson Mandela, Stellenbosch and Cape Town - and the UK's University of Oxford. Over that period, poachers killed almost 2,000 rhinos in the area under study.
It covered 10 reserves in South Africa's Greater Kruger region - a network of public and private conservation land that encompasses an area bigger than Israel - between 2017 and 2023, as well as an adjacent sanctuary in Mozambique. Together, the region hosts the world's biggest concentration of rhinos.
'De-horning rhinos is associated with large and abrupt reductions in poaching,' the researchers said in the study published in the Science journal on Thursday.
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In the first quarter of 2025, 103 rhinos were poached across South Africa, 65 of those within national parks. Although the country recorded a 16% overall decline in poaching last year, increases in key areas such as Kruger National Park underscore the need for continued vigilance and interventions such as dehorning.
Image: Southern African Wildlife College
Poachers have had rhinos in South Africa, where almost all of the world's population of the endangered animals live, under siege for more than a decade. They shoot the animals with assault rifles, often by the light of the full moon, and then hack off their horns. Those are ground down into powder and used in potions erroneously believed to cure cancer and boost virility, primarily in East Asia.
The practice of de-horning also accounted for just 1.2% of the $74 million spent by the reserves on anti-poaching programs in the four years to 2021, the researchers said. That money went toward a range of measures including 500 rangers deployed across the reserves at any one time as well as cameras and tracking dogs.
Still, even though de-horning cut the annual chance of an individual rhino being poached to 0.6% by the end of the study period from 13% at the start, there were instances of criminals killing rhinos to harvest the stumps that had been left after the horn removal, they said.
That means that conservationists can't abandon other anti-poaching measures entirely, they said. Poachers could also start targeting other areas containing rhinos that still have horns.
The number of rhinos - both of the white and less common black variety - killed illegally in South Africa last year fell to 420 from a peak of 1,215 a decade earlier. That improvement was partially due to de-horning exercises, according to Dion George, the nation's environment minister.
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