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The Poaching Crisis

I never thought I’d be excited to have someone else’s snot on my hands. But at the end of the day, as I washed the last traces of Mac from underneath my fingernails, all I felt was gratitude. I was very lucky to have the chance to be so close to and to touch an animal that is rapidly disappearing. Many predict that rhinos will be extinct in the next 10 years, and it seems increasingly likely that these magnificent creatures will become a bittersweet memory.

The world has already lost nearly 95 percent of its rhinos in the last 116 years. Just last year, the last male northern white rhino, Sudan, died. Of the five extant rhino species, three are classified as critically endangered. Each day, there are fewer and fewer rhinos than there was the day before.

South Africa is home to nearly 80 percent of the world’s remaining wild rhinos, and in the last decade, poaching there has risen over 8,000 percent. An estimated 7,700 rhinos lost their lives to poaching in just a decade—that’s nearly 40 percent of the current population.

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Of the remaining 18,000 white rhinos in South Africa, 45 percent reside on private reserves, like the one Mac lives on. Increasingly, these reserves are implementing horn-trimming as a defense against poaching. “It’s a preventative measure,” said Gerhardus.

Poachers are much less likely to target rhinos whose horns have been trimmed—the smaller payoff likely doesn’t outweigh the risk to their lives and freedom. Not to say that horn-trimmed rhinos are never poached; it may be hard to tell a rhino is horn-trimmed at night, when most poaching takes place, or they may be killed to prevent trackers wasting time on them, or poachers may be satisfied with the small amount of horn that remains.

However, many reserves are finding horn-trimming to be a particularly effective part of an anti-poaching plan. Lynne’s reserve hasn’t had a rhino poaching incident since they started trimming their rhinos’ horns nearly five years ago. Meanwhile, in nearby Pilanesberg National Park, which contains horned rhinos, multiple rhinos are being poached each week. Gerhardus recounts several other reserves where rhino poaching virtually halted after he began trimming their rhinos’ horns.

Many reserve owners don’t currently horn-trim because the process is very expensive—it can cost approximately $1,000 per rhino each year, and other anti-poaching measures are already draining their resources. But many reserve owners, and conservationists, also worry about how trimming the rhinos’ horns affects their behavior. Does a rhino still act like a rhino without a horn?

The first thing you feel when you see a rhinos’ sharp soaring horn is probably intimidation, and that’s by design. More than anything else, a rhino’s horn is meant to scare others off. Whether it’s a rival bull, encroaching animals, or a male getting a little too cheeky, these huge protrusions serve as a warning: back off…or else.

But if showing off the horn doesn’t work, rhinos will use it to fight. Thanks to their massive stature, rhinos face very little predation in the wild— although predators will try to snatch away young rhinos when they wander too far from mom—so much of the time if a rhino is using their horn to fight, it’s against another rhino. Whether over mates or territory, rhinos will lock horns with each other, often resulting in serious or mortal wounds.

This defense mechanism developed and persisted over millions of years. Now, it’s being removed, and reserve owners, including, Lynne, want to know what effect horn trimming has on the behavior of white rhinos. What are the implications for the mating, defense, and social structures of rhino populations?

That’s where Melissa Dawson, an �������� field team leader and doctoral candidate at the University of Brighton, comes in. Melissa began working on the reserve right before the 2014 poaching incident.

“Immediately, this place and the rhinos became very, very important to me,” said Melissa.

Melissa has been leading teams of �������� volunteers through shrubs and thickets to collect data on how horn-trimming is affecting the reserve’s rhinos. Her first aim was to determine the impact of horn-trimming on rhino physiology, behavior, and ecology. For the past four years, �������� volunteers from around the world have been traveling to South Africa to help Melissa observe the rhinos’ behavior and collect fecal samples.

Thanks to this data, Melissa has found that while rhinos experience elevated stress on the day of the horn-trimming, that stress recedes fairly quickly, and the rhino’s behavior is not significantly impacted after horn-trimmings. “The research that �������� is doing is phenomenal because it’s showing scientifically, factually, that the horn-trimming is not having a detrimental effect on the rhino,” said Melissa.

Now, Melissa is focusing on determining what factors affect the distribution of rhinos on the reserve—where they hang out and why. I, along with my team, helped Melissa in this goal. We roamed the reserve, recording where we spotted rhinos, and . Were they walking? Foraging? How often were they vigilant to us? To other animals? All of this data helps Melissa to determine where rhinos like to spend their time and how they use those areas while they’re there. Melissa hopes that this information can be used to predict where rhinos will be, allowing managers and anti-poaching teams to better protect rhino populations.

All of the data Melissa is collecting helps Lynne and her team better manage the reserve in real-time. It informs and scientifically backs the policies and procedures they’re using. While the rhino’s experience on Lynne’s reserve isn’t universal—it doesn’t contain large predators and is small compared to some other parks—it helps better inform everyone who manages rhinos of the realities of these under-studied creatures and the effects different management techniques can have.

“What’s really important to me, which �������� has done really well, is make sure the research that’s going on has an effect on the ground,” said Melissa. “The science is absolutely essential to ensure that the policies and management techniques you’re using are safe.”

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