Cruel but "necessary": Can cutting off rhino horns — and selling them — help save rhinos?

Johan Marais spots a rhinoceros from a helicopter and shoots it with a tranquilizer dart. Another five minutes will pass before the rhino goes down. A team is ready on the ground to make sure the animal is well positioned when it loses consciousness. A rhinoceros is so massive that if it falls asleep on its legs, blood flow could be cut off, leading to circulatory problems and significant injury.

When Marais approaches the unconscious rhino, he covers its eyes to protect them and then uses a chainsaw to cut off its horns, down to about 10 centimeters, which avoids cutting into living tissue and causing a hemorrhage of the horn so that he doesn’t cut into living tissue, which could cause a hemorrhage.

No, Marais isn't a poacher — quite the opposite. He's a veterinarian in South Africa who hopes to save these rare and endangered animals from poachers. After the operation is complete, his team carefully collects the leftover shavings — even those could be valuable to profiteers eager to sell rhino horn on the black market. 

Dehorning rhinos to save them may seem perverse. But it's become much more common in recent decades, in a last-ditch effort to save populations of black and white rhinos in South Africa and surrounding countries, where poaching threatens their survival. Although dehorning has been linked to some behavioral changes in rhinos, it has also been proven to keep them alive.

Conservationists say they hate mutilating these anmals, whose magnificent horns are integral to their being. But the alternative for someone like Marais, founder of the nonprofit Saving the Survivors, which is dedicated to treating wounded wildlife species, is worse. Sometimes, he told Salon, he has to tend to rhinos who have been shot and badly wounded, “sometimes with half their faces hacked off while they are still alive."

Faced with that choice, Marais said in a phone interview, “You have to decide which one of the necessary evils you go for. Most vets will tell you that we hate to dehorn these animals, but because of the current situation, it’s one of the tools that we have to use.”

Wildlife managers began dehorning rhinos in 1989 as the illegal wildlife trade skyrocketed, affecting both black and white rhino populations that had dramatically dwindled in South Africa and neighboring countries. Many stopped dehorning rhinos in later years as populations began to recover, but in 2014, more rhinos were killed in the illegal wildlife trade than in any previous year. Since then, many parks and reserves have returned to the practice.

There are fewer than 23,000 rhinos left in the wild, and around 400 are killed annually in recent years. Although there have been some signs that the pace of poaching has slowed, research suggests that's probably because there are fewer available rhinos to poach. 

About 80% of the world’s remaining rhinos live in South Africa, which has become the epicenter of the illegal wildlife trade involving these species. The reasons why it's happening are numerous and complex. Rhino horn is sold for tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, and seen as a status symbol in parts of the world. Many regions impacted by the trade have high levels of inequality and poverty, and corruption makes law enforcement challenging.

“South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world, and in many ways this poaching crisis is a symptom of inequality,” said Timothy Kuiper, a researcher at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. Poor people “can be recruited by these criminal syndicates" who come into an area and present poaching as "a quick way out of poverty.”

A study conducted by Kuiper that was published recently in Science found that dehorning rhinos was associated with a 78% reduction in poaching between 2017 and 2023 across 11 reserves in South Africa, where about one-quarter of Africa's rhinos resided at the start of the study period.

“Millions of dollars have been spent on ranges, tracking dogs, cameras, helicopters, fancy alarms and fences, and none of it was bending the curve or making a significant inroad in reducing poaching,” Kuiper said. “Dehorning was pursued as almost a last-ditch effort, but in hindsight — apart from the possible ethical concerns—it is a very logical and direct way" to disincentivize the illegal trade in rhino horn.

In the region studied by Kuiper, $74 million was spent to try to reduce poaching between 2017 and 2023, but 1,985 rhinos were still killed for their horns.

Questions remain about the long-term effects of dehorning rhinos. Their horns are made of keratin, like human fingernails, and the procedure is not thought to be painful. However, one study published in 2023 found that while dehorning apparently ensured greater survival rates among black rhinos, it was also linked to almost a 50% reduction in their habitat range. 

“This tells you that after you have dehorned an animal, they know they haven’t got a horn anymore,” Marais said. “Obviously, they don’t want to walk into a situation where they can’t defend themselves.”

Another concern is that dehorning some rhinos and not others will accelerate poaching to regions where rhinos are not dehorned. And even if all living rhinos were dehorned, desperate poachers could still kill them for the remaining horn on their heads, said Lucy Chimes, a black rhino ecologist at the South African nonprofit Wildlife ACT. The recent study in Science reports that more than 100 rhinos were still poached during the period in question, even after they were dehorned.

Dehorning is also temporary by design: Within about 18 months, a rhino's horn will grow back. Each dehorning costs about $600, a significant sum in the African context, although that represents just over 1 percent of the entire budget for rhino protection rhinos, and other security measures are far more expensive. 

As the costs of keeping rhinos continue to increase, many wildlife managers are selling their rhinos to other reserves, which has reduced the animals' natural range. In general, Marais said, it’s healthier for rhinos if they're allowed to roam naturally rather than displacing them. Reducing their range can also have downstream effects on the entire ecosystem, he added.

“We're not only losing the rhino numbers, but we're losing the habitat as well,” Marais said. When you lose habitat, he continued, "you lose the biodiversity that goes with it, all the little insects, the owls that nest in the grass, the ants, the worms and the grass itself.”

Ultimately, dehorning is not likely to be a long-term solution for the rhino population. Indeed, most proposed solutions meant to curb rhino poaching are focused on the rhinos — the supply side of the problem, one could say — instead of dealing with the enormous demand. “I don’t know if there is a long-term solution until you deal with demand and poverty,” Chimes said. 

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Conservationists also debate what to do with the sawed-off rhino horns. Thousands of them are now in storage facilities in South Africa, with some people arguing that they should be burned to avoid the obvious risk of theft, keeping them off the black market. Others have suggested that the horns should simply be sold into that very black market, and that perhaps legalizing that trade could help save rhinos.

Marais thinks it's worth trying. Money realized by such sales, he says, could be reinvested in conservation projects designed to help rhinos. A property owner could use the money from selling horns “to have more people on his property that can do security patrols, upgrade his fences or buy a helicopter to do surveillance,” Marais said. “If all our fears come true and it actually makes the problem worse, then we stop. But at least we should try it and see. Maybe, just maybe, it will make a difference.”