Does dehorning affect black and white rhinoceros home range behaviour in a semi-arid savannah reserve?

Abstract Law enforcement has dominated responses to the global illegal wildlife trade in general and rhinoceros poaching in particular. Dehorning of rhinoceroses offers a radically different approach that seeks to reduce opportunities for crime rather than deter crime through arrest and punishment. Yet our understanding of how dehorning affects rhinoceros biology is still nascent. We used 11 years (2013–2023) of comparable data before and after dehorning 21 back rhinoceroses Diceros bicornis in Balule Nature Reserve, South Africa, to investigate whether they altered their space use in response to dehorning. We also include similar analyses for 16 white rhinoceroses Ceratotherium simum after their second dehorning (data before their first dehorning was limited for this species). We found no evidence that black rhinoceroses changed their home range size or position after dehorning. We also found no evidence that white rhinoceroses changed their home range size or position after their second dehorning. For context, we show data indicating that poaching rates in Balule were significantly lower after dehorning. The difference between our results and previous work suggesting that black rhinoceroses reduced their ranges after dehorning could be explained by the different habitat type and lower density of rhinoceroses in our study, underscoring the difficulty of generalizations in complex ecological systems. Our results support growing evidence that well-managed dehorning is an effective conservation policy that is less disruptive to rhinoceros biology, welfare and conservation than the high poaching rates that might persist without dehorning.