Rhino populations around the world have risen slightly, but so have deaths, especially in South Africa, as poaching driven by huge demand for rhino horn remains a major threat, according to a new conservation report.
The number of white specimens grew from 15,942 in 2022 to 17,464 in 2023, but the black rhino and the greater one-horned rhino remained the same.according to a report released by the International Rhino Foundation ahead of World Rhino Day.
Another subspecies, the northern white rhino, is technically extinct with only two females left in a privately monitored reserve in Kenya known as Ol Pejeta. A project is underway to develop embryos in the laboratory from previously extracted egg and sperm and transfer them to a female black rhino to serve as a surrogate mother.
A total of 586 of these animals died violently in Africa in 2023mostly in South Africa, which has the world’s largest population at about 16,056. That was up from 551 deaths in 2022, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Adding up all five subspecies, there are only 28,000 rhinos left in the world, compared with 500,000 at the start of the 20th century.
Rhinos face environmental challenges such as habitat loss due to development and climate change, but their main threat remains poaching, based on the belief that their horns have medicinal uses.
Protection has played a major role in boosting rhino populations, said Philip Muruthi, vice president of rhino conservation at the African Wildlife Foundation. In Kenya, numbers have dropped from 380 in 1986 to 1,000 last year, he said. “Why has that happened? Because the rhinos were put into sanctuaries and protected.”
Muruthi supports a campaign to end the demand for rhino horns, as well as the use of new technologies to track and monitor the animals for their protection, while educating people in the areas where they live about the benefits these animals bring to the ecosystem and the economy.
Known as megaherbivores that cut through the vegetation in parks and create access routes for other herbivores, rhinos are also beneficial to forest formation because they eat seeds and disperse them throughout the parks in their dung.
Murithi lamented that the northern white rhino, of which there are only two females left, was so close to extinction.
“Don’t take the numbers to where it’s very difficult to recover and we’re not even sure it’s going to happen“, he said.
The body of the last male northern white rhino, named Sudan, who died in 2018, has been preserved and put on display at Kenya Museums in Nairobi.
Preserving Sudan will help tell the story of how the species lived among humans and why conservation is important, said Bernard Agwanda, a researcher and curator of the museum’s mammal exhibit.
“So we hope the northern white rhino behind us will live for a century or two so we can tell its story for generations to come,” he said.