Four northern white rhinos – believed to among just eight of the species left in the world – are to be dehorned in an effort to protect them from poachers.

The four rhinos – two male and two female – were recently returned to Kenya from a Czech zoo in the hope that they would reproduce and provide a vital lifeline for a species pushed to the very brink of extinction. But conservationists feared the creatures would be targeted for their valuable ivory.

Kenya suffered its worst year for rhino poaching in 2009 with 12 black rhinos and six white rhinos killed. The northern white is an extremely rare sub-species of white rhino.

“With the increase of poaching in Kenya, we are simply not taking any chances,” Elodie Sampere from the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, which is overseeing the animals’ acclimatisation, told AFP.

“Without a horn, these rhinos are of no value to poachers,” she said.

Sampere said that sawing off the rhinos’ horns would also allow them to grow back straight.

“All the rhinos had horns that didn’t grow upright. This is a result of them being in the zoo and not having trees to rub against,” she said.

The conservationist also said that a radio-transmitter the size of a matchbox was screwed into the base of the hacked off horn to enable the tracking of the animals as they are released back into the wild.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Conservation, Mammals, Wild, Zoos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.