Hello and welcome to the newsletter! 🌍

In this issue, we're taking you into the field for a rhino dehorning operation…

One of the most misunderstood and important jobs in conservation right now. 

By the end of it, you'll see exactly why this work, as confronting as it looks, is one of the greatest tools of rhino protection there is.

In this first image we have a fully grown female white rhino. She's been sedated by a vet, kept cool, monitored, and blindfolded.

Her calf is standing a metre away, unrestrained, watching.

In a few minutes, she'll be awake. She'll find her calf. They'll walk back into the bush together.

But first, her horn has to come off.

This is a standard procedure rhino dehorning.

You see, rhino horn is made of keratin...

The same material as your hair or your fingernails.

Cut at the right point, it causes her no more pain than a haircut.

The horn she loses today will grow back...

But what she does not lose today is her life.

That's the trade.

Because right now, rhino horn is one of the most valuable commodities on earth...

Gram for gram, more valuable than gold.

The entire trade this is built on pure fiction...

There are no medicinal compounds in a rhino horn...

And no properties that cure disease.

Yet it has persisted in certain traditional medicine markets for generations...

Despite every piece of evidence against it.

A single adult rhino, standing in a field, is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to someone with a rifle and a contact at a shipping port.

And the people hunting them are organised.

They monitor social media posts for images of horned rhinos.

They use AI to track locations.

Between the poacher and the consumer in Beijing, a horn may pass through fifteen to twenty hands - each taking a cut. And each have their own incentive to keep the trade moving.

That is what a rhino with a horn is caught in the middle of.

So we remove it.

But this opens a larger responsibility...

Dehorning only works if you dehorn every animal...

Every single rhino on the landscape.

If you dehorn half the rhinos on a property, the poaching networks figure it out within days.

They'll come in anyway.

And if they find one that's already been dehorned, they kill it regardless - just to save themselves the time of tracking the same animal twice.

A partial measure doesn't reduce the killing. It accelerates it.

So we're forced to dehorn everything...

Rhino bulls, cows, sub-adults.

Then you layer the work with rangers, surveillance, community intelligence, aerial monitoring.

And you do it again every eighteen months, because horns grow back.

My first dehorning was in 1992...

For a long time after that, I believed the right answer was to stop the trade entirely. Criminalise it. Choke off demand.

Back then I was young and naive.

Here's the thing...

Every time we've made rhino horn rarer, it's become more valuable.

And every time it's become more valuable, more rhinos have been killed.

The belief that keratin heals people - the same keratin as in a human fingernail - is not a belief that data has been able to break.

Until that belief collapses, the only variable we can work with is the rhino itself.

So we focus on the rhino.

Which brings me back to the calf.

The calf in the photo is proof this work is succeeding.

Because there is a next generation of rhino on this property...

The adults are being kept alive long enough to produce calves...

And the calves are growing up in a landscape where the humans around them are doing their best to ensure their protection...

Albeit in a strange and difficult way.

And this means that these calves will grow up to have their own offspring.

That's the whole goal.

It doesn't look like the conservation people imagine.

The chainsaw...

The sedated mother...

The calf watching from a metre away.

But it's conservation.

And it's working.

These animals will live in a landscape with people who care about their existence.

And those people will stay one step ahead of the people who want to harm them.

Removing a rhino's horn is never going to feel like a victory.

But watching those two rhinos disappear into the bush together is as close as it gets.

— Ivan Carter

A number that matters.

A 2025 study put a number to something conservation teams have known for years.

One operation, one morning, and that animal's odds change dramatically.

The horn will grow back, and that’s when we return. This is how the animal remains protected.

Thanks for reading. More stories coming.

Until next time,

Ivan Carter

P.S. If you enjoyed this issue (or didn’t), I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Just hit reply and let me know.

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