Studying the behaviour of potential rhino horn poachers
From the African savannahs to Kelburn is a leap of both distance and imagination, but a group of Victoria University of Wellington biology students is carrying out an experiment to learn about the behaviour of potential poachers of rhinoceros horns.
The BIOL 328 Behaviour and Conservation Ecology students are working to understand how poachers may change their behaviour if rhino horns are poisoned.
“There’s an idea to try to reduce the number of rhinos being killed for their horn,” says student Sean Rudman.
“This is to poison the rhino horn so that it becomes worthless on the international traditional medicines market. This will hopefully reduce the demand for rhino horn. But then a problem occurs—if you’re poisoning horn, the remaining unpoisoned horns become more valuable. We’re looking at how human behaviour and decision making around killing a rhino for its horn may change if it’s poisoned horn.”
To study this, the students have conducted a role-playing experiment, where they’ve hidden a number of stakes (representing rhino horn) around Victoria’s Kelburn campus.
“We’ve randomly selected twenty people from our class to be poachers, and go and find those stakes. This hunt takes place four times—the first time all twenty of the stakes are worth $5 each if found, and the second time half of them are worth nothing, but the other half is worth $10,” says Sean.
“The third time only two stakes are valuable, but worth $50 each to the poacher. And the fourth time all the stakes go back to being worth $5, to control for class engagement changes over the length of the experiment. Additionally, if a poacher finds a poisoned horn, they can choose to ‘kill’ it or not.
Three guards are also hired to protect the stakes from being found, or to catch the poachers in the act. They receive the money of any stakes that remain at the end of each experiment.
“Essentially we’re looking at how people behave in response to these different scenarios, and how the behaviour of our poachers changes when the monetary reward is larger but more effort and risk is required,” Sean says.
“We’re getting feedback on how many rhino horns were found, how many were killed, and the effort our poachers went to to find the stakes. We’re also interested in if the participants made any agreements, for example, between the poachers and the guards—because that’s quite informative for understanding people’s motivation and behaviour.”
Sean has been working on the experiment with fellow students Adam Sive, Caitlin Jackson and Pip Fauvel.
Rhino conservation has personal importance to Sean. “My family is from South Africa, and my uncle lives on a game reserve with white rhino. It’s quite close to home.”
BIOL 328 lecturer Associate Professor Wayne Linklater says the experiment has proved a great learning exercise. “The students have enthusiastically involved themselves in the different scenarios. It’s been great to see them learning about the interaction between humans, economics and wildlife conservation.”
The students will individually produce a report about their findings, as well as a scientific poster.
A video of the students can be found on youtube.