Conservationists are increasingly turning to a method of protecting the world’s diminished population of rhinoceroses: Removing their horns before poachers can get their hands on them.

A study published Thursday in the journal Science found that dehorning – a conservation practice that involves sedating the often multi-ton animals, covering their eyes and ears, and trimming their horns, which do not have nerves and grow back in a few years – reduced poaching by 78 percent over a seven-year period in eight reserves across 11 studied in South Africa, home to most of Africa’s rhinos.

Whereas costly surveillance and law enforcement often prove futile in a vast, tangled landscape of criminal syndicates, corruption and wealth inequality around South African reserves, conservationists and resea

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