By Oscar E. Wilson, Michael D. Pashkevich, Kees Rookmaaker, and Edgar C. Turner.
Read the response discussed in this Plain Language Summary here.
Read Oscar E. Wilson et. al.’s reply to Samuel Marthinus Ferreira et. al.’s response here.
In 2022, we wrote a paper about the different ways we can use photos of rhinos for scientific research, which included information about the changing size of rhino horns. A recent response to that paper suggested that the small sample size of our study (especially of wild rhinos) and the fact that the length of rhino horns are heavily affected by their environment, means that it is impossible to say that human hunting has made rhino horns become smaller over the last 150 years. We clarify here that we did not say in the paper that hunting drove these changes, but suggested hunting as a possible explanation for the trend we found. This is especially true because researchers have recorded the same trend in other animals with distinctive features, such as tusks in elephants and horns in wild sheep. We have a paper in draft that explores this relationship for a much larger number of images, but this result was just one part of our work, and we encourage people to read the original paper in its entirety to learn more about how humans have changed the way we characterise rhinos over time. We are fully supportive of the fantastic work conservationists and researchers are doing in conserving rhino populations, and we hope our approach represents a useful tool that could place modern conservation efforts in a historical context.
Relational Thinking 