Florida Palm Beach Zoo team trains Zimbabwe rhino to accept eyedrops voluntarily

A Florida zoo and a private animal‑welfare consultancy have exported a piece of high‑leverage pragmatism to southern Africa: train a wild rhinoceros to accept eyedrops voluntarily, in the open, without sedation—because a blind rhino in poacher country is effectively a dead rhino.

Euronews, citing AP reporting, describes how animal behaviourists working with Palm Beach Zoo & Conservation Society travelled to Zimbabwe in August after a male southern white rhino named Thuza developed a severe parasitic eye infection. The rhino is part of a pilot reintroduction effort near Hwange National Park run by the Community Rhino Conservation Initiative with support from Imvelo Safari Lodges.

The proposed solution sounded absurd even to the people protecting the animal. Imvelo security manager Daniel Terblanche told AP that “no one in Zimbabwe would have come up with the plan,” calling it “a completely ridiculous idea” until it worked.

The method is borrowed from modern zoo husbandry: teach animals to “voluntarily participate in their own care.” Thad and Angi Lacinak, founders of Precision Behavior, built a protocol to lure Thuza into a tight space using preferred food, then desensitise him to human proximity, touch, and squirting water at the face. Within about a week, they were applying eyedrops; by two weeks, they had transferred the skill to anti‑poaching scouts who could keep administering medication daily.

The technical point is not the eyedrops; it’s the incentive structure. A handful of rhinos on communal land is a concentrated capital asset with obvious downside risk. A single animal’s blindness can undermine a broader conservation and tourism project. That concentrates attention, speeds iteration, and rewards solutions that work rather than solutions that sound good in grant applications.

Southern white rhinos are listed as near threatened, with roughly 16,000 in the wild, and remain threatened by poaching and habitat loss. In that context, a behavioural training protocol that reduces the need for repeated immobilisation (with its own risks and cost) is a scalability story—especially for small programs that cannot afford constant veterinary intervention.

The most effective “conservation policy” in this case is not a treaty, a summit, or a new international body. It’s a private lodge operator with a direct financial stake, plus a zoo team willing to try something that sounded stupid. Bureaucracies can produce endless rituals of concern; a blind rhino produces a deadline.