The latest small arms survey for this year has for the first time studied poaching in Africa and looked at the role weapons play.
The researchers found that poachers were increasingly resorting to military weapons to counteract tactics by law enforcement agencies.
The survey is an independent research project based in Switzerland that provides information on small arms and light weapons.
"There is a ramping-up of weapons and methods," said Khristopher Carlson, the survey's chief researcher on poaching.
"What is interesting is that poachers are coming into the Kruger National Park in groups of three or four.
"One would be armed with a high-powered rifle and the others with AK-47s to act as a security perimeter."
Carlson said the ramping up of tactics, and with it shoot-to-kill policies in particular in East Africa, had a detrimental effect on local communities.
There have been instances, he said, where subsistence hunters had been killed by zealous wildlife authorities.
The report suggests that while armed interactions might disrupt poaching, a "substantial reduction in the demand for ivory and rhino horn is needed to stop it".
Carlson said that one way of combating poaching would be to collect ballistics and spent cartridges from "kill" sites and this could reveal who was supplying the ammunition.
The small arms survey pointed to Kenya, where Richard Leakey, director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service, introduced collecting fired cartridges from poachers' rifles.
From this his agency was able to trace several poaching incidents to guns registered to the Kenyan police being hired out to poachers.
The survey is planning to set up a project in East Africa in which community-based organisations will collect spent ammo and identify it.
In South Africa, the police have launched an initiative for forensic experts and detectives to revisit old rhino "kill" sites in the Kruger National Park to collect ballistics.
Source: The Times
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