A male attempts to hold a female group on his territory for as long as possible. At one time, Antilope reportedly formed aggregations of thousands of individuals. Most herds were essentially harems, with a single adult male and a number of adult females and young. Some herds had 1 or 2 peripheral adult males, and there were also small separate groups of bachelors. The adult male drives younger males from the herd and competes with other adults for possession of territories and the females thereon.
Dominance is achieved mainly by display of the horns and threatening gestures.
The horns are potentially dangerous weapons, but serious fighting is rare. The gestation period is 6 months, and there almost always seems to be a single young. The blackbuck is prized for its meat and as a sporting trophy. Numbers in India fell from an estimated 4 million in the nineteenth century to 80,000 in 1947 and only 8,000 in 1964. There appears to have been subsequent stabilization, with most of the remnant herds in protected reserves.