![]() ![]() They’re buying into false claims that rhino horn has curative qualities, including the recent and spurious assertion that it can treat cancer. For one thing many consumers - those who actually use powdered rhino horn as “medicine” instead of holding on to it for eventual sale - are already being exploited. Let’s get to the ethical aspects of this trade in fakes. Confiscated rhino horns about to be burned. That threat will never evaporate through the addition of fake products on the marketplace - because, yes, extinction is profitable. Rich consumers in China and other countries have been known to buy rhino horns, tiger bones, live tortoises and other species in anticipation that a species will become rarer or even go extinct in the wild, therefore making their assets even more valuable. Meanwhile some well-healed people are actually investing in the possibility of extinction. Consumers want wild products, so even if you do succeed in commercializing “fake” or farmed products, it will tend to normalize demand for all these biological byproducts and further drive desire for “prestige” animals poached from their native habitats. That’s why China still has trouble commercializing its vast network of tiger farms (yes, you read that right). ![]() In traditional Asian medicine, “wild” products are considered more potent - and therefore more valuable - than anything that comes out of a lab or from a farm. On a broader and similar note, creating fake substitutes ignores a major aspect of what drives sales of many of these wildlife products. Rhinos are already in crisis - do we want to make things even worse? Elephants had begun to recover before that, and now they’re in crisis. We’ve seen this before in the surge of elephant poaching after a one-off sale of ivory tusks in 2008, which was meant to flood the market and reduce the profitability of poaching but horrifically backfired. Progress still needs to be made on reducing the market for products from those species, as well as with other heavily trafficked animals such as pangolins, but that’s another reason why purposefully selling fake rhino horns is wrong: The more you say that any aspect of the market for rhino horn is okay, which is what happens when you put these fake products (or limited real products) up for sale, the more it will expand the market. Similar initiatives have started to help chip away at consumer demand for rhino horns there as well ( thanks, Jackie Chan). We’ve already seen this work conservationists have finally started to make headway on curbing the shark-fin trade in China after extensive public-awareness campaigns called attention to the dangers the practice poses to people and marine ecosystems. As a result the best way to eliminate the financial incentive to sell these wildlife products is to get consumers to understand why they shouldn’t be buying them in the first place. These are ultimately the reasons rhinos and many other species are poached in the first place. Perhaps most obviously, selling fake rhino horn doesn’t do anything to address the end-user demand for these illegal products, which are driven by either fortunes or phony medicinal claims. But it should be the last, because there are several reasons why this concept, no matter how it’s executed, is doomed to fail. This isn’t the first time someone’s come up with the well-intentioned (yet illogical) idea of creating fake rhino horn, and it probably won’t be the last. Earlier this month a team of scientists announced they’ve developed a high-tech way to help save rhinos from poachers: They propose fabricating fake horns out of horse hair (which is also composed of inert keratin, like human fingernails) and then flooding the illegal market with their products, thereby lowering the price of powdered rhino horns so much that no one will ever want to kill another rhino again. ![]()
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