1. Fake rhino attempts zoo escape, in Japan. Might the real rhino be more fierce? Pointer from Ryan McCarl.
2. Killing a rhino by mistake in an anti-poaching demo. Pointer from George Edwards.
3. South Africa sends rhino poachers to jail for twenty-five years each; a lot of the demand comes from here. At $40,000 a kilogram, “Traffickers and gangs have been breaking into museums and auction rooms in Britain and Europe to steal rhino heads and horns.” It is now feared that the eighty-five rhinos housed in British zoos will be the next target and so a high alert has been called.
#2 implies a very simple market solution to poaching. If a rhino can grow back a horn (article says months, video says years), why are they not simply being farmed?
I think you can’t keep them in pens together. They fight and kill one-another.
Maybe that’s just the males, I don’t remember. If it’s just the males, I don’t see the problem.
Do females grow horns though?
the name means “nose horn”, I’ll let you guess.
This very issue is currently generating a lot of discussion back in South Africa. (Some links here: http://bit.ly/vC8V6C.)
Hopefully, environmental officials will finally see the sense in repealing the CITIES ban on ivory trade, which has done little more than push horn values to astronomical values (and hence acted as the perfect incentive for increased poaching).
I honestly thought viagra had reduced the demand for rhino horn. Looks like I was wrong.
Might it be possible to flood the market with fake or synthetic rhino horn?
What am I saying? There’s an awful lot of incentive for ‘entrepreneurs’ to sell fake rhino horn already. But that doesn’t mean better fake horn couldn’t be developed.
Doug, farming rhino horn is a good idea and it might already being done. Cutting off the horn is a pretty common anti-poaching method. Unfotunately the animals still get killed for the stumps. I guess the question is what happens to the horn after it’s removed as an anti-poaching method. Unfortunately if someone is sitting on a stockpile of rhino horn it gives then a vested interest in rhino extinction as that will presumably drive the price of rhino horn even further through the roof.
More puffins!
And more on elephants, please.
This is where all the China bashing should be directed.
Why not impregnate the horns of rhinos in vulnerable areas with a long-lasting neurotoxin? It would only take a few rich Chinese dying in agony for the trade in ground up rhino horn to drop off rather drastically.
How is putting poison in rhino horns legal? Isn’t this like putting booby traps on your property.
Comments on this entry are closed.