Only 3 northern white rhinos left on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Only 3 northern white rhinos left on Earth

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70 pointsmengjiang40 comments

The fact that these animals have been hunted to extinction should be evidence that their horn has no medicine value. If it worked we'd have rhinoceros farms.

I'm sure people are happy to operate rhinoceros farms solely for the monetary value, which we know the horn does have. The problem is elsewhere.

Not necessarily. Rhinos would only be farmed if they could be patented. Of course rhino horn has no medical value, but it could still be hunted to extinction even if it did.

On this topic silphium went extinct despite being highly useful medically [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

Lots of things are farmed that are not patented.

From your own source, "The identity of silphium is highly debated."

-_-

That is because silphium was exploited to extinction, much like the rhino.

Rhinos would only be farmed if they could be patented.

That makes me wonder percentage of the world's farming is done under a patent.

Actually quite a large percentage. Plant patents are a huge business [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights

How does this argument even remotely make sense? Most manufactured drugs are not patented.

Most manufactured drugs were once patented. How many potential drugs that are not patentable have been brought to market in the last 50 years?

I don't feel like I even need to engage with the second part of your argument, because the first still doesn't make sense. They're not patented now, and yet they're still manufactured. Why?

The major cost of bring a drug to market is not the manufacturing cost, it is the testing required to sell it. This is why except for a few very old drugs all generics (out of patent medicines) were once patented drugs. The whole purpose of the patent is to allow the pharma company to charge enough initially to make a profit before they are faced with competition. Without a patent you just can't bring a new drug to market.

In regards rhinos I was responding to the claim that if the rhino horn had real medicinal value it would be farmed. It could be possible (very unlikely) that rhino horn does have real medicinal value, but there is no way of ever showing this without a patent on rhino horn. Without a patent you can't farm rhinos for medicinal purposes because you can't ever show rhino horn has medicinal value (i.e. No pharma company will invest the money required to show this without a patent).

You can't use the fact that rhinos are not farmed to prove that rhino horn has no medicinal value when there are other possible reasons that rhinos are not farmed for medicinal purposes.

The problem is also more than just "medical value". There are collectors who would prize a trophy on their desk/wall.

I wonder why. Lion farms for the sole benefit of hunters exist, why not other species.

They do exist for a number of species including black rhino. For many of these species they need open habitat, but the right to hunt them is paid for by sportspeople which in turn goes to the conservation of the open habitat.

Next week: How I can show that the dodo had no nutritional value.

You massively underestimate the complexity of animal husbandry in some species.

Why the proxy?

This is the direct link: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/only-3-northern-white-rhinos...

EDIT: actually I found the proxy more interesting than the story itself.

Personally, I found many comments useful and entertaining, but the way HN and Reddit are designed makes it difficult to read the comments while reading the story.

I also use the Parle browser extension, which does this for all articles without the proxy.

The proxy can be generated from the Parle Browser extension which overlays HN and Reddit discussions directly on the page. You read more about it at https://www.parle.co

dang can you fix the link?

Should now be fixed! The discussions appear on the top right :)

Nope still going to some proxy site.

With Chinese quackery behind the demand for rhino horn, and with China's increasing presence in Africa, I am really surprised that the Chinese government is not doing more to save the rhinos. If I were a high-ranking communist bureaucrat, I would see this as an easy chance to score points for national (and personal) prestige, yet there seems to be zero interest. Why?

I don't think its just China. Horns used to be one of the ingredients in classic chinese medicine, but its drastically reduced next to none after horns were banned a couple of decades ago. India itself is a big importer of horns and I think much bigger then China

>India itself is a big importer of horns and I think much bigger then China

That's not true at all. In fact India has two-thirds of the world's great one-horned rhino population in the Kaziranga National Park.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaziranga_National_Park

There are armed guards protecting the rhinos and they've even shot and killed poachers, though poaching still happens due to demand from Southeast Asia.

http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/3-poachers-killed-by-forest-g...

As per the article below, Vietnam is the country that is driving the current demand for rhino horns.

http://qz.com/82302/theres-a-country-that-will-pay-300000-pe...

There is also use by Somalis / Yemenis for dagger hilts and handles.

Story from BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34897767

Are there not issues of running into genetic defects from having such a small population to breed from?

Humans suck sometimes

especially this week, when combined with all the crazy events going on all around the world.

Uh-huh. We're probably the only species to ever even give a fuck that we drove another species to extinction.

back in 2008 when I visited Chitwan national park in Nepal, we were shown what locals claimed white rhinos (mother and calf). riding on the back of elephant, rhinos were calm and didn't notice us.

either things went much worse, or those were not white ones. anyway, 3 rhinos left means species is extinct, unless mighty genetics step in in near future.

we should at least keep backups of the DNA.

It's something that I was wondering: is there some kind of DNA library with samples of every species DNA, us included? I'm not a biologist but I guess with samples of 100 individuals it could be possible to "recreate" a whole species.

I'm not a biologist either. I think the problem is that DNA breaks down when stored. And you cannot store it digitally, because the way the molecules are folded contains information as well (besides just the base-pair letters ACTG), and we can't sequence the folding yet. But like I said, IANAB.

While DNA samples would be a great thing to have, I'd hate for that to be the only trance of them left in the future. Imagine one day, when all we will have is a huge book of DNA samples of everything we used to know.

The people taking DNA samples agree with you. It's not like they just really want a sample of rhino DNA. They're keeping them so that maybe some day we'll be able to use that sample to bring back actual rhinos.

Is it relevant to your question? http://gizmodo.com/the-isolated-vault-that-could-store-our-d...

The DNA Bank Network [1] indexes DNA samples held by several DNA banks — there are more banks not indexed by this system.

There are 224 different mammals so far, but no rhinos.

For plants, the Millennium Seed Bank [2] is collecting and storing seeds with the aim to have all species. They have 13% of plant species so far.

[1] http://www.dnabank-network.org/

[2] http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/millenni... (my previous employer; they're recruiting for Linux analysts at the moment).

There are two species of white rhinos: southern and northern.

The southern [0] has one horn and there are an estimate of 20,400+ alive in the wild. Although they are still quite rare, they are considered the most common and widespread rhino.

The northern [1] white rhino is the one mentioned in this article and is much, much more rare. There are now only three individuals alive. I haven't found any confirmation, but I thought the northern was more popular by poachers because of the two large sized horns, instead of a large and small one from the southern rhino.

All in all, very sad we came to the point human beings have (almost, for now) killed yet another species.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_white_rhinoceros

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_white_rhinoceros

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