Poachers kill rhino for his horn at French zoo
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
edit: just searched, yes http://www.snopes.com/3d-printed-rhino-horn-developed/
[1] https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhin...
[2] https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...
I truly hope that bioengineering the rhino horn will be successful in preventing more damage.
Despite this awful incident in France, there has been some good news on the rhino front. In the five years before our announcement in 2015, rhino poaching was growing an average of 49% or so year-over-year, significantly more than the approximately 1% or less year-over-year growth it has experienced since then. Obviously, correlation doesn't imply causation, but whatever brought about the anomaly has bought the rhinos some time. In fact, South Africa, home to the majority of African rhinos, recently announced its second year of absolute declines in rhino poaching [1]. Hopefully, this trend will continue!
[1] http://www.traffic.org/home/2017/2/27/south-africa-annual-rh...
TL;DR: I can think of no campaign that can reduce demand; although, I can think of several that might accidently increase it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_reduction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_effect_(psychology)
I'd be more inclined to call it 5% of the floor space at most, but maybe there are differences between stores.
Have you ever used Arnica gel on a bruise? Oscillococcinum for a flu? Extremely effective naturally derived products.
There are other types of non-standard remedies, which you might be talking about. But Homeopathic, specifically, is a synonym for water with fancy labeling.
So, quack quack?
[1]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001957...
[2]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Oscillococcinum+evidenc...
That's true, it's not science at all, but homeopathy is a particular form of quackery (and many homeopathic products are frauds on top of the quackery of homeopathy.)
"According to the USDA Forest Service, four million trees are planted every day in the United States. Of this amount, the wood and paper products industry plants on average 1.7 million trees daily,1 excluding millions of additional seedlings regenerated naturally. In Canada, natural regeneration is supplemented by the planting of 600 million seedlings per year."
"According to The State of America’s Forests, a report released by the Society of American Foresters, replanting and reforestation efforts have helped keep forestland stable. There are nearly 750 million acres of forests in the U.S. — about the same as 100 years ago. Annual net growth of U.S. forests is 36 percent higher than the volume of annual tree removals. Total forest cover in the U.S. and Canada basically remained the same from 1990 to 2005.3 Furthermore, less than one half of one percent of Canada’s forestland is harvested annually.4 Sustainable forests are also carefully managed to help prevent catastrophic damage from fires, disease and insects."
1Kg fetches $60K?!? Not only the ignorance part that drives me mad, but how come so many men can be extremely obsessed about sexual performance?
I lose all hope in humanity in moments like these.
Reproduction is literally the basic reason for living. For many people, it's the only reason for living. If you're not philosophically or artistically inclined, what else is there? Eating and sleeping so you can work until you die isn't satisfying, especially when it's extremely obvious that people who are luckier or less scrupulous than others work much less and gain much more. Sex is a fairly democratic comfort in that respect; if you're into someone enough to have sex with them, it's similarly enjoyable whether you're rich or poor. If someone is heavily invested in sexual pleasure and loses access to it then getting that ability back is worth a high price.
Now why people buy rhino horn when they could just get viagra or any number of illegal drugs like cocaine that would have similar effects, I have no idea. Probably nominally law-abiding people who have convinced themselves that laws and rules are what make us superior to animals, so that laws and rules about animal welfare can be ignored. Many people have such epistemological blind spots.
https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...
The ‘normal’ dose of viagra is 100mg. 1kg into 100mg doses renders 10,000 doses. So $60k is only $6 a dose. At 25mg doses (no idea what the standard dose of rhino is, as you can imagine the fda doesn’t list much) you’re down to a buck fifty.
If you dose it in similar quantities to real medications, $60k starts to look cheap.
Also, poaching can (and should, if you ask me) be addressed in a more serious manner. How about starting at the buyer's market with enticing cash offers and then hunt up the source of the illegal merchandise?
You're describing a basic sting which is far from a new idea and the poachers aren't idiots when it comes to avoiding them.
> Hume is also one of the people who sued the South African government so the domestic rhino horn trade could be made legal again. Why? It isn't quite clear, since people in South Africa don't really care to buy rhino horn — that market is in Asia.
Ethics of keeping large plains grazing mammals aside, farming large mammals like rhinos would be very expensive and costly. It would also take quite a while to get up and running. Gestation period for larger mammals is very long. Cows about 9 months reaching maturity within 3 years; Rhinos are 16-18 months, 6-7 years to maturity (for females, males do in 10-12 years); and even longer time ranges for elephants. They also consume a much more food, cows 24/lbs of hay per day and rhino's 120 lbs/day.
https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poa...
>A media content analysis of Chinese (n = 332) and western newspapers (n = 166) from 2000 to 2014 revealed significant differences between perceptions of rhino horn consumption. In Chinese media, rhino horn product acquisition was most frequently reported for investment and collectible value (75%), artistic value (40%), and medical value (29%). In contrast, western media alleged consumption of rhino horn in China was mostly for their medical value (84%)
[0]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716...
That ivory has an aesthetic value is not in dispute; it has an aesthetic value here int eh west too. People are fine with paying extra for antiques made with the product of endangered species, and I'm to sure there's anything you can do about that unless you try banning or heavily regulating the trad in antiques, so that people aren't allowed to buy items made out of mahogany or ivory because allowing such items to be the subject of commerce would drive demand for those commodities now, as we are seeing. We don't talk about this because we don't want to ban antiques and we don't have a good idea about how to deal with the fact that their ongoing commercial existence creates demand for rare goods.
Likewise critiquing investment and collectibility seems almost superfluous to western media because such speculation is a basic mode of capitalism; it is so natural to observe that the existence of human desire will lead to the establishment of a market for the satisfaction of that desire that we take it for granted, even when the market's demand for something with high profit potential significantly outweighs consumers' demand for a particular good. As with drugs and other contraband, you can have many intermediaries trading in and pushing up the price proportionate to the distance consumers wish to put between themselves and the suppliers (both to lessen criminal responsibility and as a sort of Veblen good whose primary purpose is social signaling about the owner's economic ability to waste money on it).
* the word animal derives from the same root as 'animated' - we are animals because we can control our movements, n contrast to rooted entities like plants.
And I agree with you. I would also add "bounties on poachers" to your statement.
Evil me sometimes fantasizes about real-life shadowbanning such people. When you catch them, mark them with an RFID or indelible paint. Now that you can recognize them, give their votes in elections the weight of zero. Skip them when hiring for important positions. Let them live their merry life in peace, but completely remove them from "adult affairs". You don't have to tell them. I reserve the same treatment for racists and homophobes by the way.
Of course you can't and shouldn't do that. On a serious note, it boggles the mind how much harm is done by ignorant and superstitious people even today...