Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa | Hacker News Reader

Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa

news.nationalgeographic.com

28 pointsRed_Tarsius17 comments

This is a fairly objective article but it would be nice if they offered some evidence that legal trade makes illegal trade less feasible (if there is any). When you see pictures of poor rhino on a horn farm your gut feel is to be disgusted by that farmer. However, the simple laws of supply and demand may put the baddies out of business. Very controversial but at least worth a good think instead of a knee-jerk reaction.

One solution that I have always been supriesed hasn't been considered is cosmetically destroying the horns of living rhinos while preserving their function for the animal. By that I mean either chemically dying the horn some unnatural color or carving/Branding "contraband" or something similar into the outside. I would think that if you can alter the horn enough that it becomes completely unappealing to the secondary market the poaching would stop.

Because aside from the logistics of constantly dying the ever-growing horn of living wild animals, the market is in e.g. rhyno horn powder, so nobody cares what they look like: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/why-doe...

Which only begs the question - how come the black market isn't absolutely saturated with fake rhino horn powder? If it's just keratin, you could make tons of it with little effort and sell it as rhino horn, no? People make fakes of items with much much much less smaller profit margins, yet rhino horn trade is not completely destroyed by fake product?

Of course the market IS saturated by fake product....

But when you convince a large mass of people that there is value in your "fake" Rhino Horn, that drives demand for the real thing.

This is why PETA is against even fake ivory keys for your piano. Because it keeps perpetuating that ivory is valuable and desirable.

And the fact that the South African government requires that these farmed horns are dna tagged just gave them a way to identify the real thing. How ironic. Unless this whole thing is designed to trace out the black market distribution network..

A long but very interesting read on the gang of Irish travelers (gypsies) behind a lot of the trade in Europe: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wd7mvy/rathkeale-rovers-i...

This is possibly the best thing to happen to wild rhino populations. I don't see how this is any different to farming cows, chicken, pigs or any other animal.

There will always be demand for rhino horn, so it makes sense to satisfy that demand in a way that does less damage to the wild population.

> tranquilize & dehorn them

why don't anti-poachers use that approach? thought rhinos have to die before extracting their horns...

And how will a hornless rhino protect itself against predators?

Healthy adult rhinos have no predators (except humans). They are massive. They use their horns to defend their young and their territories.

You'd think so, but here's a video of for example a hippo vs a rhino without (much of) a horn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-GX7o7hBc

Also when a pride of lions get hungry enough they'll go after anything, at which point having a horn makes all the difference.

They do, it is common practice to safely dehorn Rhino in game parks (alternatively some parks will keep all the Rhino in a smaller more easily protected area). However, horns grow and poachers will cut off the part that cannot be safely removed and still get a good yield. I'm assuming that poachers would use tranquilizers if they could because they are less noisy and would therefore be less likely to be caught. However, they are often not very well funded and simply opportunists. Some are though.

Good thing that we will be able to list every single motherfucker who buy those now it will be legal and tracked.

If it's fully legal to sell and buy and comes from farmed rhinos who are not harmed during production, why would you call the buyers "motherfuckers"?

It is fully legal to do many things that are ethically awful.

Sure, buying meat from cows and pigs which are kept in horrendous conditions is "ethically awful" but I don't call meat eaters(that includes myself) motherfuckers. As far as I can see the only problem with rhino horn is that people kill wild animals to get it - once rhino is farmed, there's no difference between that and farming cows in my mind. In fact it's much better since rhino farmers don't kill rhinos to get the horn.

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