I'm not being argumentative, I am curious how far your belief this is a good idea goes.
Agree further with you and maxxxxx that smugglers and buyers of said animal contraband should be severely punished. But again, that's so far after the fact and there are so many possible outlets for these goods that a demand side solution will just not work.
The Chinese government, if they really wanted to cut down on ivory and rhino supplement trade, could enact and enforce severe buy-side punishments.
The sad fact is, there is one and only one choke point in this entire global supply chain and that's the guy with the gun that chooses of his own free will to kill one of these animals for money. Stop him and the entire enterprise folds. Yes, I know it's harsh, but other efforts are just not working.
We're not talking about a murder in a first-world urban area where you didn't catch the suspect red-handed.
And not just committing genocide, but they are profiting from it.
Kind of like punching Nazi's - I'm willing to overlook the idea that it might not be entirely reasonable as long as it puts a stop to the thing.
Mass killing of animals is not genocide in any form. Your philosophy might deem them equivalent and I respect that view, but you should accept it's an extreme, minority position.
But unlike human genocide where only some group of humans gets wiped out in large numbers, leaving plenty of other humans walking the planet, here it's much worse: an entire species is being wiped out to complete extinction. It's demonstrably far, far worse.
Genocide is a relatively new term, created to describe the Nazis. It combines the word genos, which means race or tribe, and -cide, death.
The major problem with genocide is not the disparition of a culture or ethic type, it's the killing of scores of humans that have value unto themselves.
In contrast, the vast majority of legal systems and societies in existence today do not recognize the mere killing of an animal as wrong. Humans widely believe they have the right to take the life of an animal, as long as it'd done humanely, for sensible reasons and does not threaten biodiversity.
So genocide and extinction are fundamentally different, orthogonal moral issues.
It is just a bowl of tragedy down in the trenches.