I didn’t realize this. Injecting small, safe radioactive material into rhino horns seems like an incredibly good hack: turn all that nuclear monitoring equipment into poached animal artifact detectors.
Radiation portal monitors will not detect all quantities and there are simple techniques for masking these detections with sheilding, or via nuisance alarms if they are detected. [1]
Shark fin extraction, for shark fin soup, has a similar cultural problem. Influential people in the communities that consume these products, ie Yao Ming, could make a lot more progress by simply having public campaigns against it. [2]
[1] Source: me, I am a radation detecion PhD who works on similar kinds of problems, with similarly or more capable systems. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM
Having portal monitors that serve many purposes is good, and generally the biggest impact they have is in the deterrence effect, ie bad actors might be constrained by their existence. However in order for deterrence to be effective it must be a credible capability. Since there are so many smugglers, and they could reasonably implement simple countermeasures, it is likely the deterrence effect is small to nil in this case.
A big celeb getting caught doing something gauche and getting dogpiled in the press? That is what effective deterrent looks like.
> Rhino horns are used for their "traditional" medicine ingredients
The "product" is ruined.
Smugglers would likely be able to use simple, cheap detectors to remove these.
Potentially they don't remove the pils, simply grind the horn + source into medicine... the amount of radiation will not cause acute effects to the person who ingests it and will likely just cause some "unexplainable" tumor or system failure later in life or after a prolonged consumption.
If you just insert a capsule of radioactive material, it's easy to make it (extremely) poisonous, easily detectable and harmless to the rhino. But I don't see a way to do all three at once.
If you just wanted to kill the consumers a small amount of an alpha emitter would work quite well, but would be hard to detect and carry a small amount of risk to the rhino if it breaks confinement.
Conversely you could use a strong gamma emitter to make it easily detectable but I don't see a way to do so that would harm the consumers but not the rhino. Best you can do is some level or radioactivity that we're fine with in animals but not in humans because we're hypocrites.
I don't know if this is the case, but if the life expectancy of rhinos is much less than humans, then there would be radiation levels that are safe for the rhino but harmful for humans. Tumors can take time to develop.
Luckily this is easily obtainable information on the internet.
'Rhinoceroses’ lifespans vary on species. A rhino’s lifespan is typically 40 to 45 years."
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/rhinoceros-fact-sheet/
That is less than a human lifespan but not by orders of magnitude smaller. Sounds like a very narrow needle to thread.
Making them radioactive with non-penetrating particles might be ok from the standpoint of trying to make them less desirable... but you aren't making them detectable & it is highly controversial to do this.
In reality, and back to the solutions proposed by the article: I don't know if the source article's idea has merit or is just funded by a non-profit where this is a small pet project or if they really don't understand the tradespace.
And if it’s eg 50%, I’d very much want to be in the injected 50% because all poaching effort would be in the non treated population. Obviously assuming all animals in an area were injected and that was known to poachers.
I’m also wondering where we’re getting the idea that it’s extremely toxic if ingested. Maybe it’s in the video? The article seems to suggest that it’s “non-toxic” and that
> “the inserted radioisotopes hold no health or any other risk for the animals or those who care for them.”
> "The radioactive dose makes the horn poisonous for humans"
> 'The radioactive material would "render the horn useless... essentially poisonous for human consumption" added Nithaya Chetty, professor and dean of science at [the University of the Witwatersrand]'
> Q: What if you drop the radioactive seed in the grass and cannot be found? And other animals accidentally ingest it?
> A: This is a highly unlikely scenario as specific standard operating procedures will be developed to ensure that no radioactive material will be left behind at the treatment site. Should an animal ingest some of the radioactive material subsequent to the initial treatment, the radioisotope will be of such a chemical and physical form that it will quickly pass through the bowels of the animal and be excreted out by that animal. The calculated doses will not do any significant harm.
Perhaps something significant happens when grinding up the radioisotope, but then again this would also happen when ingested by animals (grinding between teeth etc).
I think more than actual quantities involved, the scary risk of radiation, however unlikely, may be a bigger deterrent for the consumers of these products. The more widely this news spreads, the better it is for the Rhinos.
There's definite a positive (non-zero) threshold below which it doesn't trigger.
Bananas are radioactive, and while a single banana doesn't trigger the alarms, a lot of bananas might!
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
> Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.
Because that's what the horn-smugglers will be carrying in attempts to deflect why the airport scanner is detecting radiation in their luggage.
Also, each radioactive source produce radioactivity with different energy, so you can use specialized equipment to identify the source. (We used one in the lab in an undergraduate couse of Physics. It's not very big, like the size of a shoe.)
If it was you wouldn’t see bananas at the supermarket
Besides - they worked on this for three years. They likely thought this through beyond banana comparisons…
But the idea of the test is that this could be done in a wider scale. If a significant portion of horns are being confiscated (via radiation sensors) then there’s fewer horns being sold and less money available for all those middleman groups. Over time the market goes away.
Perhaps similar to how the market for stolen iPhones dried up once people could remotely brick their stole phone. There’s just less money to be made so thieves move on to more lucrative targets.