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Comment by omgJustTest | Hacker News Reader

Classic case of a societal problem that technology tries to paper over, and does a poor job doing so. Rhino horns are used for their keratin and "traditional" medicine ingredients.

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

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Any deterrence scheme relies on awareness and uncertainty just as much, if not more than, an actual technology. If poachers think it will raise the chances of detection, even if that chance isn’t 100%, that’s just as good to deter them.

Sure, the multiagent problem needs communication of the credible threat to the bad actors. "Credible threat" implies that bad actors don't collect information about the system, technical and non-technical, that implies the balance of risk and reward isn't tilted in favor of continuing their actions.

Only if the percentage of the population injected is high, which is unlikely given it took 3 years to inject 20 rhinos. If the percentage is small, the poachers could just get a cheap radiation detector and screen out whatever portion of their haul is contaminated before passing it along. Further, many smugglers are unconcerned with detection, they already likely bribe a customs agent to ignore it.

Even if the poachers can detect the contamination, they are probably going to kill the rhino, flee the area, and then assess the goods. So you still have a dead rhino unless the doping is well communicated and obvious to all.

  > Rhino horns are used for their "traditional" medicine ingredients

The level of radiation is non-toxic to rhinos in their horns, but extremely toxic if ingested as a "traditional" medicine.

The "product" is ruined.

Not fully ruined... since the injections are typically not loose contamination, for fear that it migrates into the rhino via capillary action or irradiates the rhino more than people are comfortable with.

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.

Honestly I'm a bit confused, the descriptions seem contradictory or require an extraordinary level of fine tuning.

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.

> 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.

> I don't know if this is the case, but if the life expectancy of rhinos is much less than humans,

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.

I think that no one believes killing consumers of these products is a viable solution or that it doesn't have disastrous side effects. What happens with rhinos that die? do we have to collect their tusks and these are rad-waste now?

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.

If this has a chance of getting to 100% of the population, I think if I were the rhino I’d want to take those odds given the alternative is being hunted.

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.

Do the black-market consumers know that? Fentanyl and xylazine come to mind: not many drug users intend to get those, they can get many batches of what they do want before they get an adulterated batch, and they often don’t find out they got the adulterated kind until it’s too late.

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"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cd16yjp0062o

An additional reference:

  > '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]'

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-radioactive-rhino-horns-curb-p...

This contradicts the FAQ page

https://rhisotope.org/faqs/

> 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).

Fentanyl is more complex, now users are more and more looking for it... (source: a friend working in harm reduction)

> 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.

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.

A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

Sure, but paying for an anti-shark fin commercial might be as much as a single portal monitor.

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.

Isn’t the whole point that the portal monitors are already bought, paid for, and in fact operated by other people?

Nobody cares about preachy commercials, except in that doing the opposite of what they preach makes you edgy and cool.

A big celeb getting caught doing something gauche and getting dogpiled in the press? That is what effective deterrent looks like.

People say that, but the data proves good commercials work. Of course not all commercials work, but there is plenty of data showing they do work and what works.

Rhino horns are not made of ivory.

Yes... sorry I am thinking of some related topics in this area, not only just about rhinos. Elephant trade has a similar issue, and this is why my mind was in that space.

Sorry, but if you're going to cite yourself you should do better than "radation detecion".

Well, he didn't claim the PhD was in spelling...

At least we know I'm not an LLM! (Cant change the spelling now!)

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