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eppur_se_muova

(36,227 posts)
Sat Jun 4, 2016, 08:24 PM Jun 2016

Can we save the rhino from poachers with a 3D printer?

In a meeting room in an industrial area of San Francisco, Matthew Markus unpacks the contents of a small carved wooden box that depicts a rhinoceros with an impressive horn. Inside it are vials containing powder and small, hard-looking chunks. There are also what looks like miniature horns. “I term it conservation 2.0,” says Markus.

Markus is the co-founder of Pembient, a startup that aims to thwart the illegal wildlife trade by recreating animal products in the lab. It is starting with rhino horn but has plans for more complex materials such as elephant tusk. The hope is to produce rhino horn so biologically similar to wild horn – but at about one tenth of black market costs – that buyers and illegal traders will switch, thereby curtailing relentlessly increasing poaching levels. The mysterious box contains Pembient’s collection of prototypes. “We are working towards a bio-identical product by reverse-engineering rhino horn down to the smallest degree,” says Markus, who claims his version can be better than the real thing. “Our goal is that the only way you can tell the difference is that there will be pollutants in the wild horn.”

Rhinos certainly need more help and the desperateness of the situation is inspiring other non-traditional ideas. “There is a need to innovate from outside,” says Markus. “Conservation 1.0 is a little antiquated.” As the wealth of the elite in Asian countries has risen, the cost of the horn, along with the frequency of poaching incidents, has increased rapidly. By weight, its price exceeds that of gold. It is prized, particularly in Vietnam and China, as a status symbol and for its supposed “medicinal” qualities , unsupported by science, which include preventing hangovers, reducing fever and detoxifying the body following cancer treatment.

In South Africa, which has the largest rhino population of any country, poaching is at an all-time high. Poachers took an average of three a day in 2014, up from one a month in 2007. Save the Rhino’s most recent figures put the number of southern white rhinos at 20,405. Just five northern white rhinos remain, all of which are either too old to reproduce or infertile. Black rhinos, on the critically endangered list, number just 5,055 and one subspecies is already extinct. Two of the three Asian species are also classed as critically endangered and number less than 100 animals each.

Pembient’s concept, which another company – Rhinoceros Horn LLC – is also pursuing a version of, has raised the hackles of conservation groups from the World Wildlife Foundation to the wildlife monitoring network Traffic. It panders to consumers’ behaviour rather than trying to change it, which could set back efforts to educate, they say. “There is general horror at the idea,” says Cathy Dean, international director of the UK-based charity Save the Rhino, which earlier this month issued a joint statement with the International Rhino Foundation opposing the synthetic horn. Dean adds that ersatz horn is unlikely to dent the market – if people can afford the real thing they are going to buy it – and rebukes the company for failing properly to consult conservation professionals on the idea first.
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more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/24/artificial-3d-printed-fake-rhino-horn-poaching




Yeah, I know, this article is over a year old ... but I hadn't heard of this effort. I've always thought the best way to fight poaching was to treat it as an economics problem -- free market gone bad, so fight back in the free market by dumping fake rhino horn in such quantities that no one who pays for "real" rhino horn can be sure he's not being cheated (and make sure that plenty are). Or harvest horn (and ivory) from animals that die in game reserves and zoos and sell it legally at a tiny fraction of market price, breaking the market.

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