Hsiang cautioned, for example, that experiments trying to undermine black markets in elephant ivory by selling legal ivory backfired and ultimately lead to increased poaching.Įngineering fake rhino horn “seems like an elaborate technological approach that is not without potentially serious risk,” Dr. “But the dangers they point out don’t apply to all strategies.”įor now, these ideas remain in the realm of theory - and much of that theory goes against real-world evidence suggesting what might happen if the market was flooded with fake horn, said Solomon Hsiang, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Conservation groups tend to clump different strategies under one roof and have a knee-jerk reaction that they have to reject them all,” he said. Knights said.įrederick Chen, an economist at Wake Forest University, said that there is more than one way to flood a market, however. “It’s widely known that there is a lot of fake product out there, so this experiment is already running,” Mr. Peter Knights, chief executive officer of WildAid, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending illegal wildlife trade, added that the market in Vietnam is already flooded with convincing fakes, like water buffalo horn, which accounts for up to 90 percent of what’s sold as rhino horn. Swaak-Goldman, who works with governments and law enforcement agencies. “There’s already scarce resources for wildlife crime and we don’t want to make it even more difficult for law enforcement,” said Ms. “Their organic matrix is a neat innovation and definitely brings horsehair horn closer to being a good substitute for rhino horn,” he said.īut his company has also faced pushback from conservationists.Ĭritics say that fake rhino horn risks stimulating demand for real horn, and that it would complicate policing. Matthew Markus, Pembient’s chief executive officer, said he would be open to testing the new horsehair formula. Pembient, a Seattle-based bioengineering company launched in 2015, is already exploring the development of 3D-printed rhino horn. ![]() They cleaned and tightly bundled the hair, then bound it together with a mixture of liquefied silk, which stood in for the collagen found in rhino horn, as well as cellulose, which represented the plant material that gets rubbed in as rhinos sharpen their horns. Vollrath puts it, is “nothing but a tuft of nose hair stuck together with glue that comes out of the animal’s nose glands.” He and his colleagues chose horsehair as a basis for their fake rhino horn because horses are a close relative of rhinos. “We are giving back street entrepreneurs the recipe for how to make fake rhino horns, so hopefully people will get it into the market,” he said. Vollrath believes his artificial horn could undermine. ![]() ![]() Status depends on rhino horn’s exclusivity, high price and rarity - things that Dr. It has a similar chemical signature and behaves like rhino horn when cut or shaved. Vollrath and colleagues at Fudan University in China have produced looks identical to rhino horn under a microscope. ![]() “But these measures alone so far have not been sufficient to save the rhino, so what we’re doing here is bringing out a really good fake.” “We’re not trying to supplant boots-on-the-ground, vigilant customs officials and protection of rhino habitat,” said Fritz Vollrath, a biologist at the University of Oxford and senior author of the study, published in Scientific Reports. Now, in the hopes of driving down the value of rhino horn and reducing poaching even more, scientists have created a convincing artificial rhino horn made from horsehair. The decline in deaths is encouraging, but conservationists agree that poaching still poses a dire threat to Africa’s rhino population, which hovers around 24,500 animals. In Africa, 892 rhinos were poached for their horns in 2018, down from a high of 1,349 killed in 2015.
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