3D Printing Might Save the Rhinoceros

GordonShure.com writes: San Francisco based biotech startup Pembient have released details of their 3D printing led method to derail the market for Rhinoceros horns. Presently the bulk of demand originates from China, where said horns — gathered in the wild by poachers who usually kill the rhinos — are revered for supposed medicinal qualities. The new firm intends to mix keratin with Rhino DNA, then machine the combination with a 3D printer in a way that their counterfeit horns are difficult to detect by customers and traffickers alike.

The company already mulls expanding its production principle to other, lucrative wild animal trades such as the claws of tigers and lions. Pembient is however a young company — for all their ingenuity, will their ambitions to take on such a colossal black market be realized?

Comments

Love the idea

[Digital Pizza]

... but considering the type of people they're going up against, I hope they don't end up wearing concrete boots.

Re:Love the idea

[ArmoredDragon]

Add to it the fact that it will probably not work - to those using it as "medicine" it's only the real deal or nothing.

That's the point, they're trying to make it so that you can't tell the difference between real and fake. The idea is that you make it so cheap that poaching becomes economically unfeasible.

If the fake is good enough, then the only way to detect counterfeits is to have a traceable source. If there's a traceable source, the poachers are liable to get caught.

Re:Love the idea

[Adriax]

They aren't introducing Diet Horn here, they're trying to poison the supply chain.

The poachers probably aren't big proponents of a verifiable, traceable supply chain. They don't laser etch a serial number in the things after a kill. So you insert these fake horns into the chain and you dis-incentivize the poaching by driving prices down. Plus you get the witchdoctors questioning whether their supplier is selling them real of fake horns, which can lead to trust breakdowns and stop some purchases.
And hey, the smarter witchdoctors know it's all bullshit they're giving a polish to. So they'll secretly purchase completely legal and probably much cheaper fakes straight from the source and keep giving their victims a show.

Re:Love the idea

[ShanghaiBill]

...those buying these products usually have their own reliable sources to ensure that they are get what they pay for.

Those buying the products in bulk don't really care if they are genuine, they only care if the next customer in the supply chain will buy it. The end users, who are dumb enough to believe that ground up horn is going to cure their erectile dysfunction, don't have the means to test it. The end market is in China, where melamine is dumped into baby formula, dried weeds are sold as tea, and noodles are often preserved with formaldehyde. They just do not have the supply chain infrastructure to ensure quality or authenticity. The fake rhino horn could work well.

Re:Love the idea

[drinkypoo]

The poachers probably aren't big proponents of a verifiable, traceable supply chain. They don't laser etch a serial number in the things after a kill.

So what will happen is that most of the poachers will go out of business, but the nastiest, most tenacious poachers will band together and provide these features, because some ultra-rich Chinese guy will pay them umpty-ump dollars for certified rhino horn. Meanwhile, producing more rhino horn will make it possible for more people to buy it, which means more people will get "hooked" on it as they convince themselves it works — and if they break into the big time, they will go looking for the real thing, eventually, and insist upon authentic product. So what they are really doing here is increasing the market for the product.

The solution to this problem, if we could institute it, would be to fine the living fuck out of anyone buying rhino horn that they believe to be real, and spend the money on rhino maintenance... and vaporizing poachers. To stop killing is the one time I think killing is valid, and I don't see that these people have any more right to exist than rhinos. So let's take poaching as seriously as we do "MERICAFREEDOMFUCKYEAH" (or whatever country) and just make a genuine concerted effort to exterminate the poachers.

Re:Love the idea

[gbjbaanb]

I don't see the problem - the people they're up against will simply take the technology and start making their own rhino horn. After all, they understand profit more than most, so being able to make their own "honest guv, its real rhino, would I lie to you" 'medicine' without all the expense of paying some middleman poacher, you know they're going to go full-on in the fake rhino horn trade.

Re:Love the idea

[Skylinux]

The diamond trade is artificially protected since it is a legal product and boosted by marketing. Your wife may not be able to tell the difference but advertisement tells you that only the real deal is worth it.
If I remember correctly it is the flaws in a natural diamond that make it "spark" more then a grown one.

The fake horns may work as long as no simple test is developed to check for authenticity.
The better approach would probably be to convince people but truth rarely works ..... even westerners still believe in things like Homeopathy ;)

Re:Love the idea

[rmdingler]

...those buying these products usually have their own reliable sources to ensure that they are get what they pay for.

Those buying the products in bulk don't really care if they are genuine, they only care if the next customer in the supply chain will buy it. The end users, who are dumb enough to believe that ground up horn is going to cure their erectile dysfunction, don't have the means to test it. The end market is in China, where melamine is dumped into baby formula, dried weeds are sold as tea, and noodles are often preserved with formaldehyde. They just do not have the supply chain infrastructure to ensure quality or authenticity. The fake rhino horn could work well.

Ironically, testosterone or one of DrugCo's magic cures for ED could be included in the counterfeit horn, so it works better than the real McCoy.

Re: Love the idea

[WindBourne]

I would rather include something that turns skin blue after eating so many. Or makes them limp forever.

Re:Love the idea

[Adriax]

I'm not quite sure, but adding an extra one to two thousand pounds of rotting packaging to your illicit product may impact your possible shipping channels.
Plus sawing through a neck instead of the much thinner horn would be a wee bit slower.

Conversely

[quenda]

given so few wild rhinos are left, how about giving them all prosthetic horns, to reduce their value?
It would still be a story, because you can use 3D printers for that too, if you really wanted to.

Re:Conversely

[jklovanc]

The problem is that the poachers killed the rhinos anyway because they did not want to waste time tracking a rhino without a horn. It was a good idea but didn't work.

Re:Conversely

[cfalcon]

Not if the prosthetic horn was visibly and obviously not a real rhino horn (to the poachers and also to those giving it to them).

Given that a rhino can absolutely live without its horn... why not farm them? They wouldn't be cheap to farm, but I absolutely don't buy the cheap counterargument of "it would create demand". As long as your rhino farmers aren't some massive conglomerate trying to increase demand (ex, tobacco industry) but instead offering the "real deal" at prices that, while still expensive, could put men who risk their lives and are in some cases willing to kill to get their rhino horn cash, into different jobs completely...

Another piece is that, by virtue of having such a risk/reward setup that encourages killing or maiming the rhino so as to have a lower chance of being caught, the current system does not do quite as much to discourage the harm of rhinos as it could. A setup that, to a rational poacher, would make it worth their while to remove a horn and leave the animal healthy, would do a great deal here. An example might be that, if caught harvesting, the poacher is fined but gets to keep some fraction of the horn- but only if the animal is (not counting the horn mutilation) unharmed, with the existing stringent punishments for a poacher caught in the hack-and-slash situation.

Obviously, the ideal solution would be a twofold combination of, an artificial rhino horn that is indistinguishable and essentially the same biologically as the horn (thus undercutting the market, and also satisfying whatever mages need these for spell components or whatever), and a system that protects the existing rhinos more absolutely than the current one. This is partially a good effort towards the first (but doesn't seem to satisfy the 'artificial rhino horn' for the consumers, who will inevitably evolve more sophisticated tests), and the second is already the main attempt at protection... but it doesn't seem able to solve the problem for the desperate poachers, who are still faced with a good enough rate of return for their risk (solving the problem in this case being raising their risk to near unity).

Overall:
It's an interesting idea, but ultimately I have a lot of doubts. In order for it to work, they need to make the product that they advertise, put in place a linkage to the existing illicit rhino traders, a dubious path, especially if some believe that the rhino really IS magical or whatever, and finally, have a solid enough solution in place that a lab can't simply detect their forgery with ease, thus rendering their fake product low value, while ALSO apparently convincing the rhino preservationists that this is all a good idea (generally not possible: they'll give you a story about how it will create demand for genuine rhino parts)....

It seems they have well educated if misguided western opponents who don't want to legitimize the trade, armed and desperate southern opponents who want to poach to feed their families, and wealthy and essentially religious eastern opponents who will jump through hoops to ensure that the Horn Must Flow so they can drink their immortality soup or cast their blizzard spells or whatever. That's a lot of enemies... and before the fact that they could have cash flow issues, and have nothing else to fall back on.

Risky investment indeed!

Re:Conversely

[jklovanc]

Here is the conclusion from the article:

A first priority for all rhino conservationists should be to ensure adequate anti-poaching monitoring and security (including intelligence-gathering) to protect rhino populations, and only then should dehorning be considered, for is a rhino really a rhino without its horn?

The effectiveness of dehorning alone is much closer to 0% than it is to 100%. Dehorning is only a small part of the solution.

Re:The next Jurassic park movie

[Adriax]

"Run! We only have 37 days before the t-rex finishes printing and comes to get us!"

"We call it the Cartridge Contingency. If the dinosaurs become uncontrollable we just stop replacing the cartridges in the printer and no more dinosaurs. Much faster than the Lysine Contingency of the first island."

Will price point even matter?

[hedgemage]

Considering the market is being driven by very wealthy individuals who will pay any price for their boner pills, I would think that it wouldn't substantially change the price since these wealthy individuals could afford to pay a little extra to have certified 100% real rhino horn that's been lab tested. Unless the copies are so good that they will fool even experts, its not going to stop the trade. Sounds like a great way to make money off of the people who can't afford the real stuff, though!

Re:Will price point even matter?

[Pinky's Brain]

Mix in random poisons.

Re:Will price point even matter?

[Xest]

"Keep in mind your poisons have to have a long enough life, penetrate the entire horn of a living creature without harming it (likely impossible),"

Why? you'd just lace the horns once they've already been removed, or lace the fake ones and seed them into the market. It would only take a few casualties to massively drop demand.

"and in your BEST case scenario, end up hurting actual people"

Is this somehow worse than hurting actual rhinos? Is there some reason to class humans as a super species that have a greater right to exist than any others other than anthropomorphic arrogance?

What about the people whose lives are taken by poachers? what about the people whose livelihoods are destroyed by poachers potentially resulting in their lives being taken? Are the lives of rich Chinese folks more important than everyone else?

What about the fact that when poachers make a kill they often lace the animal carcass with poison so that the hundreds of vultures that descend on a fresh carcass are also wiped out because otherwise park rangers see the vulture swarm and know where the poachers are active? What about the people who are dying of disease because vulture populations have been decimated due to this practice meaning there are no vulture clean up flocks around in more populated areas any more to deal with decaying disease ridden carcasses of feral dogs and such that the vultures remove? Do those people not matter either?

What about the people who have died due to conflict and terrorism funded by spoils from poaching? do those victims no matter either?

I'm not advocating the GPs plan but I don't think it's as clear cut as you make out, certainly were that eventuality to occur, that given that the Chinese government wont do anything to quash the myth that rhino horn is magical, then if nothing else I'd have zero sympathy for the victims were this to happen- I'd rather have people like that suffer, than the people whose lives are taken, livelihoods are destroyed by poaching, or the poached animals themselves. Plenty of rangers and locals who have had the misfortune to run into poaching groups have also died because of these people, why should I care if something happened to the consumers at the other end? Their actions have killed enough people and animals.

Make no mistake, demand for these horns from the people buying the product have enough blood on their hands, it's not a victimless crime, on the contrary, there are many, many victims so the people who consume and feed this trade becoming victims is actually a very much preferable alternative to the status quo. It's much better that people responsible for a problem suffer, than innocent bystanders.

Re:Will price point even matter?

[MrL0G1C]

I'd put it something that both makes people puke their guts up and makes them unable to get it up (if such a thing exists).

Immoral? No, it's punishment, no more immoral than prison.

Re:Will price point even matter?

[richy freeway]

I'd put it something that both makes people puke their guts up and makes them unable to get it up (if such a thing exists).

Lots of beer then?

Re:Will price point even matter?

[flink]

Are you suggesting poisoning people? That seems absurd.

But we do it for other products. We poison industrial ethanol so the government doesn't tax it at the recreational rate. We spike opioid analgesics with non-therapeuticly high levels of acetaminophen to discourage recreational use. If we're willing to poison things that are sold legitimately, why wouldn't we poison something that is illegal? I'm not saying it wouldn't work for other reasons you cited, but we've already stepped over the line as a society of intentionally poisoning things to discourage their use.

Re:Will price point even matter?

[Solandri]

"and in your BEST case scenario, end up hurting actual people"

Is this somehow worse than hurting actual rhinos? Is there some reason to class humans as a super species that have a greater right to exist than any others other than anthropomorphic arrogance?

You can try to spin it however you want. The vast majority of the people on earth do in fact see humans as having a greater right to exist than other animals. If a rhino and person were caught on a see-saw contraption on a cliff where the process of saving one would condemn the other to death, 99% of people would choose to save the person.

In that context, you lose the moral high ground if you begin poisoning horns. The poachers are only hurting animals. You are hurting people. Therefore, you will be the worse criminal in most people's minds.

Re:Will price point even matter?

[Xest]

"You can try to spin it however you want. The vast majority of the people on earth do in fact see humans as having a greater right to exist than other animals."

I doesn't matter how I spin it, it doesn't mean it's right, whether it is or not is a wholly personal thing and doesn't make me any more wrong than someone that holds the opposite view. There's a fair argument backed by science though that allowing destruction of biodiversity only hurts us in the long run however.

"The poachers are only hurting animals."

Did you even read my post before replying? No they're not. Poachers are responsible for many, many human deaths both directly and indirectly.

Re:Will price point even matter?

[Xest]

"Yes because it is our species. Really any member of a species that does not put the survival of the other members of it's species over a different species is flawed from a biological viewpoint."

That assumes you have a complete grasp of the global ecosystem, which we don't. We do know that biodiversity reduction can lead to population collapse that can in turn hurt us though.

"A prey animal will not allow a starving predator to take another member of the herd just so predator can survive. A rhino will not worry about killing a human if it can to protect the herd. "

Though dogs have been known to die to protect humans. But this is really the point, one member of a species accepting a sacrifice for another is a well documented thing in nature because it's not about survival of an individual but survival of the species, and if killing people fuelling poaching which in turn leads to deaths of many other humans helps the species as a whole survive then you should be able to understand why your simplistic biological arguments fail to tell us anything much at all, contrary to what you're claiming.

I'm not going to pretend I've figured out the one true solution because I don't know how many dead poisoned people it would take to stop the trade relative to how many people killed directly and indirectly from poaching there would be without stopping the trade.

I also think there may well be other better options, like applying more political pressure on the Chinese government - as I say, I don't advocate the idea put forward, I'm merely pointing out that the person I responded to was wrong to claim it was a clear cut ethical choice, which it's not, just as it's not a clear cut choice from a biological standpoint as you're trying to argue either.

The fact is, we don't have the data to know either way. I'm not here to say my way is right and that's that, I'm merely here to point out that people who are saying that are arrogant and short sighted for not seeing that it's really not quite that simple.

Ecosystems are large and complex things, and you can't just simplify them down to us vs. them. Sometimes our existence is inextricably linked to theirs.

unworkable

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Animal horns have intricate ordered microscopic structures that no 3D printer can reproduce, but that are easy to look for with a microscope.

Re:Rhino horns don't even work!

[TheRaven64]

for the vast majority of the Chinese people, over 90%, do not believe in the effectiveness of the rhino horns

So that's a target market of only 136 million?

with the exception of those living in the Hong Kong and surrounding region (mainly Guangzhou)

Oh, and they're only concentrated in one of the wealthiest areas? Definitely not a problem then.

Rhino horn's function = Tylenol

[Taco Cowboy]

Instead of Viagra, rhino horn's main function in traditional Chinese medicine is much more closer to Tylenol

Rhino horn has never been used as aphrodisiacs in Chinese medicine

As there are hundreds of other ingredients, vast majority of them plant based, such as barley or chrysanthemum, which work much better as fever reducer in traditional Chinese medicine, rhino horns are actually not needed at all

Re:Rhino horns don't even work!

[Feral Nerd]

The claim that the rhino horns are clamored as Chinese medicine is way over hyped - for the vast majority of the Chinese people, over 90%, do not believe in the effectiveness of the rhino horns, with the exception of those living in the Hong Kong and surrounding region (mainly Guangzhou) This has been evidenced time and time again on the distribution data on where the rhino horns were used - over 80% of it were used inside Hong Kong In fact one can go to Chinese medicinal shops in Hong Kong and find rhino horns display prominently, but in other places inside China, there is no rhino horn in sight as there is no market for it

It isn't just rhino horn, it's rare types of wood, tiger/lion skins and the skins of other endangered species, turtle shells, elephant tusks the list goes on and all of this to feed the Chinese taste for luxuries. There used to be a market for these products in the west and to an extent there still is. Conservationist groups have done a lot of work to shame people into not buying this stuff and for a while it was actually working. With the economic boom in China that changed. A while ago I watched an interview with an African ranger who commented that "Wherever the Chinese show up the animals disappear". The problem of poaching is bad enough without the Chinese über-class of nouveau rich luxury junkies making it worse and I don't give a hoot for arguments like there being a long and rich tradition of ivory carving in China that will die out if there is no ivory. If I have to choose between luxury obsessed people in China or the West getting their fix of ivory products or elephants surviving as a species I will pick elephants every time and the same goes for tigers, lions, turtles and less cuddly or less cute creatures like the short tailed albatross, 20 % of north american mussel species, the Ganges shark, the addax, pygmy three-toed sloth, the California condor, the Lord Howe Island stick-insect, the okapi, the European fresh water pearl mussel..... the list is so long it depresses me to think about it.

Poison the bastards

[MrL0G1C]

are revered for supposed medicinal qualities

Most materials will soak up another material of the right type afaik, so capture the rare rhino's and soak their horns in something poisonous.

Make anyone using rhino horn medicinally puke their guts up for a month, that'll teach the fuckers.

In fact, someone should take the confiscated rhino horn, poison them and then release them onto the market.

Re:Poison the bastards

[DigiShaman]

Yes, they already do that with ectoparasiticides and they're dyed pink. Once ground up, they can be identified at a boarder customs.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/a...

Re:Poison the bastards

[PPH]

Nobody complains that the ATF requires producers of (non beverage) ethanol to denature it and make all the hobos sick.

Supply chain injection

[Electricity Likes Me]

I'm curious how you'd actually inject these into the supply chain.

At the minimum it seems like you'd need some undercover work, and to be really effective the best way would probably be to catch and turn some of the actual dealers. Conversely, I suppose it wouldn't take more then 1 or 2 deals-cut in order to seriously undermine and devalue the entire trade.

I doubt it because it would work BOTH ways

[argStyopa]

Whatever simple test they could fool by simply "mixing in dna" would likely then be spoofable the other way too: a vendor caught selling rhino horn could tell the authorities either "oh no, it's synthetic actually" or at least he THOUGHT it was. ...because the people who buy rhino horn today aren't doing it to own something that's LIKE rhino horn; they either believe some goofy bullshit it about it making their dicks hard or for some mystical "I want to have something that's forbidden" reason - in either case, 'fake' rhino horn wouldn't cut it anyway, and there will still remain the market for real rhino horn.

So, just like synth diamonds have eliminated...

[Overzeetop]

This will work about as well as synthetic diamonds (which are actual, real diamonds) have collapsed the natural diamond market and eliminated the horrific practices which surround natural diamond mines in under developed areas of the world.

Re:Rhino horns don't even work!

[gbjbaanb]

and the pangolin, what's not used for trinkets or medicine is simply scoffed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

"They asked up to $1,500 (£1,000) a kilo. Asked why they were so expensive, one woman replied with no apparent shame: "Because they're rare and illegal."

My only hope here is that when the pagolins are all dead, the ants they used to eat in great quantities rise up and eat the vietnamese and chinese who put profit above ecology.

Re:This is great

[Rei]

Of course it saves the rhinos. You put 100 times more fake stuff on the market and the price for rhino horn collapses, meaning people stop hunting them.

The brilliant part is that this makes use of something that's normally a bad thing - China's extensive peddling in fakes - to achieve a good result. I doubt it'll stop the really high end of the market, the sort of people who would instruct their buyer to send what they buy sent off to a lab (I don't think some rhino DNA alone would fool a lab, surely it looks different under microscopic examination), but for the rest of the market, it's a neat idea.

Re:This is great

[ArcadeMan]

for the rest of the market, it's a neat idea.

You know what else is a pretty neat idea? Digital watches.

Just sell powdered horn

[gurps_npc]

Just sell powered horn. The majority of consumers don't do microscopic and/or dna tests. Just set up a shop in the right location, ship in a bunch of shredded antelope horn and label it Rhino horn. Have some guy in a white lab cloak stand by to swear it's the real deal.