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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?
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?
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.
"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."
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
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.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Animal horns have intricate ordered microscopic structures that no 3D printer can reproduce, but that are easy to look for with a microscope.
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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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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.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
What about the Ant People? They owe us money.
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?
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.
You know what else is a pretty neat idea? Digital watches.
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