Fake Rhino Horn

So I was reading an article recently about the Rhino horn market and the recent creation of a fake rhino horn. The idea is that scientists want to flood the market with these indistinguishable fakes and reduce the price of the Rhino horn and thus reduce the shocking number of poachings in a year. In the last year alone, 892 Rhinos were poached which is a reduction from last year but still, a ton considering there only 24,000 Rhinos left.

Rhino Horn has prestige due to its position in Asia as a curative product for ailments like cancer and a symbol of wealth. In reality, the horn amounts to a large deposit of keratin as in the stuff that's in your nails.

A large global black market exists for this product and its extensive reach has been the target for international conservationists. The government has been able to sniff out the trade and move it to the black market, but yet it continues. In South Africa, a dog recently sniffed out 1.3 million in Rhino Horn. It's been for some time that officials have blamed this entire industry and practice on the Chinese buyers that encourage the poachers to kill and process these animals. It is why this solution seems like a great way to combat this problem. Many will say its simple supply and demand, but I think economists (I myself am an Economics major) tend to oversimplify. Conservationists themselves have said this solution is not as simple as it may seem and could potentially be dangerous. One risk is that introducing a convincing fake could actually increase demand for the real thing. In the case of the Elephant horns, the introduction of fakes actually increased poaching. Dr. Johnson, one of the lead researchers in this program said this “I’m a scientist, but you have to know when science won’t help.” This quote says so much about this situation in particular, but also reminds me off how sometimes when we as humans discover something that may be simple and remarkable, it can actually have hidden and very unintended consequences.

(A picture from the recent capture of over $ 1.3 million in Rhino Horns)

It reminds me of one of my favorite stories of this kind: the story Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman in the late 1800s, who was obsessed with the great city of Troy. He went searching for it and identified a location after years and years of copious research. The place he found was a site with layers of cities built on top of each other. So with belief in his research, he began removing layers and layers of cities built on top of each other. After removing 9 layers, he proclaimed that he had discovered the "The City of Troy". The truth was that he had actually dug too deep and the city he claimed to have found was actually a city from nearly 1,000 years before Troy. Thus the layers that he had removed before and which he destroyed were the true city of Troy. This was an unintended consequence of what was a noble effort. This reminds me of the Rhino because what sometimes seems to be an enormous academic, social, historical (insert whatever adjective you like) discovery can actually be not the case. This happens all the time with social sciences because some academics and those far removed from the problem at hand produce labs and reports that sometimes fail to recognize the underlying social, cultural and historical circumstances. This Rhino story is fascinating because on the surface it offers what seems like a simple solution for an animal facing terrible extinction, but until we fully understand the people that are on both sides of the demand and supply there is no way for us to know what the true consequences are to the introduction of fake rhino horns.