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Poachers kill rhino for his horn at French zoo
- yawz 10y agoI just can't believe this! Even zoos in a country like France aren't safe anymore. 1Kg fetches $60K?!? Not only the ignorance part that drives me mad, but how come so many men can be extremely obsessed about sexual performance? I lose all hope in humanity in moments like these.
- beaconstudios 10y agoimagine how much powder 1kg of Rhino horn can make if ground up - I'm sure the per-dose price isn't very high. Plus, if you look at your email's spam box you'll likely find out just how lucrative black market sexual performance medicine can be.
- Shivetya 10y agodon't need black market, this is a multi billion industry just for Viagra and Cialis
- beaconstudios 10y agoof course, but I was drawing comparison to the black-market trade of rhino horns.
- jbob2000 10y agoWtf? Why even go to the trouble of killing a rhino for that price? Here, take some ground up chicken bone, you won't know the difference.
- lawless123 10y agoit's keratin, just chew your fingernails.
- gambiting 10y agoI imagine the people who are willing to pay so much money DO actually care about buying a real rhino horn. Ground up chicken bones might be identical, but a mobster will pay for a real horn, not a bag of white powder that might or might not be a real horn.
- anigbrowl 10y agoNot only the ignorance part that drives me mad, but how come so many men can be extremely obsessed about sexual performance? Reproduction is literally the basic reason for living. For many people, it's the only reason for living. If you're not philosophically or artistically inclined, what else is there? Eating and sleeping so you can work until you die isn't satisfying, especially when it's extremely obvious that people who are luckier or less scrupulous than others work much less and gain much more. Sex is a fairly democratic comfort in that respect; if you're into someone enough to have sex with them, it's similarly enjoyable whether you're rich or poor. If someone is heavily invested in sexual pleasure and loses access to it then getting that ability back is worth a high price. Now why people buy rhino horn when they could just get viagra or any number of illegal drugs like cocaine that would have similar effects, I have no idea. Probably nominally law-abiding people who have convinced themselves that laws and rules are what make us superior to animals, so that laws and rules about animal welfare can be ignored. Many people have such epistemological blind spots.
- moftz 10y agoMost of the demand is in art made from rhino horn. It fetches a high price and holds it's value well over time. Usually just the scrap from the sculpting process is turned into traditional medicine preparations. https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-decorative-purposes-china/ https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...
- soneil 10y agoNot arguing with you, but the math does check out. The ‘normal’ dose of viagra is 100mg. 1kg into 100mg doses renders 10,000 doses. So $60k is only $6 a dose. At 25mg doses (no idea what the standard dose of rhino is, as you can imagine the fda doesn’t list much) you’re down to a buck fifty. If you dose it in similar quantities to real medications, $60k starts to look cheap.
- overcast 10y agoThis isn't ever going to stop until the ignorant stop believing in magical potions to "cure" ailments.
- amelius 10y agoPerhaps somebody should initiate a randomized clinical trial to find out the obvious, publish the results, and then it will stop.
- overcast 10y agoI don't think you understand the mentality of people who believe in these practices. That's like providing a mountain of scientific evidence against religions, to a devout follower.
- nsxwolf 10y agoI think parent was sarcastic.
- asdfologist 10y agoHow well has that worked for climate science?
- XaspR8d 10y agoWell, we just haven't found a good control planet yet.
- mikestew 10y agoWe just had a person on this very page argue that homeopathy shouldn't be equated with junk science. You think double-blind studies are going to make a lick of difference to poachers, or their customers?
- thatfrenchguy 10y agoJust go to Whole Foods and you'll see this aren't going to stop soon.
- mentos 10y agoHas anyone tried flooding the market for rhino horns with counterfeits? edit: just searched, yes http://www.snopes.com/3d-printed-rhino-horn-developed/ http://www.snopes.com/3d-printed-rhino-horn-developed/
- matthewmarkus 10y agoI'm the CEO of Pembient, one of the companies working on this problem [1]. I would be happy to answer questions on what we're doing. Additionally, it is worth pointing out that a lot of the initial research done on rhino horn usage by conservation NGOs has been debunked by Yufang Gao, Karl Ammann, the Wildlife Justice Commission [2], and others. That is, the use of rhino horn as medicine is not what drives poaching. [1] https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhino-horn/ https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhin... [2] https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-decorative-purposes-china/ https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...
- yawz 10y agoI'm really sorry to hear this side of the problem. I truly hope that bioengineering the rhino horn will be successful in preventing more damage.
- matthewmarkus 10y agoThank you for your positive thoughts. Despite this awful incident in France, there has been some good news on the rhino front. In the five years before our announcement in 2015, rhino poaching was growing an average of 49% or so year-over-year, significantly more than the approximately 1% or less year-over-year growth it has experienced since then. Obviously, correlation doesn't imply causation, but whatever brought about the anomaly has bought the rhinos some time. In fact, South Africa, home to the majority of African rhinos, recently announced its second year of absolute declines in rhino poaching [1]. Hopefully, this trend will continue! [1] http://www.traffic.org/home/2017/2/27/south-africa-annual-rhino-poaching-toll-falls-for-second-yea.html http://www.traffic.org/home/2017/2/27/south-africa-annual-rh...
- transfire 10y agoCan't they get Viagra or Cialis in Vietnam? And that's not a joke question. And if they can get it, why isn't there a huge marketing campaign to make people aware that Rhino horn doesn't do crap, but these drugs actually work.
- Raphmedia 10y agoIt's very hard to beat the placebo effect that consuming a $60k product will generate.
- castis 10y agoThe belief that they're using rhino horn as an aphrodisiac is made up by western culture. The people consuming it do not believe this. https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poaching_for_rhino_horn https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poa...
- sand500 10y agoThen why are they consuming rhino horns? Actually curious.
- castis 10y agoThis link explains it far better than I could: https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poaching_for_rhino_horn https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poa...
- captn3m0 10y agoExcerpt from abstract of the paper[0] linked elsewhere in this thread: >A media content analysis of Chinese (n = 332) and western newspapers (n = 166) from 2000 to 2014 revealed significant differences between perceptions of rhino horn consumption. In Chinese media, rhino horn product acquisition was most frequently reported for investment and collectible value (75%), artistic value (40%), and medical value (29%). In contrast, western media alleged consumption of rhino horn in China was mostly for their medical value (84%) [0]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716303044 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716...
- jlebrech 10y agoif there a way we could make poachers more valuable that the rhino horn?
- restalis 10y agoIf the demand is so high, how about farming? Or are there restrictions on the kind of animals may be breed in farms? Also, poaching can (and should, if you ask me) be addressed in a more serious manner. How about starting at the buyer's market with enticing cash offers and then hunt up the source of the illegal merchandise?
- rtkwe 10y ago> How about starting at the buyer's market with enticing cash offers and then hunt up the source of the illegal merchandise? You're describing a basic sting which is far from a new idea and the poachers aren't idiots when it comes to avoiding them.
- chaostheory 10y agohttps://www.thedodo.com/people-are-farming-rhinos-1592752412.html https://www.thedodo.com/people-are-farming-rhinos-1592752412... > Hume is also one of the people who sued the South African government so the domestic rhino horn trade could be made legal again. Why? It isn't quite clear, since people in South Africa don't really care to buy rhino horn — that market is in Asia.
- twright 10y ago> If the demand is so high, how about farming? Or are there restrictions on the kind of animals may be breed in farms? Ethics of keeping large plains grazing mammals aside, farming large mammals like rhinos would be very expensive and costly. It would also take quite a while to get up and running. Gestation period for larger mammals is very long. Cows about 9 months reaching maturity within 3 years; Rhinos are 16-18 months, 6-7 years to maturity (for females, males do in 10-12 years); and even longer time ranges for elephants. They also consume a much more food, cows 24/lbs of hay per day and rhino's 120 lbs/day.
- captainmuon 10y agoRhinos are notoriously hard to breed. And I guess you could set up a farm: Build a fence, put Rhinos there, provide food and water. But that's very similar to the reservations that already exist. And those are already hard to defend against poachers, but how would you defend your farm?
- cfv 10y agoIt takes a special kind of asshole to do this to an animal in a western zoo. I expect the culprits to pay a very steep price for their crime.
- gpvos 10y agoThe assholes who do this in Africa are equally bad. Nothing special about them.
- transfire 10y agoFirst we need mandatory life sentences for poachers of endangered animals. Secondly poachers caught in the act should be shot on site -- just like we would if someone was caught in the middle of murdering other humans.
- thecompilr 10y agoHear, hear
- khalilravanna 10y agoI know it's insane to equate a human life to an animal's but this makes me so furious I want to agree. At the very least it seems we need to have repercussions in place that are so grave that these people stop trying to drive animals to extinction for their own stupid gains.
- anigbrowl 10y agoIt's not insane. Other animals aren't as intelligent as human animals* but they're sentient and have personality. It's perfectly OK to treat such people who abuse or kill animals with the same disregard they show for others. * the word animal derives from the same root as 'animated' - we are animals because we can control our movements, n contrast to rooted entities like plants.
- arghimonmobile0 10y agoI find these kinds of statements ironic when daily we kill millions of cows in horrible factory abattoirs for the meat. Pity we can't at least be consistent; endangered or not, you're taking a life. Outrage seems justified.
- gambiting 10y agoI think the difference is that a cow is only alive because we are breeding it for meat/milk. If we were breeding rhinos for their horns then I wouldn't have any more problem with killing them than I do with killing cows for meat.
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- msie 10y agoI wouldnt be surprised if the zoo had terrible security and no cameras. The poachers left a second horn behind because they were supposedly scared off.
- XJOKOLAT 10y agoFucking awful.
- electriclove 10y agoI wouldn't call France 'western' Feels like a third world country nowadays
- Pica_soO 10y agoIf those rhinos would be eating a arsenic rich diet- and arsenic would aggregate in there horns.. would poachers check for that?