Scientists created a fake rhino horn — but should we use it?
In Africa, 892 rhinos were poached for their horns in 2018, down from a high of 1,349 killed in 2015. 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.
With such properties, Vollrath believes his artificial horn could be used to covertly flood the market with a cheap, convincing replacement, reducing the demand that leads to rhinos being slaughtered.Some wealthy elites in China and Vietnam continue to give rhino horn as gifts and, in Vietnam, bring it to parties as a hangover preventive. In China, it’s also carved into jewelry and ornate cups, and collected for speculation purposes.
Story continuesPembient, a Seattle-based bioengineering company, is exploring the development of 3D-printed rhino horn. Matthew Markus, Pembient’s chief executive, said he would be open to testing the new horsehair formula.Critics say that fake rhino horn risks stimulating demand for real horn and that it would complicate policing.
For 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. Hsiang cautioned, for example, that experiments trying to undermine black markets in elephant ivory by selling legal ivory backfired and ultimately led to increased poaching.
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