Q: Would legalizing the sale of rhino horn satisfy the demand and yet reduce poaching? A: It is not believed so. It would take a large amount of horns to flood the market and sufficiently drop the prices enough to put poachers off.
Legalizing the trade could also provide an opportunity for the laundering of illegally acquired horn, and stockpiles held in private hands. It is believed to of had quite the opposite effect. Q: Why not dehorn rhinos?
A: The reason you might want to dehorn a rhino is to protect them from the threat of poachers, on the assumption that a rhino with no horn is no longer a target.
With rhino horn reaching such high prices, it is still worth poachers targeting dehorned rhinos with a little bit of horn left. Dehorning would need to be done at least once a year to prove effective, and with wild rhinos it would be difficult, expensive, and dangerous to both rhinos and operators. Rhinos also have their horns for a reason, to protect their young and defense.
If we removed the horns, the rhinos may not be as well equipped to survive. But this is a precarious place to live. An active volcano is just 50km away. That's why establishing a safe site for another population of Javan rhinos in Indonesia is a priority. During confrontations, they growl and make 'trumpet calls'.
Rhinos also communicate through their poo and urine. When rhino poo in the same place as other rhinos — an area known as a latrine — they can smell the poo and urine of other individuals, and know who's in the area. Asian rhinos are also excellent swimmers, crossing rivers with ease. But their African relatives are very poor swimmers and can drown in deep water — so they stick to wallowing in mud for a cool-down.
Poaching gangs are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Still, Gao acknowledged ordinary people's lingering beliefs regarding the traditional medicine value remain a long-term challenge.
On the bright side, traditional Chinese medicine experts have increasingly joined the fight to reduce the demand for rhino horn.
When China officially banned the international trade in , it followed up by removing rhino horn as a medical ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine's pharmacopeia and curriculum. Practitioners promoted alternative ingredients such as water buffalo horn and herbal substitutes. But she acknowledges the challenges of convincing some customers that the historical use of rhino horn need no longer apply. Already a subscriber?
Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. With natural breeding attempts nixed for the northern white rhinos, conservationists have turned to in vitro fertilization.
However, IVF in these rhinoceroses comes with its own set of challenges, including figuring out how to get immature eggs to develop outside of the female's body and also how to inject sperm into these eggs. As for the Sumatran rhinos, they are hanging on by a thread as well. Along with the Javan rhino, Sumatran rhinos are barely hanging on in the wild. They went extinct in Vietnam in and in Malaysia in , according to the International Rhino Foundation.
Small populations of the subspecies survive in three national parks in Sumatra. And in March , conservationists captured a live Sumatran rhinoceros in the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo for the first time.
Though a camera-trap image snapped in revealed Sumatran rhinos did survive in this region called Kalimantan, the capture of the female marked the first time in 40 years that humans had physically contacted a live Sumatran rhino there.
Rhino horns are made of keratin, which is also the key component of human hair and fingernails. But the horns are not just dense clumps of hair. CT scans have shown dense mineral deposits of calcium and melanin in the core of the horn. The calcium makes the horn stronger, and the melanin protects it from the sun's UV rays, according to scientists at Ohio University. The horns are similar to horse hooves, turtle beaks and cockatoo bills, said Tobin Hieronymus, an OU doctoral student. Rhino horns tend to curve backward , toward the head, because the keratin in front grows faster than the keratin in the back, Hieronymus told Live Science.
The outside of the horn is rather soft and can be worn down or sharpened after years of use, according to the San Diego Zoo. If a horn breaks off, it can gradually grow back. Black rhinos, white rhinos and Sumatran rhinos have two horns. Javan rhinos and greater one-horned rhinos have one. On the black rhino, the front horn can grow to 20 to 51 inches 51 to centimeters , while the rear horn can grow to about 20 inches, according to the International Rhino Foundation.
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