imagine 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.
I 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.
Not 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.
Most 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.
Not 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.
I 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.
We 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?
I've never been to a Whole Foods store so perhaps the joke is lost on me but isn't the whole point of eating whole foods, escaping the potential yet unknown "magic" combinations that occur with food processing?
I've only ever been to the ones in Portland, Oregon, but I haven't seen any of the quack remedies outside of the homeopathy and nutrition aisle (the same way that Fred Meyer does it).
I'd be more inclined to call it 5% of the floor space at most, but maybe there are differences between stores.
Not really. Every Whole Foods I shopped at only had a small homeopathy section along with shampoos and beauty products, most of the stuff they sell is regular food just organic.
Homeopathic refers to a specific set of products, where the "active ingredient" is diluted to the point where it is no longer present. It is literally water.
There are other types of non-standard remedies, which you might be talking about. But Homeopathic, specifically, is a synonym for water with fancy labeling.
Oscillococcinum is just sugar. And yes, I've been fed many Oscillococcinum pills as a kid because my mum was into homeopathy - did my flu go away? You bet it did! But there's zero evidence that it happened because of Oscillococcinum - it would have passed away naturally without me taking sugar pills few times a day.
I really don't want to believe it. It doesn't make any sense. But I did see some relatives get well from some issues (none are serious) going this so called 'homeopathic' route after trying out regular doctors. Are some of the regular medicines so ineffective that a placebo is trouncing them ? That probably requires some study.
Placebo medicine does work for some people, so it's not surprising that some people get better after taking homeopathic pills. But there's nothing about homeopathic pills that makes them work - anything with a label "medicine" glued to it would have worked, if placebo works for you.
Next time you get a common cold, pick any (non-toxic) substance you like, ingest it twice a day, and within about a week you should be feeling much better.
There is no compelling evidence that Oscillococcinum performs better than placebo[1][2]. And, at 200CK dilution there wouldn't be a single molecule of the active ingredient left, it's literally just sugar water, so yeah it's junk science or quack medicine and no better than rhino horn. If you use it and feel better, that's the placebo effect because there's nothing in Oscillococcinum but water and sugar.
> I think it's a bit disingenuous to conflate all homeopathic remedies with "quack" science.
That's true, it's not science at all, but homeopathy is a particular form of quackery (and many homeopathic products are frauds on top of the quackery of homeopathy.)
You won't convince people on this sub. They will quote some molecular theory. People don't realize that science changes, and current theories of molecules may be superseded.
Of course science changes. But it's the best thing we have to go off of. Otherwise you're just guessing in the dark. If you have scientific evidence of the efficacy of.... whatever it is you're talking about, you will gain some attention. Homeopathy specifically has been quite soundly put to rest as ineffective.
They typically have an herbal remedy section that ranges from peppermint menthol for sore throats to some truely outlandish cures. I think it's those "natural medicines" on the reishi-mushrooms-align-chakras-boosting-immune-system side of things gp is referring to.
here at the downtown WF in Seattle, virtually every check out aisle has at least a few vials of homeopathic garbage. they also go quite hard in the pseudo science marketing against GMOs, gluten, and coconut / palm ingredients. apart from selling unreasonably priced produce of no particular merit, they are just another grocery store selling a particular brand of chemical puritanism and superstition.
Wood is a renewable resource, and most paper comes from tree farms, just like housing timber. Which is why the wood is so soft these days, compared to the old trees they used to clear cut.
"According to the USDA Forest Service, four million trees are planted every day in the United States. Of this amount, the wood and paper products industry plants on average 1.7 million trees daily,1 excluding millions of additional seedlings regenerated naturally. In Canada, natural regeneration is supplemented by the planting of 600 million seedlings per year."
"According to The State of America’s Forests, a report released by the Society of American Foresters, replanting and reforestation efforts have helped keep forestland stable. There are nearly 750 million acres of forests in the U.S. — about the same as 100 years ago. Annual net growth of U.S. forests is 36 percent higher than the volume of annual tree removals. Total forest cover in the U.S. and Canada basically remained the same from 1990 to 2005.3 Furthermore, less than one half of one percent of Canada’s forestland is harvested annually.4 Sustainable forests are also carefully managed to help prevent catastrophic damage from fires, disease and insects."
Ignorant people don't stop believing in nonsense. They have to be simultaneously educated, and there must be protections so that it's safe to criticize nonsense.
I'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.
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!
Honestly, my view is that demand reduction [1] is a monoculture that has taken over conservation and produced very little positive results. In fact, it could be argued that demand reduction has even increased wildlife consumption via boomerang effects [2]! I would like to see another school of thought, harm reduction [3], challenge the demand reduction orthodoxy.
TL;DR: I can think of no campaign that can reduce demand; although, I can think of several that might accidently increase it.
Can'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.
Excerpt 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%)
This is an inaccurate understanding. The main difference between western and Asian societies is the belief in medical value - about 0% in the west vs 29% as documented here. It's not that the western media believes most Asian consumers are desperate for medical ingredients, but that it is focused on this point of difference.
That ivory has an aesthetic value is not in dispute; it has an aesthetic value here int eh west too. People are fine with paying extra for antiques made with the product of endangered species, and I'm to sure there's anything you can do about that unless you try banning or heavily regulating the trad in antiques, so that people aren't allowed to buy items made out of mahogany or ivory because allowing such items to be the subject of commerce would drive demand for those commodities now, as we are seeing. We don't talk about this because we don't want to ban antiques and we don't have a good idea about how to deal with the fact that their ongoing commercial existence creates demand for rare goods.
Likewise critiquing investment and collectibility seems almost superfluous to western media because such speculation is a basic mode of capitalism; it is so natural to observe that the existence of human desire will lead to the establishment of a market for the satisfaction of that desire that we take it for granted, even when the market's demand for something with high profit potential significantly outweighs consumers' demand for a particular good. As with drugs and other contraband, you can have many intermediaries trading in and pushing up the price proportionate to the distance consumers wish to put between themselves and the suppliers (both to lessen criminal responsibility and as a sort of Veblen good whose primary purpose is social signaling about the owner's economic ability to waste money on it).
If 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?
> 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.
> 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.
Rhinos 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?
First 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.
I 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.
It'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.
I 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.
I 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.
It's not just the poachers, it's also the customers. Allowing a precious animal to get killed just to get some worthless, not even effective powder, in a futile attempt to enhance their malehood.
Evil me sometimes fantasizes about real-life shadowbanning such people. When you catch them, mark them with an RFID or indelible paint. Now that you can recognize them, give their votes in elections the weight of zero. Skip them when hiring for important positions. Let them live their merry life in peace, but completely remove them from "adult affairs". You don't have to tell them. I reserve the same treatment for racists and homophobes by the way.
Of course you can't and shouldn't do that. On a serious note, it boggles the mind how much harm is done by ignorant and superstitious people even today...
I 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.
87 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread1Kg 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.
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.
https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...
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.
I'd be more inclined to call it 5% of the floor space at most, but maybe there are differences between stores.
Have you ever used Arnica gel on a bruise? Oscillococcinum for a flu? Extremely effective naturally derived products.
There are other types of non-standard remedies, which you might be talking about. But Homeopathic, specifically, is a synonym for water with fancy labeling.
So, quack quack?
[1]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001957...
[2]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Oscillococcinum+evidenc...
That's true, it's not science at all, but homeopathy is a particular form of quackery (and many homeopathic products are frauds on top of the quackery of homeopathy.)
"According to the USDA Forest Service, four million trees are planted every day in the United States. Of this amount, the wood and paper products industry plants on average 1.7 million trees daily,1 excluding millions of additional seedlings regenerated naturally. In Canada, natural regeneration is supplemented by the planting of 600 million seedlings per year."
"According to The State of America’s Forests, a report released by the Society of American Foresters, replanting and reforestation efforts have helped keep forestland stable. There are nearly 750 million acres of forests in the U.S. — about the same as 100 years ago. Annual net growth of U.S. forests is 36 percent higher than the volume of annual tree removals. Total forest cover in the U.S. and Canada basically remained the same from 1990 to 2005.3 Furthermore, less than one half of one percent of Canada’s forestland is harvested annually.4 Sustainable forests are also carefully managed to help prevent catastrophic damage from fires, disease and insects."
edit: just searched, yes http://www.snopes.com/3d-printed-rhino-horn-developed/
[1] https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhin...
[2] https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...
I truly hope that bioengineering the rhino horn will be successful in preventing more damage.
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-rh...
TL;DR: I can think of no campaign that can reduce demand; although, I can think of several that might accidently increase it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_reduction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_effect_(psychology)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction
https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poa...
>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/S0006320716...
That ivory has an aesthetic value is not in dispute; it has an aesthetic value here int eh west too. People are fine with paying extra for antiques made with the product of endangered species, and I'm to sure there's anything you can do about that unless you try banning or heavily regulating the trad in antiques, so that people aren't allowed to buy items made out of mahogany or ivory because allowing such items to be the subject of commerce would drive demand for those commodities now, as we are seeing. We don't talk about this because we don't want to ban antiques and we don't have a good idea about how to deal with the fact that their ongoing commercial existence creates demand for rare goods.
Likewise critiquing investment and collectibility seems almost superfluous to western media because such speculation is a basic mode of capitalism; it is so natural to observe that the existence of human desire will lead to the establishment of a market for the satisfaction of that desire that we take it for granted, even when the market's demand for something with high profit potential significantly outweighs consumers' demand for a particular good. As with drugs and other contraband, you can have many intermediaries trading in and pushing up the price proportionate to the distance consumers wish to put between themselves and the suppliers (both to lessen criminal responsibility and as a sort of Veblen good whose primary purpose is social signaling about the owner's economic ability to waste money on it).
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
* 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.
And I agree with you. I would also add "bounties on poachers" to your statement.
Evil me sometimes fantasizes about real-life shadowbanning such people. When you catch them, mark them with an RFID or indelible paint. Now that you can recognize them, give their votes in elections the weight of zero. Skip them when hiring for important positions. Let them live their merry life in peace, but completely remove them from "adult affairs". You don't have to tell them. I reserve the same treatment for racists and homophobes by the way.
Of course you can't and shouldn't do that. On a serious note, it boggles the mind how much harm is done by ignorant and superstitious people even today...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811990 and marked it off-topic.