This is a fairly objective article but it would be nice if they offered some evidence that legal trade makes illegal trade less feasible (if there is any). When you see pictures of poor rhino on a horn farm your gut feel is to be disgusted by that farmer. However, the simple laws of supply and demand may put the baddies out of business. Very controversial but at least worth a good think instead of a knee-jerk reaction.
One solution that I have always been supriesed hasn't been considered is cosmetically destroying the horns of living rhinos while preserving their function for the animal. By that I mean either chemically dying the horn some unnatural color or carving/Branding "contraband" or something similar into the outside. I would think that if you can alter the horn enough that it becomes completely unappealing to the secondary market the poaching would stop.
Which only begs the question - how come the black market isn't absolutely saturated with fake rhino horn powder? If it's just keratin, you could make tons of it with little effort and sell it as rhino horn, no? People make fakes of items with much much much less smaller profit margins, yet rhino horn trade is not completely destroyed by fake product?
And the fact that the South African government requires that these farmed horns are dna tagged just gave them a way to identify the real thing. How ironic. Unless this whole thing is designed to trace out the black market distribution network..
This is possibly the best thing to happen to wild rhino populations. I don't see how this is any different to farming cows, chicken, pigs or any other animal.
There will always be demand for rhino horn, so it makes sense to satisfy that demand in a way that does less damage to the wild population.
They do, it is common practice to safely dehorn Rhino in game parks (alternatively some parks will keep all the Rhino in a smaller more easily protected area). However, horns grow and poachers will cut off the part that cannot be safely removed and still get a good yield. I'm assuming that poachers would use tranquilizers if they could because they are less noisy and would therefore be less likely to be caught. However, they are often not very well funded and simply opportunists. Some are though.
Sure, buying meat from cows and pigs which are kept in horrendous conditions is "ethically awful" but I don't call meat eaters(that includes myself) motherfuckers. As far as I can see the only problem with rhino horn is that people kill wild animals to get it - once rhino is farmed, there's no difference between that and farming cows in my mind. In fact it's much better since rhino farmers don't kill rhinos to get the horn.
But when you convince a large mass of people that there is value in your "fake" Rhino Horn, that drives demand for the real thing.
This is why PETA is against even fake ivory keys for your piano. Because it keeps perpetuating that ivory is valuable and desirable.
There will always be demand for rhino horn, so it makes sense to satisfy that demand in a way that does less damage to the wild population.
why don't anti-poachers use that approach? thought rhinos have to die before extracting their horns...
Also when a pride of lions get hungry enough they'll go after anything, at which point having a horn makes all the difference.