Rather than attempt to police the source of rhino horn, it is better to remover the demand. If there were no demand for the rhino horn then its value would decrease to zero thus removing the profit for the poachers.
The bulk of the trade in illegally poached rhino horn is to China and Korea where it is used by practitioners of traditional Asian medicine.
So, what if the uses of rhino horn in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) could be backed up by evidence-based medicine? If it could be proven that the specific strain of keratin found in rhino horn was actually a cure for the ailments that practitioners of TCM prescribe it for then would we then condone the legal farming of these animals as a way of harvesting the active commodity used to make a clinically tested and thus recognised medicine?
While this would effectively preserve the species as illegal poaching would now be replaced by regulated animal husbandry I suspect this would fail to be a cost-effective solution - rhinos are expensive to raise to a maturity where the horn could be harvested. What would happen is Big Parma would get involved, just as we no longer chew willow bark to release the salicylic acid that cures a head ache, (chemists found a way of synthesising the active component as acetylsalicylic acid and marketed it as Aspirin), the active component in Rhino horn would be synthesised and marketed in pill form.
Alas this will not happen since there is no active component in rhino horn to be synthesised, it is the same keratin that is found in hair and finger-nails and the proteins involved have no immediate medicinal value. Rhino horn is as effective as a cure as chewing your finger-nails is. In the past Big Pharma has investigated traditional cures and medicines and those few that worked they marketed, but so much failed to produce any result at all, and some even proved to be more harm than good, that research in this area is practically non-existent. Honestly, if Monsanto and GlaxoSmithKline see nothing in this research to make money from then it's a dead duck, they may be better served as the ingredients for a nice Wonton soup than a medical curative.
Unfortunately TCM is not evidence-based medicine, nor is it science-based medicine, it is merely a branch of so-called alternative medicine that continues to flourish in the 21st century despite having no clinical data to support any of its practices. Like homoeopathy, it popularity is not based upon rationality but on belief.
This is not confined to Asian countries, here in the sleepy Hampshire market town near where I live there is a Chinese Medic despite there being no Chinese community in the town:
(I'm not claiming that this shop sells medicine produced from illegally poached animals btw.)
What concerns me here is not the treating ailments and disease with a few harmless herbs and spices, if people want to take a sachet of "natural" ingredients to cure their backache or whatever then that is their choice, it is their body after all and perhaps those people would benefit from a change in diet anyway. My concern is why this practice exists at all in the Western world - that it is acceptable as an alternative.
If Big Pharma released a drug into the market without regulated clinical trials to prove their safety and effectiveness there would be out-cry and uproar, yet in alternative medicine there are no such safe-guards and regulation. This is because it has the (false) tag "natural" that alleviates any concerns that the public may have had in their use. Yet "natural" does not mean "safe" or "harmless" - for example there is nothing safe and harmless in munching on the leaves of a Foxglove, in fact every part of that common garden plant has enough digoxin to kill you stone dead. There are more toxic plants in the natural world than there are safe ones. All "natural" remedies have is trial and error - if it makes you feel worse you stop taking it, if it makes you feel better you keep taking it - if it does nothing you keep taking it and if it kills you then the "quack" stops prescribing it (maybe). These traditional, "natural", so-called alternative medicines have over 2000 years of "trial and error" to support them but they cannot produced evidence that any of them will cure anything - all they can say is 'here, take this, it won't kill you (maybe)'.
Of course, the only harm caused by powdered rhino horn is to the rhino itself - it is difficult to recover from a bullet to the head - no one ever died from ingesting ground-down keratin.
Edited by Dean - April 01 2015 at 05:23
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What is your opinion on poaching of Rhinos
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Dean wrote:
- Exactly my thoughts and concerns