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A comment on Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa.

Re:Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa by gehwartzen on Monday August 21, 2017 @10:16AM (#15064772)
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.
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Re:Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa by avar on Monday August 21, 2017 @10:25AM (#15064836)
Because aside from the logistics of constantly dying the ever-growing horn of living wild animals, the market is in e.g. rhyno horn powder, so nobody cares what they look like: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/why-doe...
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Re:Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa by gambiting on Monday August 21, 2017 @10:37AM (#15064905)
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?
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Re:Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa by ghostbrainalpha on Monday August 21, 2017 @10:59AM (#15065067)
Of course the market IS saturated by fake product....

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.

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Re:Holding an Auction to Sell Rhino Horn in South Africa by davidhyde on Monday August 21, 2017 @11:14AM (#15065155)
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..
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