I know nothing of that market though, could be entirely wrong

And feathers, turtle shell, but they are made or another type of keratin.

To be honest, each the keratin of each animal is slightly different, with small changes of the composition, something like plastic that can be made softer or harder tweaking the compostition.

Anyway, I guess it's not about the exact composition, but the "magic" part of the rhino horn.

Keratin is readily available and cheap

Here's 50g of it on Amazon for $16: https://www.amazon.com/Myoc-Keratin-Powder-Conditioner-Produ...

And you can get it from chemical manufacturers in purer forms for much more expensive but that's true for any high grade chemical.

In fact, if we type your question into Google we find this 2019 article that even references a 2015 article about attempts to do exactly that: https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22723289/3d-printed-rhino-...

I highly suggest googling solutions that you think are rather obvious. It can often lead to surprising results as things can interestingly become complex. And at the worst case, you find that your idea works and you can throw in a citation to give your proposition more weight. Seems like a win win to me and at very little cost in time.

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/science/scientists-turn-to-radio...

I’m not sure those exist, but sounds like something you want to scan for on the borderline

Reminds me of one of the worst "abolish the Police" arguments: By the time you put a murderer in jail, the victim is already dead.

From the article:

> …will closely monitor the health and vital statistics of the rhinos over a period of six months, in order to determine the viability of this approach.

If this approach is shown to be healthy, I’m sure it could be done much faster.

But seriously, S-curves aren't just about how the middle part looks exponential. Both ends are slow. Slow to start and slow to end. When technology B replaces technology A it is (almost) always WORSE than technology A initially. The difference is that its theoretical maximum is higher. Because guess what? In the long run if you stack a bunch of S-curves together, you get an exponential curve. And this is how so much technology has improved, including transistors, solar, batteries, and so on. Sometimes this slow start can be on the order of decades! The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (1983) wasn't "a failure," it was a step to the IBM Simon (1992) which was a step to the iPhone (2007).

So if you're exclusively chasing things that are better *now*, you won't make any progress. You have to invest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

Sounds like there is some inherent difficulty requiring years of meticulous and dedicated hard work to insert doses into 20 live rhinoceroses.

I'm not quite convinced of this. If you watch the video in the article they demonstrate the procedure. Considering that they typically paint the rhino's horns with substances to make them undesirable to poachers, they clearly have the capacity to subdue and restrain the rhino already. And in the video they show a person using a standard hand drill, who drills into the rhino. You can see this at 0:20 and them insert the device at 0:34, where just after they show another horn being drilled into. And they do it several times throughout the video while the narrator explains the process.

I suspect that the 3 years is far less due to the actual "installing" it into the rhino (as it looks like once subdued the process is really <15 minutes...) but rather to things like regulation and determining the nuances like "how many isotopes do we need" (clearly more than one), "what types of radiation are more detectable?" "what levels of radiation will sustain and be detectable when transporting horns across international airports?", "Are we causing harm to the rhinos through the radiation?", "does the radiation leech into the rhino's body, such that while the device is safe inside the horn it would be harmful," "how often does that happen, especially given when they fight?", "do the devices stay in place for sustained periods of time?" and so on. There's quite a lot of important questions and many I'm sure that an actual expert in this could ask, but I'm nowhere near a rhino expert (or even enthusiast) [though am experienced with radiation technologies] and I have a bunch of questions that would reasonably take years to adequately answer.

It isn't "ah fuck, rhinos are so hard to catch that we're only able to catch one every 2 months" but "okay, we've installed these devices in 5 rhinos, are they still there 3 years later?" and "oh fuck, that type of glue and that drilling depth didn't work because we lost 10 devices in the first year. Time to update our methodology."

I find these kinds of questions magnitudes more likely than the explanation that they couldn't catch 20 rhinos and drill into their horns. Especially given what can be seen in the video about how the rhinos act.

Or the other way: If it really took three years to tag 20 rhinos with everything working at full speed, don't you think the University and the researches themselves would be the first to realize this is impracticle? Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?

Yeah honestly (as an academic; on applied side), when I saw "3 years" my first thought was "wow that's fast." And the second one was "was that just to get approval or is that they've had the device in the rhino 0-3 years and are testing how effective their methods are at staying in and not doing long term damage to the animal?" Because the latter question I can see taking even longer. Though they say a rhino is poached every 20 hrs, so I think there's probably some urgency to the matter where 3 years of testing is good enough.

> Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?

Well... I also don't have faith in journal reviewers so who the fuck knows.