China reverses ban on medical use of tiger and rhino products

Many TCM doctors said "A real doctor is firstly a compassionate person thus will never encourage people to drive another species to extinction." "There aren't any medicinal materials that are irreplacable, there are only foolish doctors don't know how to replace them. Thus if a doctor ask you to use endangered species, it only proves that he is a cheat." Moreover, acording to the research of real TCM doctors, rhino horn is not listed as an important material in ancient medicine book, it is only hyped in recent times by some incompetent "doctors". Because most patients cannot afford such a expensive material, they will think their incurabilities are not the fault of the doctor, but their poverty. For the tiger bone, the Chinese TCM doctors had found the mole rat bones were perfect replacements for the tiger bones nearly twenty years ago.
On the other side, there is still a rhino farm in Yunnan with hundreds of white rhinos from South Africa, and it is said that they breed well. To made the rhinos feel more at home, they even added giraffes and zebras into the rhinos' pastures. They placed many special grinding discs around the pastures and when the rhinos rub their horns against those grindling discs, the debris from the horns will fall into the collecters beneath. I don't believe there are any medicine effects within the rhino horns, but I also don't dislike the idea of farming rhinos, the only problem is, both TCM hospitals and buyers don't care about the origin and legal identification of the horns, thus many sellers will use horns from wild-poached individuals and mixed them within the legal horn powders from the rhino farm.

 

John Hume is already farming Rhinos and has over 1,600 and calves being born every day. He has spent over $100 million protecting them and is sitting on tones of horn he cuts off all Rhinos every year, which could be used to pay for Rhino protection.
What we have been doing has not been working and poaching continues. Restricting supplies just drives the price up more which encourages poaching. Why not market Rhino horn as a renewable natural product it is, and use the money to protect them. A legal supply will force the price down and reduce poaching.
https://africageographic.com/blog/rhino-breeder-john-hume-bankruptcy-appeals-cash/

 

**Because one-off sales of stockpiled ivory, justified on the same grounds, have led to spikes in poaching and the funds generated have been widely misappropriated, in breach of CITES.
**Because, as others have suggested, legal sources provide easy cover for illegal sources. Whilst genetic barcoding has helped expose this in recent years, it remains relatively time-consuming and expensive.
**Because farming threatened species leads to market expansion (e.g. vicuñas) and puts a premium on wild stock as the "genuine article" (e.g. tigers), much like organic or free-range produce in western countries. There's little/no evidence it relieves pressure on wild populations.

John Hume and other wealthy South Africans are sitting on legally worthless rhino horn stockpiles, which would be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars on an open market. It's not hard to see why they argue legalising trade is a good idea.

Then I envy you. Rhinos and tigers might catch headlines, but, from a biodiversity perspective, this isn't even the worst conservation news I've heard this week. How about the threat to two decades of environmental progress under Brazil's new president-elect? Or, for that matter, China's own infrastructure projects in the Amazon basin and other hyperdiverse tropical forests?

 

Unfortunately, I don't think it's even the worst conservation news caused by TCM use. Many species of turtle and tortoise have been vacuumed out of Southeast Asia destined for Chinese markets, and the pangolin body count in places like the Philippines and Vietnam is calculated in tonnage. And these are species that don't have high public appeal or a wealth of conservation funding secured for them, so I believe the future is even bleaker for those species.

To give a more general statement that I think supplements @Giant Panda's detailed counterpoints, the problem isn't that the supply and demand system is being hampered, suppressed, or ignored as a solution; the supply and demand system *is* the problem. The whole point of capitalism is to use a resource to make a profit; therefore, the capitalist solution to supply problems is to find or utilize a different supply. This ignores the fact that there shouldn't be a demand for rhino horn in the first place; it is a resource people don't need, and even if it was it would be extremely unlikely that doctors and scientists couldn't find another way to replicate the product. The answer is not to find a better way of supplying rhino horn to meet Chinese demand; the answer is to find a way to eliminate the demand, while also doing everything possible to restrict supply in the meantime. This means a focus on education, advertising of alternative products, and frequent inspection and regulation of companies and pharmacies in order to hold irresponsible suppliers accountable, with anti-poaching measures and border checks being routine and supplementary.

 

Those wealthy people are the only ones who are spending their own millions to save animals like Rhinos. John Hume is running out of money and will no longer be able to protect over 1,600 Rhinos, do you want him to allow them to be poached when he can no longer pay his guards?

As rhino horn weighs around 4 kg I will estimate they can cut 2 kg from each rhino yearly. The internet says it is worth $65,000 a kg, so each rhino may produce $130,000 worth a year for its whole lifetime. If John Hume can continue to protect his herd he will have 2,000 soon.
That works out to an yearly income of $260,000,000. Even if my estimates are over double the true figure $100,000,000 would still be enough money to more than pay for rhino protection.
Legalizing horn sale would not just give a one off income from stockpiled horn it would be a continuing source of money for Rhino conservation.

Current prohibition of horn sales has not helped and has just forced prices up and poaching has not reduced. It is time we became progressive with conservation as what we have been doing is not working. it is insanity to continue to do the same thing and expect a different result.

 

I disagree that it's just wealthy people spending to save wildlife. Lots of national governments in rhino range countries have expended considerable resources on conservation with great success, including India, Nepal, Kenya, Uganda (I understand things didn't go so well with rhinos there in the 20th century, but wildlife is doing quite well overall in the 21st), Tanzania and Botswana. Not to mention the work of NGOs and local communities.

This is not to attack your overall point - it's a valid one, and merits all the consideration it seems to be getting in the conservation community (incl. all the CITES conferences), even if my personal opinion is more in line with the arguments eloquently made by @Coelacanth18 and @Giant Panda. It just seems that sometimes the importance of these private conservationists can be overstated in African/Asian contexts because the West tends to portray conservation in Africa and Asia as a doomsday scenario, when it's not.

Indian, black and white rhinos are all on the increase, according to IUCN; white rhinos aren't even listed as "vulnerable" anymore. If you look at conservation in most of Africa and South Asia from a "1900-2018" perspective, sure, things haven't worked. But if you consider that current practices have only been around 20-30 years in most of these countries, I think you'll find we've done a much better job than we sometimes get credit for. And a sudden boost to rhino horn demand can threaten all that hard-fought progress.

 

I'm sorry, but sometimes I have trouble not seeing the world as a doomsday scenario.

Rhinos may be doing a little better (just forget that Sumatran one!) but biodiversity overall is on a dramatic decrease, which is only slighly mitigated by the conservation movement. If anything we have done a terrible job at conserving the biosphere and the species that make it up. Not just in Africa or Asia, but all over the globe.

 

Just to add to @Mbwamwitu's post, this is a good slogan, but specious logic. Let's not forget that South African white rhinos represent one of the most successful megafauna recoveries in history. Since the export ban was introduced, populations have increased exponentially. Recent trends are certainly worrying, but aggressive conservation efforts have been overwhelmingly successful.

Which is not to say I disagree we should also try new things. For a novel strategy that actually works, how about using forensics to map and break up poaching networks (see http://rhodis.co.za/)? Conservation will always be an arms race between poachers and environmentalists, but legalising trade would be parochial, counterproductive short-termism.

I'm not an optimist by nature, but conservation necessitates an optimistic approach. Study after study shows that painting an overwhelmingly negative picture leads to defeatism. By offering glimmers of hope (and there is hope), you can inspire people to improve.

 

I very much agree with this, and I should say that I'm in general quite optimistic. But every now and then, like I said, it can be hard to stay optimistic.

 

China temporarily restores ban on rhino, tiger products after uproar - CNN

It seems the lifting of the ban has at least been put on hold.