> Proponents argue that an open trade would flood the market and deflate the bubble—the street value of horn currently stands at $100,000 a kilogram, more than that of cocaine—driving down the incentive to poach.
It would not decrease the value enough to make poaching not profitable for the poachers. Proposals like this one are very frequent but none of them address the issue of how exactly are the animals living in the wild protected against poaching. The assumption seems to be that as long as there are ranchers raising these animals for profit, the species should be protected. It does not address the issue of what will happen to the species once the demand for rhino horn plummets.
These legalized sales are very unpredictable. For example, the current ivory poaching crisis is attributed to the 2008 CITES reclassification of ivory that let some African countries sell their ivory stockpiles to China and Japan. This event caused an increase in demand for ivory products in China and Japan and the demand for ivory has been increasing year over year since then. As a result, poaching has skyrocketed to meet the demand.
If you live in Washington state, please support Initiative 1401 (http://saveanimalsfacingextinction.org) on the November state ballot. This initiative will help with reducing the amount of illegal wildlife products coming to the US. Most of these products come to the US from China so ports in Washington state are a prime destination for the ships smuggling these products. California has recently passed a similar law.
I've recently started volunteering with the campaign and we are looking for more volunteers who would help out with the campaign efforts. If you live in Washington state and have 2 hours of free time every now and then and want to help out, email me at adamnemecek at gmail.com.
I suspect that these proposals are partly due to desperation. Nothing else seems to be working; At least if we're farming them there's an incentive to keep enough alive that they won't go extinct.
The thing though is that these proposals usually come from groups that are not exactly impartial. These include e.g. Safari Clubs, "anti-environmentalist think tanks", ranchers and other groups who would gain from free trade of wildlife products.
> Nothing else seems to be working;
That's the thing though, not much has been tried as far as bans go. The current bans leave a lot of loopholes so getting around the restrictions isn't exactly hard.
It would not decrease the value enough to make poaching not profitable for the poachers. Proposals like this one are very frequent but none of them address the issue of how exactly are the animals living in the wild protected against poaching. The assumption seems to be that as long as there are ranchers raising these animals for profit, the species should be protected. It does not address the issue of what will happen to the species once the demand for rhino horn plummets.
These legalized sales are very unpredictable. For example, the current ivory poaching crisis is attributed to the 2008 CITES reclassification of ivory that let some African countries sell their ivory stockpiles to China and Japan. This event caused an increase in demand for ivory products in China and Japan and the demand for ivory has been increasing year over year since then. As a result, poaching has skyrocketed to meet the demand.
If you live in Washington state, please support Initiative 1401 (http://saveanimalsfacingextinction.org) on the November state ballot. This initiative will help with reducing the amount of illegal wildlife products coming to the US. Most of these products come to the US from China so ports in Washington state are a prime destination for the ships smuggling these products. California has recently passed a similar law.
I've recently started volunteering with the campaign and we are looking for more volunteers who would help out with the campaign efforts. If you live in Washington state and have 2 hours of free time every now and then and want to help out, email me at adamnemecek at gmail.com.