One way to save rhinos might be to flood the horn market with fakes. But that would require the fakes to be good ones
RHINOCEROS HORNS are big business. Traditional Chinese medicine uses them to treat rheumatism and gout, even though they have no actual pharmaceutical properties beyond placebo. And Yemeni craftsmen carve them into dagger handles. A kilogram of rhino horn can thus command as much as $60,000, so there is tremendous incentive for poachers to hunt the animals. Since almost all rhinoceros populations are endangered, several critically, this is a serious problem.
Examination under a microscope showed that hairs collected from horses’ tails had similar dimensions and symmetry to those found in the horns of rhinos. They also shared a spongy core structure. The only thing that set the two apart was a scaly layer on the horse hairs that was absent from those of the rhino. This, the researchers were able to strip this away by bathing their horse hairs in a solution of lithium bromide.
Small artificial horns cured this way in a matter of days. Larger ones took a few weeks. The result was a material that, with some polishing, looked identical to rhino horn. Yet, the researchers knew that tricking the naked eye would not be enough. Specimens on the black market are inspected carefully before sale, so for the false horns to be effective they would need to stand up to close scrutiny. To this end, Dr Vollrath and Dr Mi decided to test their product in greater detail.
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