I had not been long in Ho Chi Minh City when it was suggested by a regular at my local. We should set up a company and 3D-print rhino horn—using keratin, the stuff of which horns and fingernails are made—and flood the traditional medicine market with it in the interest of ending poaching in Africa. Soren was always coming up with weird ideas like this, but intended the vast majority of them as jokes: one of his other plans was to hold a cow hostage on Indian television and threaten to kill it unless the viewers phoned in an exorbitant ransom.
A good joke is usually funny because there’s an element of truth or logic to it. As it turns out, Soren’s was somewhat more than that: his lark—never pursued, of course—turned out to be prophetic, too. Last month, Pembient, a San Francisco-based biotech company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products,” announced that it would start 3D-printing rhino horns with a very similar end in mind.
If there was a problem with the announcement, it was arguably that that’s what it was: an announcement. While Pembient is happy to tell the world that its product isn’t the real deal, Soren’s plan had at its centre an element of deception. Given that rhino horn’s medicinal qualities are entirely illusory—if the opposite was true, biting one’s fingernails would cure cancer—its proponents’ arguments tend to rely heavily on mysticism and claims of tradition. Impervious as such arguments are to scientific rebuttal, the synthetic product, Soren said, however similar to the real thing, however identical genetically and spectrographically, should be released into the market without mention or allusion to its genesis in a laboratory.
There is a similar argument to be made about bear bile, the chemical makeup of which, it was announced last week, has now been successfully synthesised for the first time. As I wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald recently, bear bile, which does admittedly have some minor medicinal properties, is farmed on an industrial scale in China and on a cottage-industry one in Vietnam. Asiatic black bears, or moon bears, are held in cages too small for them, in many cases for decades at a time, with farmers extracting the contents of their gall bladders on a regular, debilitating basis. Animals Asia founder and CEO Jill Robinson said the development of synthetic bile—undertaken by Chinese manufacturer Kaibao Pharmaceuticals with the backing of the Chinese government—“has the potential to drastically scale back China’s bear bile industry”. But, as The New York Times put it in 2013, traditionalists claim that synthetic and herbal alternatives to the product lack “the therapeutic punch of raw bile”. There will always be those who insist, on either dubious medical grounds or for reasons of prestige, on the real deal. Unsurprisingly, when Pembient surveyed rhino horn users recently, only forty-five per cent said they would be willing to use a synthetic alternative.
Of course, the problem with both approaches—honesty and sleight-of-hand, full disclosure and cloak-and-dagger—is that neither does anything to address the prickly matter of demand. The problem with synthetic alternatives is that they may actually help to increase it. Flooding the market with cheap alternatives will not automatically bring down the price of the real thing—both rhino horn and bear bile are more expensive, kilogram for kilogram, than cocaine or heroin—leaving the profit motive that gets poachers and farmers out of bed in the morning intact. What’s more, as the International Rhino Foundation’s Susie Ellis recently argued, the synthesised products may also open up new markets for the real thing, creating new users who may eventually wish to “trade up”, precisely the opposite effect to the one ostensibly desired.
Perhaps most importantly, the development of such products “reinforces this idea that [they have] some medicinal value when there isn’t any evidence to support [that],” Ellis said. Indeed, it's difficult not to feel that there’s something crass and cynical about the whole affair for this reason. Rather than educating rhino horn and bear bile users about the therapeutic uselessness of their chosen products, Pembient and others are instead gearing up to make a good deal of money trading on their ignorance. (If the nature of the company’s ambitions isn’t clear enough yet, perhaps consider the fact that it also plans to release a horn-laced beer.) While one must always be careful when addressing such ignorance—Occidental finger-wagging can quickly lead to accusations of racism and to the defenders of Oriental tradition doubling down—education is almost certainly more likely to bring about change than enablement. When it comes to saving Africa’s rhinos and liberating Asia’s bears, peddling placebos will likely prove little more than a placebo itself.
