Unfortunately by the time this detects a piece of ivory, the damage is already done. If it took 3 years to inject 20 rhinos, it's unlikely that a large enough portion of the population could be injected to act as an effective deterrent for those actually killing the animals. Even for those actually involved in moving the ivory, it's only a deterrent if they actually face consequences at these borders - many states have weak enforcement of anti-ivory laws, and many more have bribable customs agents. Further, ivory has a value to weight ratio that is extremely conducive to smuggling.
By comparison, infusion which puts a dye and an anti-consumption toxin in the horns to render the ivory worthless and thus prevent the animals from being killed in the first place is a well developed and inexpensive process that has proven effective.[0] I don't see how radioisotope injection is an improvement.
This is a proof of concept project. The “3 years” is not because of some inherent difficulty, it’s just a typical research project.
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.
I often see this (gp's) sentient on HN and it is quite surprising to me given how people here specifically work in technology. Are we not intimately familiar with how one typically starts with small trial groups before we scale, so that we understand the effectiveness and safety? Or are we just "move fast and break things" and leave a mess in our wake with no one spending time to clean anything up. I guess that would explain enshitification.
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.
> After three years of meticulous and dedicated hard work, the Rhisotope Project at Wits University has successfully inserted low doses of radioisotopes into 20 live rhinoceros.
Sounds like there is some inherent difficulty requiring years of meticulous and dedicated hard work to insert doses into 20 live rhinoceroses.
> inherent difficulty requiring years of meticulous and dedicated hard work
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.
There is not enough information to draw that conclusion. Anyone familiar with academia (or even a R&D tech project) can imagine what could take 3 years: ethics board approval, getting permission from the relevant government agencies, finding and hiring local Rhino experts to do the tagging, iterating on design of the drill and placement of isotopes, waiting to find enough rhinos that fit the high-standards demanded for a POC study (extra large, extra healthy, etc), and so on.
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?
> Anyone familiar with academia (or even a R&D tech project) can imagine what could take 3 years
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.
Gotta wonder if it would be better to instead focus on making it easier to source keratin from a bioreactor / cell culture. Crash the market with "counterfeit" rhino keratin which is as good as the real stuff anyhow.
I'd guess that most buyers of objects made from rhino horns are more interested in its rhino horn nature than its keratin composition. If keratin became suddenly abundant, I doubt it'd impact the rhino horn market very much
I know nothing of that market though, could be entirely wrong
I also know nothing of it, it's just a fun thought. In a previous life I really enjoyed faking parking permits and IDs and transcripts and stuff... it would be pretty fun to return to that but this time be one of the good guys: faking rhino horns for the sake of protecting actual rhinos.
I think being able to produce reliable supply chain traceability is indistinguishable from keeping detailed notes on a criminal conspiracy. None of the players want that besides the consumer. Never happen.
Sure, but it isn't clear to me that China actually cares about stopping rhino poaching, and I imagine the major players in the conspiracy never set foot in South Africa, and just have local low level agents (ie the ones we are told are so poor, they need to poach the rhinos to survive) exposed to consequences.
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.
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.
Buyers aren’t interested in “keratin” - they are interested in “rhino horn”. This is about mystical benefits from phallic animal parts. You aren’t going to tackle the market by fueling it.
According to the article, the radioisotope is specifically meant to be detected by the handheld radiation detectors typically used by customs agents. If it can't be detected by passive radiation detectors, there is even less argument for its efficacy.
The flux follows the inverse square law, however, which means to detect if a rhino is tagged you'd have to get really close. Admittedly I don't know anything about the mechanics of rhino poaching, but considering how aggressive rhinos are I imagine poachers would prefer to shoot them from a decent range for their own safety.
They say that the plan is to use existing radiation detectors at ports. Another article [1] mentions that the isotope emits Gamma rays, one of the types of radiation that can be detected by a Geiger - Muller tube.
One reason it’s an improvement is that radiation is detectable by already-existing methods used at the borders. So it will help catch them in the act of smuggling.
Unfortunately by the time this detects a piece of ivory, the damage is already done. If it took 3 years to inject 20 rhinos, it's unlikely that a large enough portion of the population could be injected to act as an effective deterrent for those actually killing the animals. Even for those actually involved in moving the ivory, it's only a deterrent if they actually face consequences at these borders - many states have weak enforcement of anti-ivory laws, and many more have bribable customs agents. Further, ivory has a value to weight ratio that is extremely conducive to smuggling.
By comparison, infusion which puts a dye and an anti-consumption toxin in the horns to render the ivory worthless and thus prevent the animals from being killed in the first place is a well developed and inexpensive process that has proven effective.[0] I don't see how radioisotope injection is an improvement.
[0] https://rhinorescueproject.org/how-it-works/