There is a start-up that tries to eliminate "the $750 million illegal rhino horn poaching trade by growing rhino horns made from rhino DNA and 3D printed keratin".
I'm by no means an expert on this but I live in South Africa and we like to hunt game. The guys that I work with are regularly at game farms. One complaint they keep repeating is that game farmers don't want to own rhino because of many reasons, some of which (a) they are expensive (b) they are high risk (c) there is little return on investment (no coming here and looking at them on safari is not enough). High risk, expensive investments with little to no return are not a good deal. Making the sale of rhino horn legal is one way you could create the incentive to breed/keep these animals on their farms and also push up the supply of horns making it less profitable to poach.
There are entire farms where crocodiles are bred just for their skin. People like crocodile skin, they make shoes and crap from them. Some people think rhino horn makes their dicks work. Ok fair enough, lets make a shitload of horns.
I've thought about this with respect to the Oryx, which has been extinct in the wild since the ~1920s, but found a niche on game farms in Texas and Argentina. Now, hunting the Oryx is illegal in the United States and I've wondered how long until the animal goes extinct. At $4000 to $7000 to hunt, it was a lucrative trade.
I would guess that the issue with rhino/elephant would be resource management of a herd that does not hit breeding age for quite a few years. Of course, at these prices, that could work out.
Personally, I think the Asian horn powder market is barbaric.
Consider cows. We eat a lot of cows. In a few years, we would make cows go extinct. Except we also breed a lot of cows so that it doesn't happen.
While many animals are far harder to raise than cows, the difficulty results in lower numbers and thus increased rarity which thus increases the price of the animal once brought to maturity. Any animal that is risking extinction from being hunted should be sufficiently desirable to make this equation balance out to a sufficient population of the animal being raised.
The only issue I really see is that in the long term this will likely lead to such species being slowly domesticated.
> We won't see the extinction of the chicken, cow or pig
While red junglefowl and wild boar are doing OK, the aurochs is extinct. If you just incentivize rhino horns, you don't incentivize preserving the species or genetic diversity.
It more or less worked with bear gall bladders. Where I live, black bear poaching for gall bladder export to China was a major issue. Now the Chinese breed black bears on farms for this purpose (the farm conditions are another matter - predictably horrible). Black bears are still poached but not at the same rates.
To the Chinese, consuming these things (rhino horns, bear gall bladders) isn't crazy. It's more or less mainstream, though of course it has zero scientific credibility beyond the placebo effect.
Are the main customers for items like this the poor and uneducated, or the wealthier segments of Asian society with plenty of access to modern scientific knowledge?
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's analogous to the Dr. Oz / anti-vaccine set in the U.S. Those people have access to all the knowledge they could want, but you still couldn't shake their misguided beliefs out of them.
Their idea is that they'll dump their product into places where rhino horns shows up (e.g. in hair conditioner in SE Asia), which would then bring prices down for the real thing. Rhino horn is mainly keratin with extra hormones, which can be readily recreated.
It's really fascinating, and similar to the arms race in detecting purity levels in drugs. Also, mobs and stuff too make it pretty exciting and non-typical 'startup' work.
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Pembient).