"Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same material as human toenails"
And hair and fingernails and ..
Which brings up the obvious point that the best way to "save the rhino" is to gather about 1000 pounds of nail clippings, grind them up, and put them on ebay as counterfeit rhino horn. That'll poison the marketplace (something we're pretty good at) which will help ruin the profitability of rhino poaching, and it'll also kill the price, changing rhino poaching from "a worthwhile risk with the possible reward of a zillion bucks" to "an idiotic risk with little return"
The governments and activists involved should be flooding the market with counterfeit rhino horn today, if they really cared about the rhino.
Did you know that bread contains a product made from keratin (cysteine)? Most of it is counterfeit: it's claimed to be from duck feathers, but it's actually made from human hair collected mainly from Chinese barbers.
Probably epic chemistry fail. Its like saying there's grass in my cheezeburger because some of the amino acids in grass proteins end up reassembled as muscle proteins in cow muscle. Not only that, but aside from the biochem obviously every single carbon atom in the cow came from grass. Real cows eat grass not corn which is a whole nother topic and there are some lipid (fatty oily) issues.
This can obviously be abstracted to my innards are grass, because the amino acids in the cow were consumed and re-arranged into programmer pot belly and my stylish hair do. (glances down at my hairy belly) yes you are grass aren't you...
The other epic fail is there's real food, then there's bread, and finally at the bottom of the barrel theres not-even-bread. And the worst of the chemically preserved artificial bread shaped stuff may include various peculiar preservative compounds. But when I eat junk food like bread, I eat the good stuff. So, no, "bread" is not a singular atom or compound or food, and only the cruddy stuff is full of preservatives of weird sources.
This "epic chemistry fail" is a strawman. I did not say there's hair in bread. I said there's cysteine in bread, cysteine which is made from keratin from human hair. Quite obviously it's not in all bread, but you'll find it in most if not all industrial bread and even in many local bakeries (you won't find it in a good bakery though). The actual chemical process for extracting cysteine is boiling the hair in hydrochloric acid, which separates it into other stuff and a white powder, which is the cysteine.
Whether you personally eat that bread is not very relevant for this discussion, but for what it's worth, I personally think that whether cysteine is made from duck feathers or from human hair is irrelevant, it's chemically the same molecule. I generally bake my own bread, but when I don't I have no qualms about eating bread with cysteine in it, and if my own bread would taste better with cysteine I would put it in. Scary chemicals are just a label people put on things, salt is a scary chemical too when you call it natrium chloride.
Duly noted that HN prefers not to learn such factoids though =)
Hmm good point, but the argument stands, all good conservationists should be flooding ebay with "genuine rhino horn pocket knives" made out of cow horns.
And hair and fingernails and ..
Which brings up the obvious point that the best way to "save the rhino" is to gather about 1000 pounds of nail clippings, grind them up, and put them on ebay as counterfeit rhino horn. That'll poison the marketplace (something we're pretty good at) which will help ruin the profitability of rhino poaching, and it'll also kill the price, changing rhino poaching from "a worthwhile risk with the possible reward of a zillion bucks" to "an idiotic risk with little return"
The governments and activists involved should be flooding the market with counterfeit rhino horn today, if they really cared about the rhino.