Pink horns and poison

The idea of dyeing a rhino’s horn pink is not absurd. It’s everything else about the 21st-century rhino-human interface that’s ridiculous. The pink-horn notion is a serious proposal and it’s as sane as the whole thing gets. There are plenty of other wacky notions out there. One is to drill a hole in a rhino’s horn and fill it with poison; the idea of the dye is to mark the horn as a poisoned one. Cutting the damn things off has also been tried. There are experiments that involve a horn-cam placed on a living rhino.

If you’re involved with rhino conservation, you’re waist-deep in brochures for drones. That’s the trendiest idea on the table: long-range surveillance without the need to step outside. Well, that’s the theory. There’s also work involving satellite imagery, predictive analysis, DNA analysis and GPS, and there is an enthusiastic group of people who want to develop and sell synthetic rhino horn. There are advanced plans for powder that’s ‘biologically identical’ to rhino horn, and others for a pretend horn that is ‘genetically similar’. There have been attempts to culture rhino horn from rhino DNA.

So there’s a great deal of science, a great deal of human ingenuity and all kinds of thrilling 21st-century thinking involved here — and it’s all lined up against the might of the fairies. For the rhino trade is based on exploded and pathetic ideas that are blood-brothers to flat-earthery, evolution-denial, Biblical literalism, pixies, ectoplasm and all the other bits of bottom-wiping nonsense we’re supposed to set aside before puberty.

But it’s a fact that all five species of rhino are charging pell-mell towards extinction because of an idea that’s proven bollocks. It’s also a fact that some great minds and serious money are lining up in the attempt to stop it. And here’s the cream of the jest: they’re losing.