A rhino-head heist spree swept Europe in 2011, as thieves raided museums and auctions houses in seven countries, prompting 30 investigations by Europol, 20 of which are ongoing. Similar heists have also been on the rise in Africa, as well as in the odd American backwater town. Meanwhile, an online business thrives as well—including one dealer on Facebook who only accepts bitcoin.
What is driving this “highly organized” crime ring?
If you guessed “China,” you were wrong. The answer is Vietnam. The country’s appetite for rhino horn is so great that it now fetches up to $100,000/kg, making it worth more than its weight in gold. (Horns average around 1-3 kg each, depending on the species.)
The weird thing is that the surge in Vietnamese demand is fairly recent. Though rhino horn elixirs for fevers and liver problems were first prescribed in traditional Chinese medicine more than 1,800 years ago, by the early 1990s demand was limited. Trade bans among Asian countries instituted in the 1980s and early 1990s proved largely effective in quashing supply, with some help from poaching crackdowns in countries where rhinos live. Meanwhile, the removal of rhino horn powder from traditional Chinese pharmacopeia in the 1990s had largely doused demand. In the early 1990s, for instance, horns sold for only $250-500/kg (pdf, p.85). And only around 15 rhinos were poached in South Africa each year from 1990 to 2007.
...
What happened in 2008 to prompt a resurgence in demand? The closest guess is a rumor that swept Vietnam in the mid-2000s that imbibing rhino horn powder had cured a Vietnamese politician’s cancer. That rumor persists to this day. And note that this has nothing to do with traditional Chinese medicine. As Huijun Shen, the president of the UK Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine explained to Nature magazine, there’s no record of using rhino horn to treat cancer in nearly two millennia worth of Chinese medical texts.
...
So why are Vietnamese willing to shell out thousands for the pharmacological equivalent of chewing your fingernails? The short answer: wealth. Vietnam’s tally of multimillionaires has grown 150% in the last five years. The Convention on the International Trade on Endangered Species notes that this rising wealth is “inflating a bubble of demand for rhino horn”.
