Quote Originally Posted by wolfy-hound View Post
You can't "deal with" Traditional medicines. It's like telling people their homeopathic remedies are bunk. People will get all up in arms over it and swear that their trace amount of plant juice will cure whatever it is and you can't tell them differently.

Plus, it's another country, we can't go tell them what to use or not use.

If we want to preserve a species in the wild, we have to make those species MORE valuable alive than killed, then make sure there's a plan and people in place to protect and educate. If a rhino is worth $10K dead or nothing at all alive, a subsistence hunter/farmer has very little incentive to keep a live rhino around and a LOT of reasons to kill it and sell the parts.

Im sorry but you dont seem to be informed about the scale of this problem. Traditional chinese medicine is available in any first world urban area on the planet. In Florida it should be easy. All of these TCM doctors practise the same fraudulent crap, use the same books, and that Tiger and Rhino-parts are medicine is what they believe. It is not a local problem and cannot be solved locally. Also, 10k dollars for a dead rhino? Thats a massive understatement. If dead rhinos and deads tigers would be worth just 10K dollars, there would be no problem.

The supply routes that make rhino horn and tiger bone available to rich people in New York and Paris and Berlin and Rome and Tokyo and Delhi and Kuala Lumpur make insane amounts of profits. Maybe 250000-500000 dollars in profit for trafficking it from the poachers to the rich 1st world people. The poachers, depending on how well-connected they are, can get anywhere between 20K and 100K for the horns. In the first world, 10K would buy you between 5-10 grams of powdered horn. The local people that live near the Rhinos dont use the stuff, they cannot afford 100 dollars for 1 pill against erection problems that wont work.


"Plus, it's another country, we can't go tell them what to use or not use." That attitude is called cultural relativism, and is typically used to defend and justify great evils in the world. When people cut away the gentials of little baby girls based on ancient tradition, there is only one defense: Cultural relativism. Who are we to tell them that cutting baby girls with glass is bad? Is our culture really so superior, isnt it arrogant? If you dont believe in cultural relativism, its a clear cut case: Genital mutilation is bad, and if it stops EVERYWHERE on the planet then the whole species will have advanced. Some cultures kill and eat whales. Some cultures kill and eat humans born with albinism. Some cultures execute rape victims. Some cultures burn down rainforests. Some cultures completely censor the internet. Some cultures just mess it all up for the rest of us. With cultural relativism, you have to be apathetic and tolerate it all, and human rights and international law have also be rejected.

Without cultural relativism you dont have to be apathetic, you can act.

But since you live in Florida and traditional chinese medicine is practised and available in Florida, and because you can get pills containing rhino or tiger in Florida, your local community contributes to the global demand and you can act locally to reduce the global problem.