The interesting number is not the rhino poaching figure. It is the gap between two claims.
Between 2014 and 2017, the major Vietnamese demand reduction campaigns reported that self-reported rhino horn use among their target audiences had collapsed. TRAFFIC’s Chi Initiative, which targeted urban businessmen aged thirty-five to fifty-five with a status-and-inner-strength reframing, recorded a drop from 27.5 percent to 7 percent in three years. WildAid reported that belief in rhino horn’s medicinal effects had fallen from 69 to 23 percent over a similar window. Belief that it cured cancer fell from 35 to 9 percent. Read in isolation, these numbers describe a culture unlearning itself.
Read against the rest of the data, they describe something else. Rhino horn seizures in Vietnam rose during the same period. South African rhino poaching stayed near its historical peak. The wholesale price did not fall. Whatever the campaign surveys were measuring, the market did not appear to have heard about it.
A previous post in this series argued that synthetic rhino horn cannot displace wild horn, because what the market actually buys is not keratin but the story of the killed animal. The product is the act, not the substance. This post takes the argument from the other side. If the substance is not the product, then the campaigns that try to suppress the substance by attacking beliefs about it are aimed at the wrong target. What they may have done over the past decade, the empirical record suggests, is publicise the very story that gives the product its value.
There is by now a literature that explains the gap between the campaign claims and the market data, and it has been accumulating for nearly a decade. It is produced largely outside the campaign sector, often by behavioural and conservation scientists who have read the campaign claims with academic patience and tested them against consumer data. Three findings, produced by independent research groups using different methods, converge on a single conclusion that the campaigns themselves have not absorbed.
The first comes from a discrete-choice experiment of 857 Vietnamese consumers and intenders, published in Conservation Letters (Hanley, Sheremet, Bozzola & MacMillan, 2018). When respondents were offered hypothetical purchase scenarios, willingness to pay rose under the illegal-trade scenario. Wild horn dominated farmed horn. Horn from rare species commanded a premium over horn from common species. The product attributes that demand reduction campaigns spent the decade publicising (illegality, scarcity, wild origin) were attributes the same consumers were paying extra to acquire.
The second is from a structural-equation study of 427 high-income Hanoi residents in Ecological Economics (Dang Vu & Nielsen, 2022), and it tests the standard demand reduction theory of change directly. Does shifting attitudes and norms predict purchase intention among elite consumers? It does not. Only perceived behavioural control and habit predicted intention. Attitudes were saturated, because almost everyone in the elite cohort already approved. Subjective norms had nothing to bite on, because rhino horn use carries no meaningful stigma inside the relevant networks. What remains binding is the practical capacity to access the product and the inertia of having done so before. The constructs that the campaigns target are statistically silent in the population that actually buys.
The third is qualitative, from fifty interviews with self-reported users in Hanoi (Dang Vu, Nielsen & Jacobsen, 2020). Users systematically distrusted the messengers featured in demand reduction campaigns: doctors, government officials, business celebrities, foreign royals. The only credible reference group was peers with prior personal use. Among that reference group, scarcity and high price were read as evidence of efficacy.
Each of these on its own is a curiosity. Together they describe a market in which the very attributes that the campaigns publicise function as positive characteristics of the good. Awareness raising under these conditions is not informational. It is promotional.
This describes Vietnam. China is a different market, and the difference matters because the international demand reduction industry has spent ten years addressing what one critique called the imaginary “Asian super-consumer” (Margulies, Wong & Duffy, 2019), who does not exist. In Vietnam, rhino horn is a single-substance powder consumed in elite male sociality. It is taken at business drinks, gifted to cement patron-client relationships, offered as comfort to dying parents. In mainland China, the product is largely something else. A 2016 content analysis of 332 Chinese newspaper articles and 7,042 auction records found that of the reasons given for acquiring rhino horn in Chinese-language media, only 29 percent were medical; 75 percent were investment or collectible (Gao, Stoner, Lee & Clark, 2016). In Western media coverage of the same market, 84 percent of the reasons were medical. The product that the Chinese market actually buys, in volume, is closer to a Ming vase than to a Vietnamese hangover remedy: the carved libation cup, the figurine, the antique-style piece. A campaign optimised for the Vietnamese hangover-and-gift market reaches the Chinese carving collector approximately not at all. The two markets transform the same physical substance into two different goods, told two different stories, sold through two different channels. The premise that the demand for both can be reduced by a single international communication strategy is, on the empirical record, structurally wrong before any specific campaign content is even chosen.
This still leaves the question of whether the campaigns work for whichever market they are actually addressing. The honest answer is that the field’s evaluation infrastructure cannot tell us. A 2018 review of nine Vietnamese rhino horn interventions found that only two had baselines and only two were grounded in any behavioural-change theory (Olmedo, Sharif & Milner-Gulland, 2018). A 2019 systematic mapping of 236 wildlife demand reduction campaigns found that only five reported direct behavioural change and only two enabled effect-size estimation (Veríssimo & Wan, 2019). After more than a decade of well-funded effort, no randomised controlled trial of a rhino horn demand reduction intervention has been published. The headline numbers cited at the start of this post (Chi’s three-quarters reduction, WildAid’s collapse in cancer-cure belief) are pre-post repeated cross-sectional surveys without controls or behavioural endpoints, on populations in which actual buyers are well under one percent of any sample. WildAid’s own 2014 baseline of four hundred Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City respondents recorded no admitted buyers at all. The instruments cannot detect the behaviour they claim to be reducing. Dang Vu and Nielsen titled their 2021 review of the field “Evidence or Delusion.” After re-reading the literature, that does not feel to me like an unfair choice of words.
The point is not that these campaigns were cynical or pointless. The people who built them understood how serious the problem was, and many of them designed their interventions with the best available consumer research at the time. The point is that the field has been operating with weaker evidence than its public claims suggest, in a market where the act of raising awareness about a product can change the value of that product. That is not a failure of intention. It is a mismatch between the theory of demand the campaigns assume and the market the empirical record describes.
The most rigorous causal evidence on rhino conservation interventions runs in a direction that few demand reduction strategies have absorbed. In Science in 2025, Kuiper and colleagues reported a quasi-experimental study of eleven reserves in the Greater Kruger area between 2017 and 2023. Across the period, 1,985 rhinos were poached and roughly seventy-four million dollars were spent on reactive law enforcement. That spending produced no statistically significant reduction in poaching. Dehorning, which removed the marketable substance from 2,284 rhinos, produced a 78 percent reduction at 1.2 percent of the budget. The intervention that removed the prize dominated every intervention that tried to raise the risk of stealing it. This is supply-side evidence, not demand-side evidence, and it does not directly tell us anything about consumer behaviour. But it identifies the same binding constraint from the opposite end of the trade. On the demand side, the publicised attributes of the product are positive product attributes. On the supply side, the only intervention that reliably suppresses extraction is the elimination of the marketable object itself. Awareness and risk are not where the action is. Access and the existence of the good are.
Read together, the two ends of the trade describe one structural problem. If what the market buys is the story of the killed animal, then the substance can be made synthetically and the campaigns can reach saturation, and neither will move the demand. The only thing that moves it, in the data we have, is removing the substance from the world before the story can attach to it. That is what dehorning does. It is also what the demand reduction campaigns have been failing to do, in reverse, for ten years, by publicising every attribute of the substance the story relies on.
The lesson is uncomfortable. A prohibited luxury good does not lose value simply because outsiders explain that it is irrational. In some markets, the explanation becomes part of the aura. A market like this one cannot be talked out of itself by generic awareness, medical correction, or celebrity shame. If demand reduction is to work, it has to stop treating rhino horn as a mistaken medicine and start treating it as what the evidence suggests it is: a social object whose value grows from the very story the campaigns keep repeating.
References
Cheung, H., Mazerolle, L., Possingham, H. P., & Biggs, D. (2021). Rhino horn use by consumers of traditional Chinese medicine in China. Conservation Science and Practice, 3(5), e365.
Dang Vu, H. N., & Nielsen, M. R. (2021). Evidence or delusion: A critique of contemporary rhino horn demand reduction strategies. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 26(4), 390–400.
Dang Vu, H. N., & Nielsen, M. R. (2022). Understanding determinants of the intention to buy rhino horn in Vietnam through the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the Theory of Interpersonal Behaviour. Ecological Economics, 195, 107361.
Dang Vu, H. N., Nielsen, M. R., & Jacobsen, J. B. (2020). Reference group influences and campaign exposure effects on rhino horn demand: Qualitative insights from Vietnam. People and Nature, 2(4), 923–939.
Gao, Y., Stoner, K. J., Lee, A. T. L., & Clark, S. G. (2016). Rhino horn trade in China: An analysis of the art and antiques market. Biological Conservation, 201, 343–347.
Hanley, N., Sheremet, O., Bozzola, M., & MacMillan, D. C. (2018). The allure of the illegal: Choice modeling of rhino horn demand in Vietnam. Conservation Letters, 11(3), e12417.
Kuiper, T., et al. (2025). Dehorning reduces rhino poaching. Science, 388(6748), 1075–1081.
Margulies, J. D., Wong, R. W. Y., & Duffy, R. (2019). The imaginary ‘Asian Super Consumer’: A critique of demand reduction campaigns for the illegal wildlife trade. Geoforum, 107, 216–219.
Olmedo, A., Sharif, V., & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2018). Evaluating the design of behavior change interventions: A case study of rhino horn in Vietnam. Conservation Letters, 11(1), e12365.
Veríssimo, D., & Wan, A. K. Y. (2019). Characterizing efforts to reduce consumer demand for wildlife products. Conservation Biology, 33(3), 623–633.