On February 10, 2016, the Center for Biological Diversity and WildAid filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The petition asked the agency to prohibit the import, export, and sale of bio-engineered rhinoceros horn, and to extend the prohibition to cultured parts and products from other protected species. National Geographic ran the news that morning as an exclusive, under the headline "Petition Seeks Ban on Trade in Fake Rhino Horn." The petitioners named Pembient. They also named CeratoTech, Rhinoceros Horn LLC, and a fourth company called Stop Rhino Poaching Through Synthetic Rhino Horns.
The petition contained five justifications for the proposed ban. The first was that the Fish and Wildlife Service already had the authority to act, citing the Endangered Species Act and the Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Act. The second was that legal trade in cultured horn would provide cover for the illegal trade, drawing analogies to legal trade in captive-bred geckos and to the laundering of illegal ivory through legal domestic markets in China and Hong Kong. The third was that cultured horn would hinder enforcement, because traffickers could claim genuine contraband was synthetic. The fourth was that cultured horn would expand consumer demand, particularly among less affluent buyers, and signal that the purchase was legal. The fifth was that cultured horn would lend credibility to the unproven medicinal claims that demand reduction campaigns were working to dispel.
Justifications two and three argued that the product would fail as a substitute for the real thing and would instead serve as cover for illegal trade. Justifications four and five argued that it would succeed too well as a substitute, expanding demand and entrenching the medicinal claims. Both positions can be defensible in different markets or at different time horizons. The petition did not draw the distinction.
Sarah Uhlemann, senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, was the petition's lead voice in the article. She described the products as a source of "incredible consumer confusion." Pembient CEO Matthew Markus appeared briefly, summarizing his company's strategy of using a low price to undercut the margins on which poaching depended. The voice the article gave the most weight to, and the only voice with regulatory authority, was Ed Grace, Deputy Chief of Law Enforcement at the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Experience demonstrates that efforts to "flood the market" with products produced from protected wildlife, either by producing synthetic alternatives or raising animals in captivity for harvest, often fail to achieve their stated goal. Such efforts often create more demand from consumers, even as products from wild animals and plants continue to command a premium over synthetic or farmed alternatives. — Ed Grace, Deputy Chief of Law Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The agency Grace spoke for had not yet reviewed the petition. He was nonetheless able to set out, in two sentences, the framework against which the petition would be assessed: synthetic alternatives often fail; where they do not fail, they make demand worse. The framework left no operating space for Pembient's strategy.
"NIP THIS RAPIDLY DEVELOPING CONSERVATION PROBLEM IN THE BUD."
— Sarah Uhlemann, Center for Biological Diversity, quoted by National Geographic
This is not editorial. It is news. National Geographic does what a news organization does: it runs the petition's argument, names the petitioners, gives the regulatory deputy his say, and gives the company under petition a brief response. What the article does not do is ask whether the petitioners and the agency had institutional stakes in how the question was being answered. By February 2016, those were no longer the questions in the story.
