On June 22, 2015, Matthew Markus and George Bonaci sat down for an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit's r/IAmA, two months after the spring press cluster and one week after the Fast Company piece announcing the Beijing brewery partnership. The thread drew thousands of comments and is one of the few public records of the founders speaking at length in their own voice rather than through the framing of a conservation reporter.
Their opening post lays out the case in plain terms. South Africa lost 1,215 rhinos to poaching in 2014, almost four percent of the wild population, with poaching rates rising every year since 2008. Demand was concentrated in East Asia, where rhino horn served simultaneously as traditional medicine and as a status symbol. Because supply was small and demand was great, the substance was selling for tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. The founders identified the price itself as the engine of the crisis.
Their stated solution is unornamented and economic. Fabricate horns in a lab. Sell them at one-eighth the market price. Take the incentive away from poachers and the corruption away from the officials taking bribes to look the other way.
"We believe that animals are precious and traditions are important." --Matthew Markus & George Bonaci, Reddit AMA, June 2015
The line is significant because it stakes out a position that almost no other actor in the rhino horn debate would take publicly. The conservation NGOs were committed to the position that the demand itself was the problem, that the medicinal beliefs underlying it were illegitimate, and that the strategy was to extinguish them. Pembient took the opposite view. The thread is the clearest single source on this difference.
