When you add up everything that is being spent to save the rhino from extinction in the wild, then it would become a teeny tiny fraction of 1%. The vast majority of the money donated to rhino conservation is spent on the ground on protection measures – fencing, rangers, equipment, dehorning etc. Only a relatively small percentage is spent in demand countries. Of that percentage, again only a small fraction goes into what can be classed as demand reduction campaigns. Breaking The Brand Basic Definitions As an introduction to this blog, I must qualify Breaking The Brand’s definition of what constitutes a demand reduction campaign: It is a campaign that elicits an emotional response in the current user groups [...]

I, like many people around the world, was disgusted at the sales of rhino horn in Sydney and Melbourne last week. As someone who calls Australia home feeling ashamed of the stupidity, naivety, greed and ignorance that enables this to happen was also part of the list of emotions I experienced. Having visited many rhino range countries and spoken with the people dealing with the tragedy of the current rhino slaughter, who are too regularly confronted with the death and mutilation of the rhinos in their care, I can only imagine how angry they must feel at this uncaring act. Peter Fish’s first line in his Australian Financial Revive article reporting on the [...]

Pro-Trade Response to BTB Blog: Viet Nam’s wealthy buyers of rhino don’t see horn from farmed rhino as a substitute product. Given that the blog talks about the wealthy Vietnamese elite who can afford genuine, wild rhino horn are not interested in a farmed ‘product’, which is a critical point in the legalised trade debate, it was not a surprises that this blog was shared with the group: The Great BIG NO Trade/PRO Trade Rhino Debate. So far it has generated 5 comments and 3 patterns of response: Not a single rhino in SA is not behind a fence Breaking The Brand has not produced the desired results Breaking The Brand wants donations Before [...]

As people who say we care about rhinos we need to make a decision to get smarter faster if we really want to save these animals from extinction in the wild. I have several reasons for making this statement, for now I will focus on just two or three. This blog is a little lengthy, please don’t assign it to the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) basket; a lack of attention to the detail of this complex issue is slowing down the solution to the rhino poaching problem. Firstly, in August 2012 TRAFFIC published a report: ‘The South Africa – Viet Nam Rhino Horn Trade Nexus’ highlighting Viet Nam as the primary driver of the current rhino killing spree and the key users groups. It [...]

If I was Chinese I would be disgusted that a group of people lobbying to legalise the trade in rhino horn where pushing a message that I was ‘stuck in a cultural mindset’ that would never enable me, my society or my country to evolve or change. The propaganda this pro-rhino-horn-trade group is pushing seems to say that ‘Because the Chinese and people of SE Asia have used rhino horn in the past then obviously they will ALWAYS use rhino horn because they are incapable of changing, so the only hope for the rhino is to sell rhino horn to them’. All this because the pro-trade people have stockpiled billions of dollars’ worth of rhino horn that they [...]

Since launching Breaking The Brand in 2013 and highlighting the Spiral Dynamics, behaviour change, Model we use to create our rhino horn demand reduction campaigns in Viet Nam, we have constantly been asked for more information on the model and how it works.  I wrote an introductory blog about the model in January 2014:  http://breakingthebrand.org/values-development-behaviour-change-and-conservation/ providing examples on how it could be used in conservation. When a recent article profiling socially conscious billionaires talking up Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – ‘Zillionaires’ warned: wake up, it won’t last: http://www.executivestyle.com.au/zillionaires-warned-wake-up-it-wont-last-gi5vbj ) – caught my attention I decided to revisit Spiral Dynamics for a new blog. It can be used to explain why CSR didn’t [...]