Patent applications can reveal emerging trends in wildlife trade, a new study has found.
From rhinoceros horns to pangolin scales, trade in wildlife is a highly lucrative business. In 2019, the legal global trade in wildlife was estimated to be worth about $107 billion. The illegal trade is thought to fetch between $7 billion and $23 billion annually.
As with any commercial business, those trading in wildlife also strategically adapt to shifting market trends in product preferences as well as trade policies, the study’s authors write. This includes filing patents to protect innovations or products that have strong commercial potential.
“These patent applications document changes in species, products and locations of wildlife trade,” study co-authors Amy Hinsley, a biologist at the University of Oxford, U.K., and Susanne Masters, a doctoral student at Leiden University, the Netherlands, write in The Conversation. “So patents can provide a window into innovations related to wild products.”
To test this hypothesis, the researchers analyzed 27,308 patents related to six highly traded groups of wildlife, including rhinos, pangolins, bears, sturgeons, horseshoe crabs and caterpillar fungus, popularly known as Himalayan Viagra. Many wildlife products made from these animals are incorrectly thought to have various medicinal properties.
The study’s analysis revealed there was a 130% annual increase in patent filings related to these target animal groups between 1988 and 2020, considerably more than the global average increase of 104% for all patents during the same period. This suggests there’s a growing commercial interest in wildlife-derived products, the researchers say.
Companies are also coming up with new applications for wildlife parts, including snuff and fertilizer containing rhino horn, and livestock feed containing pangolin scales, the study found.
Moreover, the analysis showed that stricter regulations and trade bans don’t necessarily lead to a decrease in wildlife-related patents. For instance, all 526 patents for rhino products were filed after the 1977 ban on the international trade ban in rhino horn. Nearly all of these were related to products containing actual rhino horn rather than new synthetic or farmed alternatives.
Furthermore, 426 of the rhino patents were filed in China after 1993, when the country banned trade in rhino horn and its medical derivatives. The patents include a potential treatment for blood disease in 2016 and an anti-cancer food supplement in 2013, the authors write in The Conversation. This trend of patent filings suggests that companies may expect trade bans to be relaxed in the future, the researchers say.
In fact, ongoing analysis of patent trends could serve as an early-warning system for emerging patterns in wildlife trade, the authors propose.
“Wildlife trade is subject to the same pressures and processes as other commercial sectors,” Hinsley and Summers write in The Conversation. “Patents reveal a side of wildlife trade that has not been recognised or incorporated into decision making.”
Banner image of white rhinoceros by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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