As we know, Rhino horns are similar in structure to horses? hooves, turtle beaks, and cockatoo bills and even human's nail! They are made of keratin – in rhinoceros horn it is chemically complex and contains large quantities of sulphur-containing amino acids, particularly cysteine, but also tyrosine, histidine, lysine, and arginine, and the salts calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate. But sadly, Vietnamese do not believe this.

A rumor swept Vietnam in the mid-2000s that imbibing rhino horn powder had cured a Vietnamese politician's cancer. That rumor persists to this day. And note that this has nothing to do with traditional Chinese medicine. As Huijun Shen, the president of the UK Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine explained to Nature magazine, there's no record of using rhino horn to treat cancer in Chinese medical text.

In Vietnam, however, at least some respected doctors vouch for rhino horn's cancer curing property. One woman who purchased $2,000 worth of horn powder on her doctor's advice.

So why are Vietnamese willing to shell out thousands for the pharmacological equivalent of chewing your fingernails? The short answer: wealth. The Vietnamese rhino horn craze has caused an unprecedented rhino poaching in Africa and Asia.

The Javan rhino was declared extinct in Vietnam in 2010 after the last one was found dead with a bullet in its leg and its horn sawn off. So now Vietnam's own nature park rangers don't have to worry, though. Their job is already done. But what about the other rhino? They are all at the brink of extinct.

It is now the time for action. I have participated in some campaign to declare to the Vietnamese the true structure of rhino horn in order to stop this cruel belief.