Like the RFID tags you can have inserted into your pets or cattle, a microchip the size of a grain of rice will allow officials to positively identify where a horn comes from – and thanks to a matching tag in the animal's body, they'll also know which individual the horn was hacked off of. That means when a rhino horn is confiscated in some back alley, they can determine its exact origin and legality. There are all kinds of loopholes traffickers use to avoid prosecution, including claiming the horn is an antique or that it's from a legal kill, which actually do exist. But you can't loophole an RFID tag and a DNA database.

"It really opens up possibilities in terms of investigation," said Matt Lewis, African species expert for the WWF. "If that horn shows up somewhere in Europe or Asia, you can tie the person in possession of the horn back to the scene of the crime, and you can start to find out how the horn got from Point A to Point B."

In other words, the microchips are a passive technology. They may not prevent poaching in and of themselves, like armed guards or dyeing a horn, but they help authorities build a case, which is probably better in the long run. All the more so if you can take a rhino horn possession case in Asia to take down the channels of a global network, a la The Wire. And that's no overstatement – Lewis describes the forces they're up against as a "highly organised, international crime syndicate".

Some organisations have begun to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, with mixed results. A company called Kashmir Robotics is even offering a $25,000 prize to encourage the creation of a drone designed specifically for anti-poaching efforts. Other campaigns have focused on giving rangers better tools to use in the field, making their patrols more efficient and, hopefully, safer.

But for every advance conservationists make, there's an equal and opposite story that just kicks you in the teeth ... like the elephant poachers in Namibia who realised circling vultures were giving away the location of their kills. Their solution? Poison the elephant carcasses. As a result, officials found a mound of 600 dead vultures scattered around a single elephant carcass.