Ton of ivory crushed in Times Square to highlight poaching

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Ton of ivory crushed in Times Square to highlight poaching
By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press | June 19, 2015 | Updated: June 20, 2015 2:13am

NEW YORK (AP) — Over a ton of confiscated ivory tumbled off a conveyor belt into a rock crusher in Times Square on Friday in a symbolic display highlighting an illegal trade that activists say threatens the survival of African elephants.

The Wildlife Conservation Society says the global ivory trade is responsible for the slaughter of as many as 35,000 elephants a year in Africa.

"Crushing ivory in Times Square — literally at the crossroads of the world — says in the clearest of terms that the U.S. is serious about closing its illegal ivory markets and stopping the demand," said John Calvelli, the society's executive vice president for public affairs.

U.S. and state government officials, conservationists, animal-welfare advocates and tourists gathered to watch as hundreds of ivory trinkets were turned into a powder that fed into a trough, waiting to be trucked away.

The event was organized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, New York state agencies and the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs New York City's zoos


Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/science/article/Ton-of-ivory-crushed-in-Times-Square-to-highlight-6337668.php

[BumRushDaShow]

1. Let's just hope that this doesn't just encourage the poachers

to re-double their efforts to replace what was confiscated and destroyed.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Really is quite a waste

Certainly not advocating fresh harvests, but couldn't that ivory have been
conserved for historical restoration by museums?

You are correct, they may think they're hindering the ivory trade, but they
may be economically encouraging it. If they constantly confiscated the ivory
and jailed the perps and dumped it back on the market, prices would fall.

Reducing the supply raises the price, which encourages more poaching. At least
in economic theory.

[LeftyMom]

5. Legal ivory markets provide cover for smuggling.

It's easy to fake paperwork saying any given shipment is a legal one. The only way to eliminate the smuggling is to eliminate the legal shipments that camouflage it.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. With a little creativity, solutions could be found ...

Fluorescent dye stamps, jet-injected liquid "tags" which can be chemically detected, embedded microdots, etc. Might not be 100% effective but it could put a good portion of the smugglers behind bars. Personally, I think nothing would put a dent in smuggling quite like dumping seized ivory on the market below 10% of current market price. Either go to a gov't auction and get a cheap price on tagged, traceable ivory or pay over ten times the price AND risk going to jail ... that's a carrot AND stick approach . So far, we've only tried the stick, and it hasn't worked. The closer the animals get to extinction, the higher the price of ivory, and the more poachers are willing to risk getting caught. It's too easy to see where that's going to end.

Remember, every time an elephant or rhino dies in the wild (or a zoo) from natural causes, there's a source of ivory right there. Park rangers could collect it and sell it for a pittance, completely undercutting the poaching market.

Personally, I wish someone would have to sense to do the full-blown R&D necessary to come up with very convincing fake ivory. Sell it without revealing that it's fake, and watch the market price crumble when people discover the market is full of fake ivory -- and those who only want artwork don't care so much if it's real or not.

[LeftyMom]

9. Smugglers only have to fake it well enough to get past bribed officials.

The best way to make their lives more difficult would be to eliminate "legal" ivory as a notion. Then there's no question of whether the shipment or shop shelf is aboveboard.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Market economics ? Ha ! Find me anyone who believes in ... oh, wait ...

funny how we'll build our domestic policies around the Holy Unrestricted Free Market, but when market economics might be used to solve a problem that only liberals care about, suddenly no one in power can remember how to use it.

[Travis_0004]

2. I dont get why people dont just use mammoth ivory

Mammoth ivory is a beautiful material, and suprisingly quite abundant. If you want ivory, I say buy all the mammoth ivory you want.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. They do, and it's mostly harvested by black marketeers ...

in the process destroying irreplacable frozen mammoth carcasses and fossils -- possibly including fossil mammoth DNA -- which are lost forever to paleontology.

NatGeo aired a couple of shows about people trying to recover mammoth DNA from permafrost in Siberia. The ivory "miners" are pretty much Wild West types, who will kill to keep others away from their finds. The fossil sites are being ripped apart with high-pressure hydraulic jets and only the ivory is collected. It won't take that much longer for these sites to be exhausted.

This doesn't really strike me as much of a solution to anything.

It's worth noting that in the ancient world amber and ivory were used mostly to carve objects that nowadays are easily molded from plastics. There's no practical reason to be collecting ivory at all; the demand is driven strictly by an acquisitiveness that's purely cultural in origin. Humans need to curtail their destructive habits, not find alternative destructive behaviors.

[cosmicone]

4. Just symbolic

Most of the poaching trade supplies China which turns a blind eye towards it.

Chinese superstitions of a tiger-paw being a lucky charm, Rhino horn as aphrodisiac and sexual potency enhancer have brought the tiger and rhino populations near extinction.

The Chinese won't do a damn thing about it but what will help is an "anti-poaching tariff" of 10% on Chinese made goods exported out with the money going for protection, conservation and poacher extinction. That is when the Chinese will crack down on their population.

[Liberal_in_LA]

10. good

[blackhawk2415]

11. Opinion

Interesting Read, thanks for sharing.