Accrington Web - The Ivory Trade.

Quite rightly the trade in elephant ivory has been illegal for decades but it hasn’t stopped the slaughter of elephants to supply the illegal trade.

In the past when poachers were caught with their ill-gotten gains, the ivory was burned. They should have burned the poachers too.

However I understand that the burning practice has been abandoned in favour of stockpiling and periodic auctions in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. With the money raised (a possible $30m) from the sale of 100 tonnes of ivory going into elephant conservation projects.

That seems fair enough to me, yet unbelievably some conservationists object to this practice and claim that it will just encourage culling/poaching.

However wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that with more money available more anti poaching patrols could be hired, trained and put out on patrol? With more patrols the chances of the poachers being caught would be greatly increased.

The other point is that sooner or later an elephant will die from an accident or natural causes. It is said that elephants, when nearing the end of their natural life, go to their own “burial grounds” to die. What is so wrong in collecting the ivory from these places?

There is one other point to make. With the short supply of ivory, thousands of oriental craftsmen were put out of work. It was my good fortune, when stationed in Singapore back in the fifties, to watch with fascination at the skill and supreme patience of a “street carver” at work. I watched with amazement as he took a two inch cube of ivory and carved it into a ball. Then with a skill that only a master craftsman would possess, he carried on carving until the lump of ivory was a ball inside a ball inside a ball inside a ball with each ball moving freely inside the others.

Sadly for the craftsman his masterpiece was sold at a fraction of its true value.

Many of the more normal ivory carvings were so skilfully carved by hand as to make them works of art rather than just an ornament or jewellery.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7693816.stm