Ban Elephant ivory. Why to kill innocent animal for just ivory

Ivory has been traded for hundreds of years by people in regions such as Greenland, Alaska, and Siberia. The trade, in more recent times, has led to endangerment of species, resulting in restrictions and bans. Ivory was formerly used to make piano keys and other decorative items because of the white color it presents when processed but the piano industry abandoned ivory as a key covering material in the 1970s.

Elephant ivory has been exported from Africa and Asia for centuries with records going back to the 14th century BCE. Throughout the colonisation of Africa ivory was removed, often using slaves to carry the tusks, to be used for piano keys, billiard balls and other expressions of exotic wealth.^[3]

Ivory hunters were responsible for wiping out elephants in North Africa perhaps about 1,000 years ago, in much of South Africa in the 19th century and most of West Africa by the end of the 20th century. At the peak of the ivory trade, pre-20th century, during the colonisation of Africa, around 800 to 1,000 tonnes of ivory was sent to Europe alone.^[4]

World wars and the subsequent economic depressions caused a lull in this luxury commodity, but increased prosperity in the early 1970s saw a resurgence. Japan, relieved from its exchange restrictions imposed after World War II, started to buy up raw (unworked) ivory. This started to put pressure on the forest elephants of Africa and Asia, both of which were used to supply the hard ivory preferred by the Japanese for the production of hankos, or name seals. Prior to this period, most name seals had been made from wood with an ivory tip, carved with the signature, but increased prosperity saw the formerly unseen solid ivory hankos in mass production. Softer ivory from East Africa and southern Africa was traded for souvenirs, jewelry and trinkets.

By the 1970s, Japan consumed about 40% of the global trade; another 40% was consumed by Europe and North America, often worked in Hong Kong, which was the largest trade hub, with most of the rest remaining in Africa. China, yet to become the economic force of today, consumed small amounts of ivory to keep its skilled carvers in business.^[5][6]

The illegal trade in elephant ivory is being fueled almost entirely by recently killed African elephants, not by tusks leaked from old government stockpiles, as had long been suspected. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which relies on nuclear bomb tests carried out in the 1950s and ’60s to date elephant tusks and determine when the animal died. The findings could help efforts to halt the illegal trafficking of ivory, but they also reveal just how little is known about the criminal networks behind elephant poaching.

“It’s a really important study, and shows that elephant ivory is going practically straight from where an animal was poached to the market,” says Elizabeth Bennett, a wildlife biologist and vice president for species conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City, who was not involved in the study. “It tells us that if we can stop the poaching, we can dry up the ivory pouring out of Africa.”

But stopping the poaching is a tall order. Despite an international ban that prohibits the sale of ivory from elephants killed after 1989 (the seller must have a permit from the United States or foreign government verifying the age), the ivory market is thriving, largely thanks to young, low- to middle-income people in the United States and Asian countries, like Vietnam and China, who see ivory jewelry and carvings as status symbols—and who mistakenly think that buying only a small piece does not hurt elephants. To meet the demand, poachers are killing some 50,000 elephants a year, an unsustainable rate. Black market prices for ivory in China and elsewhere run about $1000 per pound. A recent survey showed that poachers slaughtered nearly 30% of East Africa’s savanna elephants from 2007 to 2014, some 144,000 animals. Poachers also killed nearly two-thirds of central Africa’s forest elephants between 2002 and 2013. Fewer than 400,000 elephants are believed to remain in 18 sub-Saharan countries.

Law enforcement officials are stymied because they have not been able to crack the criminal syndicates believed to be behind the illegal trade, says Samuel Wasser, a conservation geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the study’s authors. Still, between 2002 and 2014, police and customs officials intercepted 14 large shipments of ivory in nine nations, including Kenya, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Using DNA collected from these tusks, Wasser previously showed where the ivory came from.

“In any forensics case, you need the when and the where,” says Kevin Uno, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and another co-author. “Now, we have both.”

To get the “when,” the scientists collected ivory from the pulp cavity, or roots, of 231 tusks—the same tusks that Wasser and his colleagues had analyzed to show the “where.” An elephant’s most recently formed ivory tissues are found inside the roots of the tusk, which grows outward. Using a technique that Uno and his colleagues previously developed, the scientists measured the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in these tissues. The isotope (an atom with the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons), which derives from open-air nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and ’60s, remains in the atmosphere and is taken up by plants through photosynthesis. And because elephants consume plants that contain the isotope, it is also found in their bodies—including their tusks. The ivory forming in an elephant’s pulp cavity can thus provide an accurate record of the date of the animal’s death, the scientists say.

Ultimately, the scientists hope their research will help law enforcement officials figure out “the strategies that the crime syndicates are using to kill elephants and ship illegal ivory,” Wasser says. Adds Wittemyer: “It adds a piece of hard data to a puzzle we’ve been trying to put together in the dark.”