Started by GuardianTalk at 11:58am Apr 1, 2004 GMT

South Africa, Namibia and Botswana have vowed to continue their fight to lift the global ban on the ivory trade, despite the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voting to keep the ban.

Should Southern African countries be allowed to sell their ivory stockpiles?

Does this work now?

We should support these african states, hunting is a lost art and sublime pleasure.

< First fluff. >

Oh, is this a new folder?

I read that elephants are a nuisance in Botswana. It's hard to be sympathetic to endangered species when they are reducing your home to rubble.

They're more likely to take out your garden (or farm).

There is a problem, though; if you protect elephants, they multiply and end up damaging all sorts of stuff to the detriment of everybody including themselves; the only way to deal with this in the absence of suitably large expanses of pachyderm lebenraum seems to be culling them.

Trading in ivory is currently banned, but the countries mentioned above, which go to the trouble of protecting their elephants (at considerable expense) have in the process of culling their healthy populations amassed a considerable quantity of quite valuable ivory which they can't currently do anything with.

These countries with a responsible elephant protection policy, feel they could recoup some of the expense of their policy (compensating farmers for elephant damage, wardens, etc.) by selling legitimately obtained ivory from clearly sustainable elephant stocks.

Meanwhile in other African (and Asian) countries, elephant populations have been massively reduced, by poaching for ivory or just killing them in protection of property (quite often just an excuse).

The existence of a legal ivory trade would encourage poaching in less well protected countries (many local African elephant populations are already extinct), as poached ivory could then be passed off as being of legal provenance; elephants would probably as a consequence of this, be totally exterminated over a large proportion of their former range.

Elephants are a huge nuisance in Botswana. They keep on getting in your way and making you wait for them to move when you're looking for lions, the selfish gits. 65,000 elephants in Botswana - I should know, I saw every single one of them. Bastards. all that lion spotting time wasted waiting for elephants to shift their big fat arses.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

And we did see one lion, in the end.

Lions are generally pretty dull though. Was yours worth waiting for?

Well, coming at the end of a day in which the car broke down and we'd been stationary for the whole afternoon waiting for our friend to come back with a mechanic, we were delighted. And he was a real poseur - At one point he got up, walked away from the verge, and then turned back round and placed himself in a better position (I think he wanted to show off his best profile)

Natch, it's not the first time I've seen lions on safari, but he was the only one we saw this time.

I hate posing mechanics.

:-)

Now why would gut deposit me here. Trying to flog a dead pachyderm are we.

Ok Elephant ivory is beautiful. To burn it in big piles is a sacrilidge. For western countries who are often engaged in destroying their own flora and fauna as an ongoing national pastime to impose such draconian measures for nothing but bureaucratic purposes is contemptable. But noone wants elephants to suffer.

Solution:

all Ivory to go through one international marketing body who issue identifying bar code (or similar technology) for all ivory that passes their doors.

Same body to issue quotas to be culled from the various 'herds'. The rarer ivory is the more it will attract profitable poaching of course. Double or triple blind accounting procedures to minimise corruption with stiff penalties eg confiscation of assets.

bump