Meanwhile, animal welfare in China is an absolutely nightmare with many rare and endangered animals ground down into "sex powder" or whatever superstitious nonsense still rules Chinese culture and Chinese "alternative" medicine, which is a very popular pseudo-science.
Its only recently that China outlawed things like tiger penis and rhino horn, but the damage has already been done. China is still very much behind the times. Also the statistic of 70% of Chinese not knowing where ivory comes from is a scary prospect as selling the concept of more animal rights to people ignorant of the basics of the animal trade will be an uphill battle.
https://news.vice.com/article/china-outlaws-the-eating-of-ti...
Antiques over 100 years old would also be exempted, but only those containing less than 5% ivory by volume. This would seem to ban the sale of a wide variety of antiques and artworks. I'm not sure about the volumes, for example, but I expect it would ban the sale of many Georgian-era hair-on-ivory paintings and ivory portrait miniatures, amongst other things.
Why not legalize it? Given how large the current black market is "farming" ivory has to be a viable enterprise at some level. Cows aren't going extinct anytime soon, why can't the same market force apply to elephants and rhinos?
Better than banning the sales? How is legalizing it better? Because some people would be able to resell their old piano? You have a pretty dumb definition of better.
> Why not legalize it?
The current poaching epidemic is due to relaxation of CITES restriction of ivory trade in 2008 (I think). The poaching issues wasn't as bad until then. So "legalization" is what got us here in the first place.
> Given how large the current black market is "farming" ivory has to be a viable enterprise at some level.
Right, let's inflict pain and suffering on an entires species of extremely intelligent creatures so that we can keep making some shitty trinkets.
Besides the ethical issues, it's also unlikely to be viable economically. It takes a while for an elephant to grow tusks (as in decades).
> Cows aren't going extinct anytime soon, why can't the same market force apply to elephants and rhinos?
Domesticated cows might not, but their wild ancestors went extinct some 400 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs). What this would do is make the market for ivory even bigger and there wouldn't be anything preventing poachers from hunting wild elephants to extinction. If anything, it would make the extinction even faster.
You aren't the first person to suggest this idea but it's extremely stupid regardless. As in, I cannot understand how anyone would think that this is a better idea than banning sales of ivory.
How is it not an issue? Are you concerned about extinction of species?
This allows those who own ivory, potential many historical, to trade in those pieces.
How does this contribute to extinction? Unless there's time travel involved.
a.) sustains a market for ivory
b.) a lot of ivory has falsified paperwork
c.) enforcement of these rules is costly and there isn't enough people to do it http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/overwh.... For example, the Fish and Wildlife service in New York has 6 employees which are supposed to be checking all cargo coming to NYC and NJ. That's very few people for the job.
A centralized database just creates a lucrative side business for the sysadmins.
There are also lots of other endangered species, though the big mammals make the biggest news stories.
"The United States is the second-largest market globally for illegal wildlife products after China, and it still allows trade in ivory acquired before a worldwide ban in 1989."
This doesn't seem like an issue to me.