Just read that all of the united states stockpiles of "blood ivory", 6 tons (or up to 2,000 elephants for anyone keeping score) were pulverized in a rock crusher today because, apparently some people argue that "crushing the ivory conveys to illegal traffickers and collectors that it has no value unless it is attached to an elephant."
I'm having a hard time reconciling this my understanding of supply and demand. Shouldn't pulverizing the supply increase demand, thereby further endangering elephant populations? I'm no expert on exceptions to the laws of supply and demand but I don't agree with really any of the proponent's reasoning.
I think there are certain people who will still go to great lengths - greater lengths now than ever - to get that prized ivory trinket. What do you guys think?
Original article below:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240527023035595045791980103…
I don't know what to think. What do you think they should do with the ivory?
That ivory wasn't going anywhere. Whole or pulverized, if it's in gov't custody it's not accessible as part of the supply. Supply's already been decreased at the point of confiscation. You might instead ask if confiscation leads to more dead elephants.
To which I ask what's the alternative? According to Wikipedia African elephant population went from 1.3 mil to 0.6 mil in the 10 years leading up to the 1989 ban. Assuming you want to keep elephants around you'd have to impose a ban on trade, and enforce it somehow if you hope for it to have any actual effect.
Sure, you've driven up the price of ivory a lot, but you've also greatly decreased the size of the market, which was the whole point. African elephant population 25 years later is somewhere ~500k-700k (according to World Wildlife Federation) so I'd argue that it was successful in stemming the population drop.
It probably won't do anything. The supply that they had has already been taken out of the market, so destroying it shouldn't matter.
Theoretically, wouldn't dumping it on the market kill the pricing and decrease demand for more elephant killing? It's not like a drug, each purchase is independant. Or is the larger point to basically try to kill all interest in the product?
This is what I thought. People who want ivory trinkets can get them, and the price of new ivory (i.e. from recently poached elephants) should drop, possibly enough to make poaching not worth the trouble.
You want to stop the poaching? Make hunting poachers legal and have the government pay for the scalps of poachers. Insane you say? You would be right. Poaching is a crime that is almost impossible to stop.
Either way though, since the supply had already been depleted due to it being in government custody, why pulverize it? What is the point.
This may seem like a super weird point of view, but at least the elephants' deaths left some sort of cultural and artistic symbol. Pulverizing the statues and trinkets ensures that the elephants died for absolutely nothing. I don't even know if I fully believe the sentence I just wrote by the way. But I do believe that crushing the ivory is symbolic at best, and it is a pretty stupid symbol.
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