[Sca-cooks] RE: tusks

[Weems, Lora]

I'm sorry, but you seem to think that elephants shed their
tusks, like deer shed their antlers.

Not true - the tusks are modified teeth (canines, I think)
and never stop growing.

Those tusks in storage are mostly confiscated from poached animals.

Leofwynn

<OT musing> Interestingly, though, in some places African elephants have
benefitted so greatly from protection that some local populations are
far from endangered, and are becoming a significant danger to the
ecosystem and to human habitation.  They're having to do controlled
culls to keep the populations in check, as with alligators in Florida.
And in all elephant populations, tusks are shed annually and collected
by rangers for storage to keep them out of the hands of collectors.
There are huge warehouses full of tusks just sitting there doing
nothing.  That strikes me as really ridiculous - why can't they have
those tusks made into ivory products and have each product
electronically tagged to validate it?  Kinda like the bitty microchip
embedded in my dog's shoulder blade.  Wouldn't that damage the black
market ivory trade significantly?  Seems like that would be a huge boon
to a really decrepit African economy.  (For that matter, for all they
tranqualize wild elephants for study, couldn't they embed a homing
device in the tusks that would allow them to track down the poachers
when an animal falls off their radar?  Tusks are masses of clumped hair,
not living tissue.) </OT musing>

I wonder if they'll start combing the beaches and collecting ambergris
and storing it or destroying it, similarly?

-Magdalena