[Sca-cooks] RE: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #983 - 16 msgs

[Decker, Terry D.]

> Wasteful?  Well, not really - it's going to take whatever place it had
> in nature before we started collecting it.  Kind of like fallen leaves
> if we don't bother to mulch them.  They're not wasted, they just don't
> grace our garden beds for the winter.  But, realistically,
> it's probably
> just like ivory.  You can't sell ivory from the shed tusks of
> elephants,
> even though they're just lying there, because you can't prove that you
> didn't poach an elephant to collect it.  And, given the scale
> and impact
> of poaching and the impossibility of tracing legitimate sources, it's
> much more practical to restrict ivory sales altogether.  I presume
> they're handling ambergris the same way.

Elephants do not shed tusks.  They are projecting teeth and are with the
animal for life.  The only way to harvest tusks is off a dead elephant.
Since one can't tell the difference between ivory from a natural death and
ivory from poaching, the ban is on all elephant ivory, especially as there
is a tremendous trade in false origination documents.


> 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.

Those warehouses full of tusks are almost all recovered from poachers.  They
are not recoverd when the elephant's "shed" their tusks, because the tusks
are not shed.  If elephants shed their tusks, there would be no poaching
industry and ivory would be inexpensive.

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.

A tracking/identification device in a living animal is one thing, because
the animal and device act as validation for each other.  A number of origin
validation schemes have been suggested for the sale of ivory, but all are
subject to counterfeiting and only serve to make the illegal trade more
difficult to locate.

  (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.)
>
> I wonder if they'll start combing the beaches and collecting ambergris
> and storing it or destroying it, similarly?
>
> -Magdalena
>

The tusks are not clumped hair, they are teeth.  I certainly don't want
people sticking transmitters in my teeth and I feel certain the elephants
wouldn't appreciate it either.  In any event, poachers are not stupid and I
am certain the transmitter would be found with the dead elephant.

Rhinoceros horn is made of clumped hair.  The horns are not shed and can
only be harvested from dead animals.

Beached ambergris falls under the laws of salvage, so I doubt they will go
sweeping beaches for it and it will continue to belong to whoever finds it.
It's just that there is no market for it, because the sale of ambergris
falls into illegal trade.

The key difference between ambergris and ivory is ivory can only come from a
dead animal.

Bear