[Sca-cooks] ambergris substitute?

[Tara Sersen Boroson]

> Exactly. The equivalent of a cat's hairballs, but from a much larger
> animal.


Oh, boy, that really makes it sound appealing ;)  Maybe it's just 'cause
one of our cats coughed up a hairball on the bed the other night while
we were sleeping...


> It's not part of the animal. So why are they trying to ban whale
> 'hairballs'? Because it can more easily be obtained by killing the
> whale than hunting for what it spits up?
>
> They still allow possession of fossil ivory or ivory obtained when
> the animal is killed by legal means (ie: "native" hunters even if
> done with firearms).
>
> Why can't/don't they allow processing of that found naturally? Seems
> a bit wasteful to me to do otherwise.


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.

<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