New proposal for ivory controls....

[chefjeff]

CATO institute's Doug Bandow writes about a new proposal for controlling the ivory market.

A few excerpts:

this obscure committee would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals. The Council also would destroy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property legally acquired by everyone from antique dealers and restorers to tourists and retirees.

Thousands of elephants are still killed annually. Daniel Stiles of the IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group explained: “The inconvenient truth is that the CITES ivory trade ban and [subsequent CITES] votes to cut off legal raw ivory supplies are the real causes of the recent elephant holocaust.”

Yet the U.S. and other nations recently made a great show of destroying ivory stockpiles

Turning everyone into a criminal would accelerate the slaughter of elephants. Today USFWS says it has trouble stopping the import and sale of a limited amount of poached ivory. So it proposes greatly increasing the amount of illegal contraband and number of illegal traffickers. Agents would have to visit flea markets as well as antique shows, and police online listings as well as auction offerings.

This obviously would dissipate already highly limited enforcement resources. And the government’s incentive would be to fire at the easiest targets—who are not today’s well-organized illicit poachers. The agency says it wouldn’t go after people selling family knick-knacks, but anyone who counted on not being prosecuted for violating the law by agents and prosecutors hoping for an easy boost to their enforcement statistics would be a fool.

fyi for cue owners and makers (and elephant lovers),

Jeff Livingston