U.S Ban On Ivory :: Mmegi Online

On Thursday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency housed at the Department of the Interior, effectively banned the sale and trade of antique ivory within the U.S. In so doing, the federal government has made the owners of precious chess sets and decorative musical instruments hoarders of valueless period pieces. Not only is this intrusive behavior bad for business, it’s no good for the elephants the department claims to be protecting.

While it’s clear that preventing the sale of your great-grandfather’s ivory cane does nothing to save the life of an African elephant, it may not be so obvious to the average American (or, apparently, to Obama administration bureaucrats) that the majority of African elephants don’t need protecting in the first place.

In Botswana, the country home to one-third of the African elephant population, 150,000 of them inhabit an area about the size of the New York metro area. This is unsustainable. A short drive around the Chobe National Park reveals the destruction the animals have wreaked on the environment since 1990, when the population in the reserve numbered only a few thousand. The once-lush forest has been decimated by the elephants. Soil sullies the water where it was previously held back by a robust root system, and game has died of starvation in their ravaged habitat.

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