Hi Rick,
While I agree that the transparent sale of ivory might help save elephants as a species, I think there's another big problem, amply covered in
An elephant crackup?, an article from a couple of years ago in the
New York Times. Basically, it's about the problems elephants are causing for humans in Africa (like, for instance, raiding their farms and killing them), and how these problems are growing.
Why are they growing? In part it's about population pressure, but it's also about the nature of elephants. See, they're smart and long-lived, and because of they're smart and long-lived, they have a culture. They survive because the elder elephants know where the water is, where the food is, what the threats are, and so on, and pass them on to the younger elephants. Elephant culture is also strongly gender divided. There are matriarchal herds of females and younger offspring, and there are bands of males, and the two largely come together to mate.
The problem with the ivory trade is that it targets the bigger, older males with the biggest tusks. The old bulls are the carriers of male society, and what ivory poaching leaves behind is a group of leaderless, young bulls.
Ditto, unfortunately, with culling, which is more interested in killing a set number of elephants than with keeping elephant social structures intact.
You might want to consider how much this sounds like the problems of ghettos and war zones, where angry young men are growing up without a strong, peaceful, male role models. Heck, just imagine what would happen to this site if someone started killing our old bulls to get the gold fillings out of their teeth, and discarding their collections and libraries in the process.
Anyway, that's the problem with both poaching and culling--it promotes social fragmentation in elephant herds. While I can't say for sure that vengeance or PTSD are things elephants deal with, I am quite sure that elephants who don't know better will raid crops, will kill people, and will be much more of a problem than were previous generations who were taught by other elephants how to deal with people.
So what do we do? I don't have an easy answer, but I do know that it's complicated, and neither poaching nor indiscriminate culling are the answer, whatever E-Bay does.
Best,
F