The Issue of Ivory

[A. G. Maisey]

We came to agreement between ourselves that if the true objective of the anti-ivory clan was to ensure the survival of elephants, then the way to achieve that was to give the elephant a commercial value, in other words either farm it, or provide some sort of open range farm where the elephants could live wild until such time as they were ready to be harvested and their commercial worth realised.

But the problem with this idea was also recognised, and that is that elephants are big animals that need a lot of room, and they need land that is also needed by people. Regrettably elephants and people seem to be unable to co-exist within the same area of land.

So the problem perhaps is not the killing of elephants for ivory, but rather the killing of elephants to enable elephant habitat to be successfully used by humans. The ivory is sometimes no more than a by-product of the need for human living space.

If elephants in the wild are to be preserved, then the people who want to preserve them are going to have to pay in order to do so, and since they are big animals, that means paying big amounts of money.

Do they really think they can achieve anything at all with a ban that costs virtually nothing?

So, if it is going to cost money to preserve wild elephants, and make no mistake, eventually it will, why not make the elephant pay for his own preservation? In other words give him a commercial value.