A year after proposing a near-total ban on sales of products containing elephant ivory, the Obama administration made the rule final on Thursday, ending a trade as old as the United States.
Selling ivory is now prohibited, with few exceptions, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said Wednesday. Preexisting items manufactured with ivory such as musical instruments used in orchestras, furniture and items such as firearms containing fewer than 200 grams are exempt. Antiques at least a century old are also exempt, but owners must prove an artifact’s age through a professional appraisal or some other document that can be verified, he said.
Ashe defended the rule as a bold attempt to reduce the illegal trade of ivory in the United States and the world fueled by wildlife traffickers. Ivory fetched prices as high as $1,500 per pound due to demand in Asia, where elephant tusks are ornately carved into art. The demand was met by poachers who slaughtered an estimated 100,000 elephants “in just a three-year span” ending in 2014, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said during an event in New York’s Time Square where a ton of confiscated ivory was crushed last year.
The rule is part of the administration’s National Strategy on Wildlife Trafficking to curtail poaching that threatens to wipe out the world’s largest land animal and dry revenue streams of African warlords and terrorist groups that fund the killing of both elephants and rhinoceros to enrich their operations, according to intelligence reports. Horns from endangered rhinoceros bring up to $25,000 per pound in China, where they are cherished as carvings, and Vietnam, where they are used as traditional medicine.
Rhino horn sales have been banned for years in the United States, and Ashe suggested an equally restrictive prohibition on elephant ivory was overdue because items such as pianos, cutlery handles and furniture were so beloved. “It was inculcated in the culture … a luxury item. What we’re doing today with elephant ivory brings us closer to what we’re doing with rhino horn and sea turtle shell where commercial sale is completely prohibited.”
Wildlife trafficking, a cottage industry a little more than a decade ago, now ranks fourth on the world black market behind the illegal trades of drugs, weapons and humans for sex, generating about $20 billion per year, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service police and economists.
Although the comment period for the rule drew the second most responses ever — 1.3 million, Ashe said little of the wording changed from the original proposal. He said, without confirmation, that 98 percent of the comments favored the near-total ban. “We felt buoyed by the comments,” Ashe said.
Antique dealers who facilitated the sales of everything from ivory statues to walking canes excoriated the ban as an infringement on their livelihoods from the moment it was proposed. But public opinion and government actions leaned against them. New Jersey, New York, California and Hawaii, the nation’s largest markets for ivory, each made nearly all sales illegal in recent months.
Hawaii’s ban last month was the strongest yet. Bowing to years of pressure from conservation groups fighting to save two iconic African animals from slaughter by poachers, state lawmakers not only banned sales of products containing elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn, but also artifacts made from the hides of numerous other species — seals, sharks, lions, hippopotamus, jaguars, tigers, leopards, great apes, whales, walrus, monk seals and cheetahs.
The law in Hawaii is even stronger than the federal rule, which exempts items from walrus, whale and mammoth. Hawaii’s does not.
“I would extend my gratitude to New Jersey, New York, California and Hawaii for being leaders in this effort,” Ashe said. He also thanked the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Humane Society of the United States, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other conservation groups that pressed for laws to restrict ivory sales.
“We’ve been a part of this since the beginning,” said John Calvelli, executive vice president for public affairs at the conservation society. “We are very excited by the rule because it shuts down a market in the U.S., and it sends a message to the world.”
The message, Fish and Wildlife officials said, is that U.S. citizens cherish ivory on living animals rather than on a carving or trinket. It is a signal to China to be equally aggressive, to do all it can to block illegal trade that is more robust there than anywhere in the world.
Elephants that once roamed the African plains by the millions now number fewer than a half-million, and about 35,000 are killed each year.
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