Ivory’s for sale again. Legally.

And here I thought the taboo was strong enough never to make the substance available as anything but a black (er white) market ware; I was wrong.

Merchants in Namibia held a closed door auction for nine tons of ivory (the product of roughly 10,000 dead elephants) yesterday morning. Six buyers from Japan and China purchased 7.2 of those tons.

The argument for that sale: Now that there are more than 312,000 elephants in Africa, the animal can no longer be considered extinct. Moreover, the ivory sold in Namibia purportedly comes from both elephants dying from natural causes and those selected from a group of government operations-owned animals (that doesn’t sound sinister at all). Lastly, those throwing the auction, one of a planned four “internationally authorized sales” presenting a net 108 metric tons (or 238,032 pounds), have promised those events will precede a nine year “resting period” in which no ivory will be procurable in Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. That period, the equivalent of letting the field lie fallow on the seventh year, would be observed in order to “safeguard stocks.”

Not to sound like a crazed PETAite or even a softie, but facing the idea that ivory may be bought legally makes me slightly ill.

Even if, as the merchants claim, the elephants died a natural death or were carefully gleaned from preserves, how can these merchants be themselves sure any number of the pachyderms were not poacher trophies? Like the one conflict diamond that gets cut and mixed into a more purely obtained batch and sullies the trade, that one poached elephant piled into the haul suddenly turns the whole ivory business rogue.

Why does having more elephants suddenly send the message that an ivory selling fest is what’s in order? And while I’m on a simile-making kick, I’ll compare that to procrastination. Finding yourself in the unique, wonderful and implausible position of having been given the gift of extra time to spend on a project when you least expected it, will you use it to finish the piece at a leisurely pace? Not likely. You’ll somehow end up squandering it in such a manner as to be in the dire straits you were caught in before. I don’t think witnessing a healthy growth in elephant numbers should imply that more of them ought to be killed. Why not enjoy their presence in peace, remembering that ivory’s mien may easily be mimicked by cream-colored plastic?

I guess you can say that it would be a waste not to use the ivory that’s been languishing in safes or faults or wherever these years since it became illegal (nine years ago and one year ago on eBay), and that extant ivory-wielding jewelry or figurines, chess sets or pianos should be sold regardless. But as much as that makes sense, and as an antique lover, I do understand the rationale, I can’t shake the feeling (and please don’t liken me to an anti-legalizing drugs finger waggler) that making all of it available will remind those who didn’t know about or miss it how “nice” or “pretty” it is, eventually increasing demand for this tusk-stealing material.

Banning anything’s a slippery slope. Most things we use, even for decorative purposes alone, involve some form of direct or indirect killing or oppression: silver/gold/precious stones (mining, often slave-like and definitely dangerous), wood (tree chopping, cheap and/or forced labor), bone (self-explanatory and much like ivory), plastic (cancer producing through factory emissions and deadly to those working in them), etc. Even were we to limit ourselves to the use of obsidian, we could conjure up collective memories of those slain by lava.

So there’s no easy solution.

But why risk endangering elephants again? And if it was, until so recently, illegal, why mess with a good thing?

Tags: auction, black market, botswana, china, conflict diamonds, diamonds, elephant, endangered, gold, ivory, japan, mining, namibia, obsidian, peta, plastic, precious stones, procrastination, silver, south africa, wood, zimbabwe