black market

Don’t Want to Tickle These Ivories

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

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.

(more…)