In other news, Japan to stop whaling in a few years, once they’ve finished eating all the whales.
And the U.S. banned the cocaine trade many decades ago, & we can see how successful that’s been to stop the trade in the U.S. It’s bigger now than ever. I fear the legal “war on Ivory” in China will be about as successful as the failed “war on drugs” has been in the world. Good luck with that.
So they shouldn’t ban ivory trade then.
Not only that - all laws get broken sometimes, so repeal them all. End the failed “War on Crime!”
The War on Foo is a very specific US thing, currently China said it would forbade domestic trade of ivory - no black helicopters, no SWAT teams w/o warrant, no criminalization of grandfathered possession.
Most people are law-abiding, a ban will lower the ivory demand.
Within a year “or so”? Really? It’s actually entirely possible that the entire population of elephants in Africa could be nearly wiped out “within a year or so”, if the poachers put their minds to it, so now, they probably will. At this point, they’ve actually resorted to indiscriminate poisoning of elephants, which takes out entire groups, with ivory or not. This is a fine example of where diplomacy completely fails us as a species.
Japan, of course, fights very hard at resisting any attempts to legally restrict its whaling–there are treaties and agreements, but there are also loopholes and ways to weasel around it. Japan has never banned the sale of whale meat domestically.
And we should keep in mind what drives much of the poaching–money, yes, but much of the money ends up in the hands of African terrorist groups like Boko Haram and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and China is the main market.
When I was in Japan in 2001, I read about exactly that in the Asahi Shinbun. Koizumi announced an extended whaling campaign for “science”.
It took a couple years of pressure for him to clarify what sort of “science” involved killing 500 whales in the arctic, but (and I shit you not) the response was along the lines of, “the impact on whale populations of an extended whaling campaign”.
If China makes good on banning the ivory trade, maybe they will also ban all those other things that have been funding terrorists and driving animals to extinction?
-Tiger penis
-Rhino Horn
-Shark fin
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