EBay Pressured To Block Sales of Ivory Products

RickRussellTX writes "eBay is being pressured by an animal welfare group to ban sales of ivory and animal tooth products on its site. Although eBay is in compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species when it warns users that such postings may be inviolation of national and international law, the International Fund for Animal Welfare is demanding that they go a step further to search for and delete any posting of ivory products."

Won't happen.

[snarfies]

Ebay does not give a crap, so long as they get their cut. Want proof? Go ahead and report any of the THOUSANDS of Taiwanese bootleg anime DVDs on Ebay and see if even one gets yanked.

I'll save you some time - they won't. Last time I tried (and this, I will confess, was almost a decade ago) I was told to provide proof that I was the copyright holder.

Boo Hoo

[strikeleader]

As long as eBay is following the law they should tell those bleeding hearts to go pound sand.

Re:So...

[Otter]

The other curious thing is that the story claims (quoting the IFAW guy, I guess) that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits are required for legal sales in the US and then goes on to to state that there are no such permits! It's surprising enough that the "expert" doesn't have even a basic understanding of the law, but you'd think the writer would at least go back and correct an earlier paragraph!

Vintage items?

[jockeys]

The article is not 100% clear on whether an item must be older than 100 years or just older than the 1989 ban to still legally be sold.

Does anyone know?

I collect old straight razors, and have been looking to sell an old piano (not 100 years old, though) so the issue affects me personally.

Re:I'll skip to the end to save you some time

[WK2]

"Ebay isn't interested in policing the existing business"

That's not true. eBay bans stuff on its site all the time. Like MMORPG gold. And that's legal everywhere. Before you can decide whether or not eBay will choose to ban ivory, you need to figure out what criteria eBay uses to ban stuff.

In the case of MMORPG gold, it was because large corporations wanted them too (and probably paid them). If people with a lot of power ask them to ban ivory, they might do it. You're right about the little people though. eBay doesn't care about them.

Re:Vintage items?

[beadfulthings]

The convention among people who might be interested in ivory is that objects more than 50 years old are OK. You would most likely be both legally and morally in the clear with an old piano and antique razors. I would guess that nobody has manufactured straight razors with ivory handles in the past 50 years, and celluloid keys for pianos have also prevailed in that time frame. The problem comes with people who lie about the age of the ivory they're selling. (Incidentally, for people who might be interested in the "look and feel" of ivory without the slaughter, I'd strongly suggest a look at "vegetable ivory," or tagua. It is a nut-kernel product that actually has the look, feel, grain, and strength of the real stuff. It can be worked, carved, and shaped just like the real thing, and it lasts just as long. It's entirely renewable, and its harvest and preparation provide employment for people in several economically distressed areas of the world. Any amateur carvers or makers of jewelry would do well to investigate its excellent properties.)

Re:Pianos

[rivaldufus]

It depends on the age. The pianos I had growing up were quite old and all had Ivory veneer. As far as I know, the actual key mechanism is always wood, with the veneer... the same is usually true with modern pianos - wooden key with plastic veneer.

Even ignoring the fact that someone killed an elephant to get the ivory for the keys, I've always hated playing on ivory keys as they would break more easily than plastic.

Re:Boo Hoo

[bigstrat2003]

you are either ignorant or heartless.

Not caring about an issue is not the same as heartlessness. I don't give a flying fsck about the plight of the elephants, but I'm about as far from heartless as they come. Everyone has some things they don't care about, that doesn't make them bad people.

You're a good example of liberal fascism.

[Anonymous Coward]

*sarcasm* Oh, you're right! Nobody ever committed murder until the invention of the firearm, so if we divest ourselves of this terrible invention, we'll also eliminate murder!

Newsflash, a-hole. People have murdered each other since there were people, and they will continue to do so, be it with a knife, a club, or even a spoon. That is the problem with you liberals. You want to try to turn a dangerous world into a warm and safe cocoon for everyone, but the only way you can do so is through fascism. Your beliefs are as dangerous as they are ignorant. The data is overwhelming that gun bans only create victims. If someone is intent on committing murder, do you really think that a lesser law like a gun ban is going to stand in their way?

Re:C'mon, hippies...

[couchslug]

If people genuinely wanted to reduce trade in endangered species they'd support devaluing the products by ranching and harvesting the species instead.

Domestic cows aren't hunted to extinction.

Poaching is a myth; elephants died of impaction

[Reziac]

Several decades back, one of the major animal control agencies in Africa investigated the issue of ivory poaching -- and to their own astonishment, discovered it was entirely a myth. Poaching simply wasn't happening.

And they discovered that those huge "elephant graveyards" had another cause entirely.

Elephants are grazers, NOT browsers. This means they eat, and are designed to eat, GRASSES. They are NOT designed to eat shoots and twigs, nor can they digest that much cellulose.

The elephants found dead in those mass graveyards all had one thing in common: a large ball of half-digested tree branches lying inside each carcass. NONE of them had the large-calibre bullet hole in their skull or ribcage that would be left by an elephant gun (you don't hunt elephants with a deer rifle; you hunt them with armor-piercing shells the size of a Polish sausage. And you get ONE shot -- and if it's not a clean kill, the elephant kills YOU.)

And their tusks had not been CUT off, as would be the case with a fresh corpse -- they'd been removed from the tooth socket entirely, as can only be done if the flesh has already rotted away.

Suddenly, all was explained. These elephants died not from being poached, but of impacted bowels (which if untreated is 100% fatal).

And why was that happening? It's a direct result of Africa's exploding population, and its need to feed that population:

Over the past 100 years, African agriculture has radically expanded. Huge tracts of grassland that were formerly open range are now fenced off, and have been variously cultivated for human crops, or overgrazed down to dirt. Along with several major droughts, this has pretty well destroyed the grasslands that were the African elephants' original habitat AND their major food source.

Starving elephants took to eating whatever they could find that looked halfway like food -- and that too-often meant brushy shoots and small tree branches, which they could not digest. And they died of it. Being social herd animals, they tended to die in groups.

When one of these graveyards was found by humans, they rejoiced to see all the free ivory laying around (already conveniently rotted loose from the skull), carried it off, and sold it. No harm was done to any living elephant.

But international opinion and law had already decided that all ivory must come from poaching, so these facts were, and still are, entirely ignored. Especially since this mythical "poaching" makes great press for animal rights extremists.

And impoverished Africans either lose the money they gain from selling the ivory left behind by long-dead elephants, or they sell it on the black market.

Thought they were already doing this

[goltz20707]

A while back I tried to auction off a vicuna fur coat on eBay (from an estate sale), not realizing that vicuna is considered an endangered species. eBay curtly informed me of this fact and summarily deleted the auction. So why do ivory auctions only get a warning?

Re:Pianos

[kurzweilfreak]

It's no problem for you to sell your piano w/ ivory keys domestically (I work for a piano retailer, we sell/repair/rebuild ivory key pianos all the time), however it is illegal to import or export any piano with ivory keys. Piano keys are wood (spruce) with ivory or plastic keytops, not solid ivory or plastic. Some manufacturers today use a synthetic ivory compound that simulates many of the properties of ivory (slightly porous to absorb sweat and oil from the fingers). An interesting tidbit is that one manufacturer came up with a synthetic ivory solution that was so close to ivory, it actually turned yellow with age like the real thing except it did it much faster than real ivory. Whoops. Like someone below said, I also hate playing on ivory keys because I just don't like the feel of it. I guess I'm just used to the plastic of modern pianos and digitals.

Elephant Farms

[Quiet_Desperation]

Why don't some of the countries in the area just breed elephants on farms as a livestock animal? You get the ivory as a valuable export. You get the meat to feed your people. You pull elephants way back from the brink of extinction. And so on.