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Temika

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:35:34 PM8/3/24

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On Friday, illegal elephant ivory was put on display and then destroyed in the center of Times Square in New York City. Elephant poaching is soaring according to conservation groups, as a pound of ivory can fetch $1,500 on the black market. Hari Sreenivasan reports.

This lifeless pile of tusks and trinkets and decorations is a stark reminder of the many thousands of elephants that have been slaughtered and continue to be slaughtered to support the global trade in ivory.

Elephant poaching for ivory is soaring according to conservation groups; a pound of ivory can fetch $1,500 on the black market and African elephants are already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

But the seized ivory was not there just to be looked at, it was there to be crushed. One by one the pieces were placed on a conveyer belt where they were dropped into an industrial rock crusher. The decorative ivory was turned into a fine powder.

Yesterday was the sixth ivory crush in the last two years. And other countries have followed the U.S.'s lead, including China which is the largest market for ivory in the world. Chinese officials destroyed nearly 1,500 pounds of ivory in May.

This is not a problem of conservation biology. It's not a problem of conservation management. This is a problem that people can solve. Don't buy ivory. That's what's going to stop the elephants from being killed.