Ivory Retail Trade Dips, But DC Now Leads Nation

The trade in elephant ivory is down but not out. And the nation’s capital has become a hotbed for hawking ivory, apparently because other places have made it harder to move stuff made from the tusks of slaughtered pachyderms.

TRAFFIC, a nonprofit group that monitors wildlife trafficking, said last week that it identified 658 pieces of ivory in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area in a survey of six major U.S. cities and several online selling sites between May and July of last year.

The group compared its findings to those made during a similar study in 2006 that found 16,758 ivory items for sale in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles alone. The latest TRAFFIC study found 489 pieces in those cities combined.

D.C.’s Lack Of Laws Could Be A Factor

“We were surprised to see greater D.C. top the list of elephant ivory in retail,” TRAFFIC’s Rachel Kramer, one of the report’s authors, told National Geographic.

She said Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco have long been the main ivory hubs in the United States. She said the survey suggests the discernible ivory trade was down in those cities because California and New York state have some of the toughest ivory regulations in the country.

Ivory Suppliers Follow The Demand

The United States also enacted tougher federal regulations in July 2016 that resulted in a “near total ban” on imports, exports and in-country ivory trade.

Conservation groups say the illegal ivory trade is responsible for the deaths of 30,000 elephants a year.

“Limiting ivory trafficking at the state level is a really important step towards closing the illicit U.S. market entirely,” Peter LaFontaine of International Fund for Animal Welfare, which participated in the survey. But he told National Geographic, “We want to avoid the ‘whack-a-mole’ scenario where ivory dealers simply pack up and move across a state border.”

Overall, in the six cities (Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, DC) 1,589 elephant ivory items were offered by 227 vendors.

It found 2,056 elephant ivory items in a survey of six major auction and marketplace sites.