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Comment by elefanten | Hacker News Reader

Another key vector is to reduce demand for ivory. The world needs to pressure the government of China, which drives demand and global ivory prices.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09993-2

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China banned all ivory trade at the end of 2017 and by all accounts (see WWF and NG sources cited in the tweet) it's been working quite well.

https://www.twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/13397828106309...

Yet the paper you reply to is written in sep 2019 and states that the Chinese market is still a massive influence. Don't you think that outweighs your tweet from 2018 from some guy?

The reports I linked to argue that (i) demand has been significantly reduced. The paper I replied to argues that (ii) a reduction of demand is significantly correlated with a reduction of poaching. Not only is there no "outweighing" of the former by the latter, but the former depends for its point on the latter (i.e. there is no reason to care if (i) is true unless (ii) is true).

The tweet is from this month. The NG article is from 2018, but the WWF article postdates the Nature article.

I read the linked tweets, and found them pretty vague.

Ivory powder is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), so it's more likely than not that China won't stop killing elephants (or rhinos.) Additionally, exotic TCM ingredients are considered to be a status symbol, so price is no object.

In addition, there's a new development. The CCP is intruding into Asian and African countries using Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a pretext, and even positioning armies there. This could well accelerate poaching.

I think you mean well, but consider the source of your information before being argumentative.

Has synthetic ivory gotten good enough to replace the natural source? Is it too expensive? Too easily distinguished? Demand too great?

One way to check for real v fake ivory is to heat a pin in a lighter and then try and poke a little hole. Real ivory doesn't melt at all, and a lot of imitation ivory does, and that is a very easy and expedient test.

Thank you. Ideally we can blur the lines between these two, so that the price for one is ruined because they can't be distinguished.

Mammoth ivory is actually not as expensive as you might expect, that’s about as good as you can get

What is it for? The only application that I know of is to make trinkets and baubles. The desire for that kind of thing is a good test to separate humans from animals.

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