14 DAY TRIAL // Recent news from the US Fish and Wildlife Service says that next week, on November 14, the country's national ivory stockpile is to be publicly destroyed in an attempt to send a message to poachers.
The message the US is trying to convey by crushing all the ivory it has collected over the past 25 years from traffickers and even tourists is that the country does not and will not ever stand for wildlife crime.
“We are taking an important step next week,” said the Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Daniel Ashe, at a press conference on Tuesday, as cited by Swampland Time.
“We’re doing that in the hopes of raising the profile of this issue and also to try to inspire other nations around the world to deal with their stockpiles,” he went on to argue.
The ivory crush scheduled for next week's Thursday was initially supposed to take place on October 8, as announced by the Obama administration towards the middle of this year's September.
“By crushing this ivory stockpile, the U.S. government is sending a signal. If we're going to solve this crisis we have to crush the demand, driven by organized crime syndicates who are robbing the world of elephants and stealing the natural heritage of African nations.”
“It’s a global phenomenon. So we hope this encourages other governments to take bold, decisive steps to curb the demand for illegal elephant products,” Carter Roberts with the World Wildlife Fund stated at that time.
Unfortunately, the ivory crush had to be postponed due to the government shutdown. The good news is that it did not get canceled altogether.
The destruction of the 6 tons of ivory that the US presently keeps in a warehouse in Denver, Colorado is the first event of its kind for this country.
Word has it that, after the ivory is destroyed, bits and pieces of it will be used to erect a memorial in Washington DC. The monument will honor the thousands of elephants that have thus far been killed by poachers.