Government makes killing elephants more profitable

Here's a snippet from December 29, 2006 (just because I saw the topic of ivory bans come up again recently):

The environmental mindset of government was witnessed years ago when some "ivory smugglers" were caught.

In order to "save the elephants", ivory had been tightly controlled.

Some government now had "confiscated" tons of a precious material. How could they have destroyed the market for ivory and put the poachers out of business? (Not that I believe they should, just as a thought experiment) They could have released all that ivory into the market and caused a glut, sending the prices down and making it less profitable to kill elephants.

What did the governments actually do? They burned the ivory.
There, in a nutshell, is how governments think they will save the planet.

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