Elephant Ivory facts
While investigating facts about Elephant Ivory Price and Elephant Ivory Billiard Balls For Sale, I found out little known, but curios details like:
Every year, an estimated 33'000 elephants are killed for their ivory across Africa. That's nearly 100 a day or one every 15 mins.
how much is elephant ivory worth?
GPS trackers in fake elephant tusks helped to reveal an Ivory smuggling route.
What is elephant ivory?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is elephant tusk ivory used for. Here are 35 of the best facts about Elephant Ivory Anthrax and Elephant Ivory Uses I managed to collect.
what elephant ivory is used for?
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Black Ivory Coffee, the most expensive coffee in the world, is made by feeding coffee beans to elephants then picking the beans out of their droppings. The fermentation process inside the elephant is said to help remove the coffee's bitterness.
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The Maasai tribe rarely killed elephants because they believe they have human-like souls. However, ethnic violence and droughts have greatly hurt their traditional way of life and the high price of ivory has induced many Maasai to risk jail and tribal shame, and start poaching elephants.
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In 1956, a contestant at The Price Is Right was offered an elephant as a bonus prize to make for extra ivory for the grand piano he had just won. The real prize was in fact $4,000 but the contestant insisted he wanted the elephant. The show eventually delivered an elephant from Kenya to him.
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George Washington's false teeth were not made of wood. Instead, his only complete set of dentures were made of lead, human and cow teeth, and elephant ivory.
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The demand for elephant meat (for human and animal consumption) may soon surpass the ivory trade as the dominant threat to elephant populations worldwide.
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The name "Les Elephants" which means "the elephants" is the nickname for the Ivory Coasts" national football team.
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An investigative journalist had two fake elephant tusks embedded with GPS tracking devices to track illegal ivory trade.
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Some traditional bagpipes were made with ring caps of elephant ivory that makes it difficult to take the instrument to countries where ivory has been banned.
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Located in the jungles of Thailand are elephants that are fed coffee beans. 15-30 hours later they excrete the beans in their dung and it is harvested to make the most expensive coffee in the world - called Black Ivory Coffee.
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Elephants in Mozambique are evolving to lose tusks due to ivory poaching, and that 90% of its population in the country was killed during the Mozambican Civil War.
Why is elephant ivory valuable?
You can easily fact check why is the commercial value of ivory a threat to the elephant by examining the linked well-known sources.
There was a $50M reward for Veerappan aka the Sandalwood Smuggler, who was an Indian bandit that was wanted for killing approx. 184 people and poaching 200 elephants, smuggling their ivory worth $2.6M and sandalwood worth approx. $22M.
Black Ivory Coffee is a brand of coffee produced in Northern Thailand from Arabica coffee beans consumed by elephants and collected from their feces. It is among the world's most expensive coffees, at US$1,100 per kilo - source
Tusks of woolly mammoth are the only type of ivory that can be legally sold today (unlike elephant ivory). Thanks to the price of 400 dollars per pound, tusks of woolly mammoth are very popular among tusks-hunters.
Some animals throughout history have been hunted for only a small portion of their body, resulting in devastating losses to populations. Some of these animals have included elephants (for their ivory tusks), bears (for their gallbladders), white rhinos (for their horns), and American bison (for their hides).
To avoid ivory trafficking violations, Violinists with very old instruments replace their elephant ivory with mastodon ivory. - source
When was elephant ivory banned?
Around 90% of Ivory seized by law enforcement is from elephants that died less than three years before it was seized. In a sample size of 241 pieces of ivory, only one was older than 6 years from harvest.
How to identify elephant ivory?
More African elephants are being born without tusks. Ivory poaching may be an evolutionary pressure resulting in survival of the tuskless.
Poachers prefer the ivory of African Forest Elephants (in the Congo Rainforest) because compared to their savanna cousins, it's much denser and can be more intricately carved. The tusks can be 5 feet long in males.
Poachers in Myanmar are killing elephants not for ivory but for their thick skin, some of which is dried and turned into red beads.
Mammoth ivory trade is a thing and is actually legal. This is however an aggravating factor in the trafficking of elephant ivory since they are very similar to each other encouraging falsification.
