To sell antique ivory or ban it? Or, how to blacken a party by inuuendo.

I agree Penstemmon although I am not a strong Conservative voter usually but certainly am for this GE and the last one. For the future it will depend on what happens to the Labour party ditto the Lib Dems.Who is leading them etc. And in what direction!
I just think all the pettyness around who votes for who and why ,( calling them heartless, no moral compass etc etc) both distracting and actually plain silly.It must just be social media, because I remember ( not all that long ago) that you voted, but accepted that your chosen party didn't get into power every time, and you didn't go around vilifying other people for choosing them.
Now it seems like a war!
Social media has many good points, but sometimes I think outweighed by the bad.

Re banning the sale of any ivory, where does that leave pianos?

Toothless?

On the face of it, I thought that it was a bit silly to ban the sale of old ivory but I have changed my mind. Those that know more about the trade have said that it is not possible to ensure that all ivory which is traded is old ivory.

Maria Mossman from Action for Elephants UK, said: “The crackdown on ivory sales announced by the government does not represent the total ban we are calling for. It simply tightens controls on the documentation of ivory for sale, however no mechanisms could ever ensure that such controls were met and enforced for every single piece of ivory sold in the UK. As long as a legal ivory trade is allowed to continue, illegal ivory will find its way on to the market – and the scourge of poaching will continue.”

Exactly Eloethan. There are still unscrupulous people who will work to make new ivovy look old etc. if there is money to be made. If there is no market for ivory there is no need to poach elephants.

My mum was a governess in South Africa and the High Commissioner gave her an intricate ivory brooch with an elephant carved into it. I keep it in a drawer, but one day I will probably take a deep breath and throw it away. Someone gave me the address of a dealer in London but I haven't pursued that avenue yet.

The way things are going, there will very likely come a time in the future (probably nearer than we think) when elephants are extinct anyway. It is not just poaching, there is the encroachment of humans planting crops on land where elephants live, and protecting them from being eaten, the building of political barriers across routes they have travelled for many centuries, the changes in climate turning large areas into desert, ancient waterholes drying up because the water has been tapped elsewere for crops to feed expanding human populations, and so on and so forth.

If/when that happens, the only physical evidence remaining of these magnificent beasts could be the beautiful things made in the past from their ivory. Perhaps these should not be destroyed, but put away for future generations, when an elephant is just a fabled beast like the dodo?

And I'm still wondering about pianos.

Pianos have had synthetic keys for quite a while.

Not that long...what about all the old ones?

Can you not sell an old piano?

Yes, a few years ago we sold an Edwardian age piano, people were queuing up to buy it, it was amazing.

BUT was it ethical? (As seems to be implied above)

There's nothing to stop you selling an old piano with ivory keys.It's not going to bring an Edwardian elephant back to life.I think that old ivory figurines etc netsuke and so on are still sold legally too.

not going to bring back etc!

My query about pianos was related to ethics, not legality.