On the recordFebruary 26, 2016
Today I am offering an amendment to the SHARE Act to direct the Government Accountability Office to delve deeper into an important issue, and that is the ivory trade, which has sparked international concern. Last year my home State of California became the third State in the country to approve tougher restrictions on the intrastate ivory trade, joining New York and New Jersey in that regard. The new California law, AB 96, closes a loophole that had allowed the import of ivory harvested from animals killed before 1977. Now, this loophole made a ban of the import of elephant ivory nearly impossible to enforce because distinguishing between pre- and post-1977 ivory products would require very expensive isotope testing. The California law also included a ban on the growing trade in mammoth ivory--this is ivory discovered in Siberia and elsewhere-- ironically made easier because of warming weather and melting tundra due to the impacts of climate change. There is growing concern that Chinese ivory traders are passing off illegal elephant tusks as mammoth ivory in order to avoid international elephant ivory bans. But distinguishing between mammoth ivory and elephant ivory requires technical testing, which makes, again, enforcement of an elephant ivory ban very difficult unless the mammoth ivory trade is also addressed. Now, some argue that, despite this difficulty, legal mammoth ivory can reduce the market for illegal elephant ivory.…
