WASHINGTON STATE FRIENDS: Washington State is proposing a ban on elephant and mammoth ivory sales in Washington State. This ban would make it a crime to sell or possess with the intent to sell legally imported pre 1990 elephant ivory and 10,000 year old mammoth ivory from the extinct woolly mammoths! This means collectable guns, knives, carvings, cue sticks, musical instrument, scrimshaw, trophy tusks and family heirlooms. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the venerable World Wildlife Fund the U.S. is NOT a destination for poached ivory today, so why have our legislators decided this is necessary? Poverty and corruption in Africa, and greed in Asia are the reason poaching in Africa is happening. Americans should be allowed to buy and sell our legal property freely, and if not we should be compensated. Tons of mammoth ivory is collected every year by Alaskan natives along the riverbanks and on the beaches, where the tusks fall out of the banks due to erosion. This ivory is one of their few sources of income, and gold miners find it in their pursuit of gold. No archeological sites are robbed, this material becomes exposed by nature and mining and if it is not collected it cracks, crumbles and deteriorates into compost within a few years and is lost forever. The only way to preserve this precious prehistoric material is to allow it to be collected, bought and sold. It is easily distinguishable from elephant ivory and is legal to ship all over the world, because of that no one is smuggling it. This very poorly crafted bill goes to the Agriculture and Natural Resources committee on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. at the John L. O’Brien building in Olympia. Ivory owners need to be at the meeting, if you can’t be there, then call the numbers on the committee member list and speak out! Below is a link to the HB1131 bill and a link to committee members with their phone numbers. If we cant convince the committee to kill this bill, then we need a minimum 30-day public input/comment period for the facts to be presented. The thousands of people, who have millions of dollars of property that will be affected, need to be heard. Again we need to speak up now so this bill dies in committee. This may be our only opportunity to be heard.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 04:44:20 +0000
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