Why America’s ivory ban won’t help elephants

The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose population is being decimated by poaching. But his advisers should have been quicker to dissuade him from one aspect of his campaign: the threat to dispose of his grandmother’s ivory collection.

That Africa’s elephant population is in peril from poachers is not in doubt. Of a total of 400,000 living in the wild, around 50,000 were illegally killed last year, way beyond the numbers which the population could naturally withstand. The future is looking bleak, too, for wild rhino, 1,000 of which were poached in Africa last year out of an estimated total of 25,000.

But what good it would do to put Buckingham Palace’s chess sets and pianos through the grinder is not easy to ascertain. By the same token, there could be an argument for demolishing the great pyramids on the grounds that they were built by slave labour, or for erasing the Yorkshire town of Whitby from the map on the grounds that it owes much of its wealth to the now frowned-upon whaling industry.

To be fair to Prince William, the idea of punishing old artefacts for the crimes of modern poachers is unlikely to have originated with him. This week, the Obama administration is preparing to pass one of those illiberal and irrational laws which occasionally make us wonder about America’s right to claim the title of Land of the Free. Under the proposals, there would be an outright ban on import of any product containing ivory, and a ban on export of any ivory unless the owner can prove that it is over 100 years old. There will also be bans on sale of ivory within the US.