Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
So if ivory is so valuable why has no-one started farming them?
It's not that valuable, they eat loads and live for like 100 years
I like your thinking though. Could it not be grown in big 'tusk shaped' petri-dishes?
Plus the ivory grows slowly so the return on investment would be poor.
Could it not be grown in big 'tusk shaped' petri-dishes?
Theoretically possible to do it in a lab, whether people would buy it as opposed to buying the real thing is a different story.
And the more ivory there is, the less valuable it is. Look how affordable farm grown Scottish salmon is now.
who'd want to clear out the stables?
Bad things can happen
There used to be several well documented elephant cages dotted around the British countryside and elsewhere. These large structures were often hidden as well as possible from prying eyes.
Perhaps this has been tried and failed.
The thing with Ivory is its the only part of the animal thats valuable - if there was a market for elephant-ear rugs, elephant trunk draft excluders, elephant burgers etc then farming might be sort of viable. But because its only a tiny part of the animal that has a value, even if its a spurious one, its not worth farming one but it is worth someone poaching one.
Doubtless a lot of the value of ivory is its a trophy - that its had to have been pursued and hunted, the market would lose interest in something that wasn't rare and hard-won.
But... those collectors don't need to know - there needs to be a was a way of secretly farming ivory, using smaller, cheaper to rear, easier to hide animals then selling that into the black market. Thats why in my secret laboratory I'm conducting cruel and unusual experiments to see if I can genetically graft the DNA to produce tusks onto more conveniently sized animals. I've had mixed results so far - A cat with a trunk, a dog that produces a 150kg of shit everyday and a goldfish that never forgets.
LMAO!
Quality post - very funny!
Funniest post I've seen on here for a while - genius
[IMG] 
[/IMG]
Oh dear god maccruiskeen, how did you breed them?
There's a joke in there somewhere about an enormous hooter, but I can't quite find it...
awww baby owlephants