You are more than welcome to use the image yoko. I think I borrowed it from Vicky originally.
http://www.ivorynet.com/banivorytrade/index.htm
The process involved in procuring ivory is indeed horrific. The elephant must be killed before the ivory can be procured - stoning, poison dart resulting in slow painful death or machine gun slaughter of entire herds at waterholes. Regardless of the mode in which the elephants are killed, the process of extracting the ivory is all the same. In order to obtain all the ivory from the elephant, the hunter and poacher must cut into the head because approximately 25% of the ivory is contained in the head. What is then left on the fields of the African or Asian plains is the corpse of a tusk less elephant with a mutilated face and head.
THE POACHING PROBLEM
Between 1979 and 1989, the worldwide demand for ivory caused elephant populations to decline to dangerously low levels. During this time period, poachings fueled by ivory sales cut Africa's elephant population in half. Since they were big targets and sported the largest tusks, savannah elephants took the worst hit. But as soon as these elephants began to vanish, hunters moved into the forests in search of the elephants' smaller kin. In 1977, 1.3 million elephants lived in Africa; by 1997, only 600,000 remained.
Elephant tusks are still prized.
Recently, that number has stabilized, due in large part to the 1990 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) ban on international ivory sales.
But in June, 1997, CITES voted partially to lift trade sanctions and to allow Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to sell stockpiled ivory to Japan, where there is a major ivory market. Many conservation groups fear that this slight loosening of the ivory ban will rekindle poaching throughout the elephants' range.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/elephants/poaching.html
