SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Ivory dealers in San Francisco’s Chinatown stood in their shop doors next to windows full of carved ivory tusks and trinkets, unfazed by proposed federal rules that the White House says go as far as possible to ban the U.S. trade of ivory from the world’s endangered elephants.
“Wooly mammoth ivory,” not elephant ivory, Michael Rasoyli said this week of the carved tusks for sale in the store he manages.
“Cow bone,” Virginia Lo, manager of a Chinatown shop next door, said of the half-dozen curved tusks up to 4 ½ feet long that she was selling.