Marking World Elephant Day, New York has passed one of the strongest laws of any U.S. state banning any dealing in elephant ivory and rhinoceros horns.
With elephants being slaughtered in Africa at a rate of almost a hundred a day, the New York law is intended to cut off the movement of ivory into the state, often considered the top imported in the United States.
Signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo Tuesday, it amends the state's environmental statutes to ban the sale of elephant ivory.
The law includes some common-sense exemptions for antique items containing small quantities of ivory, certain musical instruments manufactured prior to 1975 and specimens used for scientific or educational purposes, officials said.
An ongoing demand worldwide for ivory has caused a disastrous reduction in elephant numbers as the result of poaching, with populations of African forest elephants falling 65 percent since 2002.
Poachers are estimated to have killed around 35,000 elephants in 2012 alone, with heavily armed gangs using night-vision goggles and helicopters to hunt and kill the animals at night.
Elephant ivory can bring $1,000 a pound, and the gangs reportedly routinely bribe police and border guards to move illegal ivory in a trafficking operation said to be worth $7 billion to $10 billion each year.
The New York law dramatically increases penalties for illegal importation of ivory, with as much as 7 years imprisonment if the value of the illegal ivory exceeds $25,000.
Increasingly, world governments are willing to get involved in combating the illegal trade in ivory and other wildlife resources because of growing evidence that many terrorists groups are augmenting their funding through the illegal wildlife trade.
In the United States, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service destroyed several tons of seized illegal elephant ivory in 2013.
The Chinese government conducted a similar crushing of illegal ivory shortly after that, and similar actions have been undertaken in Africa by Chad and Gabon, and also by France, Belgium and the Philippines.
The law just passed in New York has wide and unflagging support by the public, with almost 80 percent of those contacted by pollsters earlier this year saying they supported a permanent ban on the ivory sale ban.
In 2012, New York City officials working with state and federal law enforcement entities seized around $2 million in illegally imported ivory from jewelers in the city, with one of them found to have a ton of ivory in his possession.
