SAN FRANCISCO—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 said 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 4.5 feet long that she was selling.
Those claims are a ruse, according to opponents of the global trade in elephant ivory. San Francisco and Los Angeles make up two of the country’s top three hubs for ivory sales, and most dealers in the state rely on intentional mislabeling to cover up the illegal sale of recently poached African elephants, wildlife groups and some ivory experts said.
The proposed federal rules would not close the mislabeling loopholes, ivory opponents said, but a bill before state lawmakers would narrow them in California by banning ivory-like material from many animals, advocates said.
