Thailand is a pit of evil.

You can buy a 6 year old girl or get a 14 year old Transvestite 10 minutes after getting through customs. Literally anything goes.

If they sell their children, Why would they not deal in Ivory.

Truly sad.

China on the other hand is just full of greedy bastards. The are a scourge on the animal kingdom.

One country is desperately needy the other one is just obscene.

Kill an elephant or Rhino just to get some horns.

Kill Gorillas and tigers just to get hands and paws.

Killing whales and Dolphins makes no sense at all.

Cutting off shark fins then dumping them back in to drown, Inhuman.

It will suck when we have a planet without wild animals. I don't want to live to see that.

I see it everyday and I swear we are beginning to de-evolve.

If you want to help life on Earth then invest in artificial reefs. There are miles of canals and sea floor that are nothing but mud.If you put just a little structure in a location it quickly becomes full of life.

Sorry Chris the coral reefs are dying from global warming & ocean pollution. Capitalist strike again & religion is but one tool.

There is no excuse in today's wol=rld to trade in any exotic animal parts. Thailand is a pit of evil and always has been. The UN is always sticking their nose wwhere it isn't needed or wanted why don't they do something about this problem. Thisis a global problem. If there is any legal place on Earth to trade these items then the blackmarket will continue to feed off of them.

There was a recent show on PBS about the plight of the elephants. They are being slaughtered by the poachers at an astronomical rate. The ivory is being sold to the Chinese. There are places in China to buy ivory that has been carved into very nice things. The people who work at these places supposedly "know" where the ivory is from, and that it is supposed to be 'old' ivory, from before the ban. But the vast majority is not. The Chinese want what they want, and to heck with everyone else's wishes.

If this continues, the elephant will be an animal of extinction. The numbers are dwindling...I believe they said there are fewer than 1 million now...600,000 or so. I think they said there were over 8 million in the early 1900s.

Shame on we humans. Animals kill other animals only for need. Humans kill for greed.

Here we go the not even 1 degree change in temperature is killing off coral reefs and manhattan is 4 feet under water like predicted, right.. Nonsense

Nothing will change. Greed is whats causing so much of this but then again the countries that want all this Ivory for there ornaments and trinkets that just sit on some shelf collecting dust. Sick.

China is of course causing the largest part of the problem and until that country admits its wrong doings nothing will change, look at how China pollutes its own cities and towns with toxic chemicals from there commercial business's everyday and someday all of these things will catch up with them in that the land wont be livable or the people will become infected with all sorts of aliments and illness's, I will look forward to that day when it all hits them where it counts.

Until people come together from all over the planet to put a stop to crap like this nothing will change, sadly.

If I had my way I would start up a safari company that specialized in hunting expeditions of the killers of these defenseless animals. Wouldn't that be a fantastic way to give people a way to make a difference and maybe even a tax deduction to boot! I'll bet there would be a lot of takers to this crazy idea.

Thailand is a 3rd world country that has no regard for the safety and conservation of any animal species, they wontonly kill, eat and destroy all animal life if there is a profit to be made from it.

they are exactly like china when it comes to their attitude about animal species.

china has eaten every living thing on its land and in its seas.

Hopefully, next, they will start eating each other.

The core of this issue is: CHINA.

A CBS news report uncovered that the unprecedented demand for elephant tusk ivory is primarily coming from the ignorant population in China that is aquiring new-found wealth in the global economy.

Chinese culture associates power and prestige with the ownership/display of various animal parts. Ivory is one of them.

in the CBS report, poached tusks were being sold in Egypt (although illegal), mainly to Chinese tourists going into markets. Real ivory is painted/coated in paint to look/feel like wood, and therefore pass customs (if the agents already aren't corrupt plebians in the various second or third-world nation).

Chinese demand has also been traced to near-extinction of sea horses in the waters around Southeast Asia.

plastic that looks like ivory would be fine with me if you couldn't tell the difference so what. and whats with the ivory anyway. they used ivory in the old days because they didn't have plastic. carve something else if they want to carve something. like wood. they should put to death anybody that kills an elephant for ivory. humans are the worst thing that has happened to this planet.

We need to get money any way we can if you can do this under the table and not pay taxes on it do it

I hope these are not going to be a bunch of "feel good" sanctions. Too many times that's all we get and that's the reason this trade goes on.

Asian cultures do love to support wanton slaughter of endangered animals. Without their rhino horns the Chinese would be impotent.

Blaming China/asian nations for poachers' killing is tantamount to blaming narcotic/illicit drug users for the action of the drug producers/traffickers.

With all of our efforts- WWF and others, sancuaries for elephants, and all of the sentiment from the majority of rational people, the slaughter still goes on. When am I going to read some good news about the plight of animals? And to make matters worse, elephants are so darn intelligent and they grieve. Where is the humanity? Where is empathy? Why bother being a human?

"...It is the right of Thai people to use domestic elephants," he (Thai official) said -- That says it all about the Thai government. And they're supposed to be a Buddhist country, full of compassion and mercy.

Asian cultures are like locusts, they just devour anything in their path. It is utter total ignorance and greed. I'd rather decimate their cultures, then have one elephant killed. When you keep trying to change their foolish ways and nothing changes, its time to take another approach. Perhaps we should just ask that no US citizens as well as any other country to join us, to ban tourist travel to Thailand, until they do something constructive to stop this moronic disgusting behavior!

I'm getting so sick of seeing, everyday, that some "exotic" material such as rhino tusks, tiger paws, or some other animal part is poached for the sake of some jackass in a foreign country who can't get it up and considers the animal part to be an aphrodisiac that will help him "be a man." That and the illegal ivory trade that serves megalomaniac dictators and other people who want richness and opulence in their lives--all are just sick, stupid, ignoramuses who, themselves, should be taken out of the gene pool.

Folks, if you want to be part of the solution, immerse yourselves now in the study of permaculture (see the books in bookstores and on Amazon, etc.) and learn to practice it right where you live, be it urban, suburban, or rural. If everyone rethinks their approach to nature and human habitat, we might have a chance of saving our animal species AND ourselves!

Donald Trumps boys have no problem with killing elephants. Just last year they murdered one while on vacation and then posted photos online of them posing with it.

Greed is the source of all human evil. We are depleting the earth,s natural resources and its beauty
In the end, the human race will eradicate itself once and for all

Na Balony South Africa has far too much ivory............ DNA is th solution

To stop the trade of rare and endangered species animal products (in this case it is elephant ivory), the solution is to stop the trade in ivory at the source of the poaching problem (in the field) and not just rely upon governments and regulations (too corrupt and incompetent) to stop the sale of the products. The technology is available to do it (through former U.S. military arial surveillance equipment once used to detect and track IED's and terrorists), but the funding for such conservation, usually passes through global animal protection group 'money machines' that raise incredible amounts of money each year ($100's of millions/U.S.) only to waste most of it on their own internal organizational expenses and salaries, rather than in-the-theater interdiction and true conservation efforts. Groups like WWF and others use the images of orphan baby elephants and their slaughtered mothers to raise money. These so-called wildlife preservation organizations are abysmal failures at their core claim of effectively protecting endangered species. To these conservation bureaucrats, talking about doing something about the slaughter of elephants, is like actually doing something about it. Technical surveillance superiority combined with fierce interdiction practices are the only things that will save many species from this suffering and ultimate extinction. The people in the field that are witnessing the poaching are too underfunded to prevent it and too co-dependent on the limited funding that they receive from the incompetent wildlife organizations to challenge their benefactors and thereby risk a total loss their meager funding. Furthermore, the wimpy conservation expert elitist members worry more about protecting their funding 'turf' than about the effectiveness of their respective anti-poaching/anti-ivory trade programs and the regulatory merry-go-round of CITIES conferences and the debate about whether or not, the sale of any ivory should be allowed. The limited sale of ivory acquired through the natural end-of-life of an elephant should be handled by a third-party international auction, with the proceeds going to species conservation and poaching interdiction within the country of the ivory's origin. This takes the element of corruption and incompotence of the governmental and wildlife organizations, respectively, out of the equation for the survival of the species. This is model for action is the only wildlife presrvation model that will work, rather than the current failed model of trying to talking the poachers, their customers and the feckless governmental oversite authorities into submission to save these and other endangered species. Otherwise, the talking will only continue at the wildlife preservation cocktail party fund raisers, the poachers will continue to cut the tusks off of the elephants with chainsaws, the ivory buyers with add another vanity status symbol made of ivory to their fireplace mantles and these magnificent elephants will die grotesque deaths and become extinct.

It's normal for Thai politics. Talk, talk, talk and do nothing. Agree to everything and do nothing. Listen to everyone and do nothing. That why they have the famous term in Thailand "Mai pen rai"! They could care less what the world thinks, just keep the money moving through our hands.

As a Buddist country they should be ashamed, but if you don't care...? Very sad statment on Thailand.