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After the Trump administration announced last year that it would be undoing an Obama administration ban on importing elephant trophies, a decision that may or may not have been grounded in Uday and Qusay Trump's compulsive need to shoot at things, public outcry was so severe that Trump was forced to reverse himself.
It turns out that was only a temporary reversal. Now that the news cycle has moved on, the ban on importing the detached corpse parts of African elephants has been lifted after all.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has quietly begun allowing more trophy hunting of African elephants, despite President Donald Trump’s pledge last year to uphold a ban on importing parts of animals killed by big-game hunters.
The agency issued a formal memo Thursday saying it would consider issuing permits to import elephant trophies from African nations on a “case-by-case” basis, effective immediately. The new guidelines, first reported by The Hill, end U.S. bans on the import of such trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia.
The immediate pretext for the decision is a court finding that although the import ban was warranted by the evidence, the Obama administration did not invite sufficient public comment before banning those imports. Rather than seek that public comment now the Ryan Zinke-led Department of the Interior has, at least as of this moment, scrapped the ban in favor of this new "case-by-case" curiosity. And the agency has not made public just what criteria will be used in these "case-by-case" decisions.
“We saw the public outcry last fall when [the trophy decision] was announced … not just from people who are traditionally Democrats,” [Center for Biological Diversity attorney Tanya Sanerib] said. “The agency is really playing hide the ball. It’s incredibly disappointing.”
As a reminder, elephants are an endangered species. They are in danger of extinction, but continue to be widely poached for their tusks, which are powdered and consumed by dimwitted people as purported medical cures, cut into chunks to be carved into artistic trinkets, or are imported whole, with the heads still attached, by hunters who just like to shoot things and display the stuffed corpses as proof they did it. Populations are shrinking precipitously, and are especially in danger in places where government corruption or unrest limits the ability (or will) to enforce hunting limits, which is why the original ban targeted those specific nations to begin with.
Trump originally received lavish praise for promising to keep the ban in place; there is no word yet on whether he expects similarly lavish praise for his administration's quiet reversal of that promise. But there is something grimly fitting in the Republican administration's insistence on culling the population of the animal they have chosen as their mascot. Perhaps the banner-wavers think their own stock will go up if the real things go extinct?