eBay Allows Ivory Trade

In a one-week period this February, more than 2,200 elephant ivory items were up for grabs on eBay, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

In Britain, it's legal to sell ivory only if it was harvested before June 1947. In the U.S., it has to be more than 100 years old. But for more than 90 percent of those listed ivory goods, sellers did not provide the required proof-of-age certificates, the report stated.

"What's happening online is that there's a totally unregulated trade. If you stop the selling of ivory, then the killing will stop," Robbie Marsland, director of the IFAW in Britain, told the AP.

Between 1979 and 1989, poaching for ivory in Africa cut its elephant population in half. About 1.3 million elephants lived in Africa in 1977; by 1997, there were just 600,000.