China announces ban on ivory trade by end of 2017

They do. For example, Pangolins are at the brink of extinction (they are actually the most trafficked mammal on the planet) mostly because they are considered a delicacy in China. A friend of mine is running a website called Poaching Facts (http://www.poachingfacts.com/) if you want to learn more. Here's for example his article on sales of bear parts http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of...

Vice also did a short documentary on it

https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/the-most-trafficked-mamma...

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that it doesn't seem like the willingness to put a stop to this is universal among the members of the Chinese govt http://www.voanews.com/a/report-china-presidential-delegatio...

Your line of thinking is why the "War on Drugs" is a failure. If you think people want to hunt elephants, deal drugs, or mug for a living, you haven't thought hard enough on the socioeconomic problem that plagues the poor.

> Compared to rhinos, elephants are in zero danger.

Elephants are definitely NOT in zero danger. Certain species of Rhino are definitely virtually extinct (for example, there are only three known remaining specimen of the Northern white rhino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_white_rhinoceros) but elephants are in a pretty bad shape too. If the next 10 years are as bad as the last 10, they will be virtually extinct in the wild.

Furthermore, IIRC, the biggest consumer of illegal rhino horn isn't China but Vietnam.

Reading material for you from the president of Columbia, citing the failures of the War on Drugs.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/18/colombia-unite...

"“We need to provide social and economic alternatives to small growers of illegal crops and other vulnerable communities in order to create the necessary conditions to bring them back to legality,” wrote Santos in an opinion piece in the Observer."

And your analogy of the mugging is invalid. In mugging there's two parties, the mugger and the victim. The war on drugs is the closest analogy. It is an illegal trade, just like ivory. There's three parties. The grower, seller, and buyer.

If you do not get the grower, in this case, the ivory hunter, a legal path to providing food for their family, it will be a failure, just like the crackdown on cocaine for the last 30 years.

I feel somewhat qualified to speak on this since my startup, Pembient, biofabricates rhino horn. Basically, rhino horn has been banned in China since 1993. Despite that prohibition, much rhino horn still ends up in China, where it is used primarily for decorative purposes and not medicinal purposes as is widely reported [1].

From a policy perspective, bans often don't work because they induce a "forbidden fruit" effect [2]. Or, in the words of Walter Lippmann [3]:

"We find ourselves revolving in a circle of impotence in which we outlaw intolerantly the satisfaction of certain persistent human desires and then tolerate what we have prohibited. Thus we find ourselves accepting in their lawless forms the very things which in lawful form we repudiate, having in the end to deal not only with all the vices we intended to abolish but with the additional dangers which arise from having turned over their exploitation to the underworld."

It is especially strange seeing wildlife policy push further towards a "war on drugs" stance at the same time that many are claiming that war has been lost [4].

It will be interesting to see how things play out, but I believe policy in this area is fundamentally flawed and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, the animals will survive our blundering.

[1] https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...

[2] http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=33...

[3] http://www.unz.org/Pub/Forum-1931feb-00065

[4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/war-on-drugs-legaliza...