The availability of online elephant ivory

The ivory trade is an increasingly prominent form of wildlife crime, and due to technological advances in recent years, the internet has made ivory trading more accessible than ever before. This has created a drastic change in how crime operates and has consequently led to difficulties in identifying sales and penalization. Despite the UK Ivory Act banning the trade, and CITES protecting vulnerable elephant populations, the ivory trade still continues to threaten the species. Further research into the online availability of ivory is crucial in understanding the trade and behavioural response of consumers. This study aims to; understand the demand for ivory and the scale of consumerism in more detail, and to investigate the accessibility of the online ivory market. This involved exploring how popular ivory products are in UK marketplaces, and how easy it is to find and purchase ivory as a consumer. These questions are investigated through chapter 2 of this thesis, which involved a 17-week investigation of eBay UK by searching for 'netsuke' items to identify possible ivory products being sold. These were examined for Schreger lines to determine the authenticity of ivory items. Additionally, chapter 3 of this thesis investigates trade data using the search-cost ('shopping list') analysis method, which involves searching for a specific list of wildlife items online. The aim of this is to demonstrate a more time-effective way to gain trade data compared to traditional methods, especially given the scale of online trade. This follows the rationale that when searching for an item, a higher search time would correlate with less availability. The ivory market provides a particularly interesting case study to investigate the effectiveness of the search cost method due to the persistence of active ivory sellers despite the UK Ivory Ban and recent political interest in wildlife crime. For this study, we involved 24 participants who were given a 'shopping list' of both elephant items and non-elephant items and asked them to record how long it took to identify each item online. These studies identified some key findings, where we can conclude the ivory trade is still prominent, with existing demand and accessibility to consumers. Over the 17-week study period of eBay investigation, we identified a total of 43 unique ivory items with 30% of products being sold to the consumer. 44% of these items were removed from the website, however, approximately a quarter had already been sold. This suggests an existing demand for ivory, in addition to inefficient policies presented by eBay to reduce these sales. This contradicts their 2009 policy that banned such sales on their marketplace, demonstrating the need for new and improved measures in this area. Additionally, easy accessibility of ivory was demonstrated through our search-cost analysis. Despite limited knowledge in this field prior to the study, participants had no reported problems identifying an ivory item, with an average search time of 4.13 minutes. Interestingly, our results also found no time difference between ivory and non-ivory items, contradicting certain results from the original study based on physical markets in China. This was a surprising result, which we have concluded could be due to three key possibilities; current deterrents are ineffective meaning ivory items are just as easy to identify as non-ivory items, the items we chose for the list are not popular on online marketplaces, and participants spent more time searching for items due to the risk of getting it wrong. These have presented certain amendments to the research which could be beneficial in any future replications of the study. From the results of this research, we believe the ivory market is still in demand on online marketplaces, with easy accessibility for consumers. We suggest research on a longer scale to investigate whether trends are increasing or decreasing with time. The search cost was an effective method of gaining trade data, but due to limited studies previously, more research is required. Future study is crucial in building on the results of this study, to understand online consumer response to effectively decrease availability and demand.