Cites has even got teeth here in NZ

https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckla...milys-heirloom-piano

So some stupid bureaucrat thinks he is saving the elephants by confiscating ivory from a piano made in 1895?

What had happened to common sense?

We are fortunate here in NZ to have very relaxed hunting regulations. With the exception of wildfowl and upland birds which are protected by a licence hunting system with fairly generous daily bags in most areas, the rest of our game, deer, chamois, tahr, pig, feral goats and other small game have no licence, no bag limit, no sex or age distinction and can be hunted all year round over vast tracts of public land, national parks etc for free, all administered by DOC. A permit is required to hunt on DOC land but these are no cost and can be obtained on line in a matter of a minute or so for certain areas you wish to hunt or for the whole of NZ if you wish. They are simply renewed every four months online by selecting your permit number and hitting the renew button.

In general DOC look after our public land pretty well and generally work with hunters to ensure land remains accessible and also have various schemes to encourage hunters to cull animals in areas where numbers build.

In this case that has hit the news, I guess DOC is only administering the law as it applies to countries who are signatories to CITES and not seeing it as actually saving any elephants. The elephant in question that provided the ivory for the piano keys must have at least died before 1895. Might even have been one that Bell knocked over with his 7mm Mauser

I agree it seems bureaucratic nonsense and commonsense should have prevailed.

Total nutcases - somehow the ivory stored in museums does not get any attention!

It's typical 'jobsworth' bureaucracy at it's worst but their 'crime' was in transporting it across borders without the correct paperwork.

What they should have done is get the correct paperwork done before they left home.............. that said, it's a very easy mistake to make.

The technicality would be that the piano was imported less than a year ago, not the fact the ivory itself is over a century old, and under the letter of the law I presume this would be correct. I would assume NZ has a legal date, before which the ivory would be legal. I wouldn't expect a door-to-door search for pianos.

Still, this is the kind of pedantic bureaucracy we expect here in Africa, and it could have been handled much better.