Or else the smaller tusks will mean poachers kill more elephants each hunt to meet their ivory tonnage criteria?!? Could be a double edged sword. I heard on a

Or else the smaller tusks will mean poachers kill more elephants each hunt to meet their ivory tonnage criteria?!? Could be a double edged sword. I heard on a podcast recently that the main cause of elephant deaths in the 1920's and 1930's was.... the manufacturing of billiard balls. Apparently it took roughly 2 elephants worth of tusks to manufacture one set of ivory billiard/snooker balls. Astounding - whereas a piano keyboard would usually only take up less than 1/2 a tusk because they used laminated sheets of ivory. At least we can be thankful that the modern plastics industry was born out of the need to create 'artificial ivory' billiard balls which exhibited the same bounce and noise properties. Although one could argue that modern plastics are a whole ecological blight in their own right...