(SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE) Two elaborately carved elephant tusks stand inside a display case at the Canton Bazaar in San Francisco's Chinatown, elegant reminders of a tragic, escalating world crisis.
Booming global sales of ivory are driving the precipitous and accelerated decline of one of the world's largest, most revered mammals: the African elephant. Despite movements in the late 1980s to ban the international trade in ivory to protect the elephant, poachers kill an average of 96 African elephants a day for their tusks. That's one every 15Â minutes.
And Chinatown is one the top spots to buy ivory in the United States, which ranks second - behind China - on the list of nations with the biggest ivory markets, according to experts.
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