More than 20 years ago, when I was living in New York, I wrote an article about the mutilation by the United States government of a fine old piano on the pretext of saving the African elephant. The piano was a 1920 concert grand from the once famous Parisian house of Érard, from which came the favourite piano of Franz Liszt. It had been bought in Paris by the Israeli–American pianist Ophra Yerushalmi, a huge admirer of the Hungarian virtuoso, and flown by her at great expense to New York, where it had been seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the grounds that it had ivory-coated keys.
Well, of course, until recently all piano keys had ivory on them, and this particular piano was then 73 years old. But the Fish and Wild Life Service would not release it to Mrs Yerushalmi until the ivory had been stripped from it and returned to France. This was done in accordance with the 1988 African Elephant Conservation Act, which had been enacted in response to an international agreement to ban trade in ivory; and it prohibited the importation to the United States of any African elephant ivory, new or old, worked or unworked, unless the article containing it was more than 100 years old. So the old Érard piano came to languish in Mrs Yerushalmi’s New York apartment, unplayed and unplayable, a useless, mutilated object.
The timing of the new law was strange because, following an earlier decline in the African elephant population, numbers had picked up again, and in some places excessively so. Elephants are charming in their way, but they also attack people and trample their crops. We would hate them to die out, of course, but at the same time we don’t want too many of them.
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