One of the most surprising things I’ve learned while writing about the wildlife trade is that the high value of rhino horn and elephant ivory has led some criminals to steal the goods from museums. When it comes to rhino horn, one Irish gang gained notoriety for lifting horn from museums all over Europe. Still, this is pretty wild: Saturday morning, police in France arrested a man shortly after he’d hacked off the tusk of an elephant skeleton at the Paris National History Museum. Stranger yet, the skeleton in question was given to French King Louis XIV all the way back in 1668.
“The elephant that was damaged was given to Louis XIV as a present by the king of Portugal in 1668,” Jacques Cuisin, head of restoration at the museum, told local reporters. “He was cutting the tusk with a chainsaw until the tusk actually fell. The noise from the security alarm was so unbearable that he left.”
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Elephant ivory is incredibly lucrative these days, and wild elephants are disappearing, so thieves are getting ever more creative in their sourcing. Museums aside, that can mean going as far as targeting zoo animals, so I suppose we should be happy the elephant in question was already a skeleton. But man, hacking up a king’s elephant? That’s not going to go over well.
