Jan,
Gov ivory does not necessarily have to be from elephants that died a natural death. I believe this also includes confiscated poached ivory. The idea behind this is that this ivory stock, comprising ivory form all deaths, can be traded legally and raise a large amount of money that can then be used to fund further elephant conservation initiatives such as anti-poaching, research, translocation, etc. A lot of Gov stock is ivory accumulated over the past 20 - 40 years. The stocks of some countries are huge and a lot is from elephants that were found dead i.e. not poached.

Hunters that hunt elephants or rhino are allowed to keep the ivory/horn and take it back home BUT are not allowed to sell/trade it. It remians a personal trophy for themselves.

There are "green hunts" for rhino both black and white, on offer in SA and Namibia. They use dart guns but an individual animal must not be "darted" more than 5 times in its lifetime or else there could be complications as a result of the drug used.

let me see if I get this right:
A hunter is allowed to take his tusks home to let's say the USA.

Ivory trade WITHIN the USA is legal only import and export is not.

How much does it cost to shoot an elephant and how many kilos are average tusks?

Considering a legal price per kilo of some 500 US $ it looks to me as if the hunter can at least break even if not make profit

A legal elephant hunt averagely sells for over $40,000 and the average combined tusk weight is probably close to 40 Kg continent wide which makes $20,000. It would go a long way to recovering some of the costs though.....

From my experience, very few (less than 5%) hunters end up "selling" their ivory once they get back home. I am also curious to know whether the internal "trade in ivory" is restricted to "worked ivory products" alone or also "raw ivory"? Someone with more time than I may want to dig this info up.

There is a website I came across the other day.

www dot cuecomponents dot com/elivco.html

Please replace the word "dot" with a " . " - I do not wish to promote the website with a link.

The laws here are certainly screwed up Carsten. Yes, you can sell ivory within the U.S. but not import or export ivory.

However, the way a lot of people get around it is to say it is antique (which doesn't require a permit), or bone (who can tell looking at a picture whether a carving or jewelry is indeed bone or ivory? I was on eBay last week and there were Chinese curio ships selling intricate "bone" and "antique" online - I'd be willing to bet that all of it was ivory. It is maddening.

To be honest I doubt that ebay is the place to sell ivory declared as bone. As you say, people can not tell the difference so they would believe it is what it is declared as. If it was ivory, they would use other words like netsuke where insiders know what it is.