Associated Press. Stuart Chapman, a regional representative of the World Wildlife Fund, presented a petition for a blanket ban on the ivory trade to Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, on Wednesday.

You might want to lend your signature to the petition mentioned below, for which we thank WWF:

As my colleague Erik Olsen just noted here, many threatened species will be competing for attention when officials from 177 countries open a conference on the trade in endangered species on Sunday in Bangkok.

On Wednesday, Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, received a major international petition from the World Wildlife Fund calling on Thailand itself to ban the trade of ivory within its borders. The petition, which drew 517,899 signatures online and 10,000 “offline” in Thailand, was presented to Ms. Yingluck at a special handover event. She said that she would take the issue into “consideration,” but an official with the conservation group said that it anticipates a change in Thai policy. Thailand currently bans the sale of ivory from wild elephants but permits the trade in ivory from captive domestic elephants. Environmentalists say that this situation is being exploited by criminals to launder illegal ivory from Africa, and have been calling for Thailand to ban the sale of all of it.

Read the whole story here.