Donald Trump Jr. holding the cut-off tail of an elephant during an African trophy hunt

After the Trump administration announced last year that it would be undoing an Obama administration ban on importing elephant trophies, a decision that may or may not have been grounded in Uday and Qusay Trump's compulsive need to shoot at things, public outcry was so severe that Trump was forced to reverse himself.

It turns out that was only a temporary reversal. Now that the news cycle has moved on, the ban on importing the detached corpse parts of African elephants has been lifted after all.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has quietly begun allowing more trophy hunting of African elephants, despite President Donald Trump’s pledge last year to uphold a ban on importing parts of animals killed by big-game hunters. The agency issued a formal memo Thursday saying it would consider issuing permits to import elephant trophies from African nations on a “case-by-case” basis, effective immediately. The new guidelines, first reported by The Hill, end U.S. bans on the import of such trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The immediate pretext for the decision is a court finding that although the import ban was warranted by the evidence, the Obama administration did not invite sufficient public comment before banning those imports. Rather than seek that public comment now the Ryan Zinke-led Department of the Interior has, at least as of this moment, scrapped the ban in favor of this new "case-by-case" curiosity. And the agency has not made public just what criteria will be used in these "case-by-case" decisions.