ELEPHANT
WALK
Dame
Daphne Sheldrick tells this story in her book, Life, Love, and Elephants: Her husband, the late David Sheldrick, chief warden of Tsavo National Park in Kenya for many years, once
encountered a herd of twenty-five or so elephants as he returned from a trip to
Mudanda. As the vehicle approached, the herd moved off, but three elephants
remained behind, puzzled by the nervousness of their wild friends. David
recognized the three as orphans who had been raised in the compound and then
returned to the wild. He got out of the car and called to one they had named “Fatuma.”
She came hurrying over to him, with the two smaller elephants following. Fatuma
seemed to want David to join her in following the herd. Fatuma would start off
but after a few paces turn around to see if he was coming. When he didn’t, she
would return to him, rumble softly and wrap her trunk around him. When the
three elephants still remained after the rest of the herd moved off, he decided
to let the other passengers in the car drive back while he walked the three
elephants home.
In
the pitch black night, he could see only a few feet in front of him. However,
the elephants knew the way. They seemed to understand that he needed guidance.
They pressed close to him, so that he found himself sandwiched between Fatuma
and Kanderi. As they headed back to the compound, he walked with a hand resting
lightly against a foreleg of each elephant. They slowed their pace to match his.
He heard and smelled other groups of elephants as they continued their
journey, and it surprised him that the orphans avoided contact, presumably
because they instinctively knew that David’s presence would he unwelcome. “It
was such a humbling and stilling experience,” he said later. “I felt at one
with them in their world, entirely dependent on them for my safety, sheltered
and protected as I were one of their own.” It took about four hours to get back
.
These
marvelous creatures have been killed for many years for their tusks. In the
beginning, they were killed one by one with poison. Poison-making was a highly
specialized profession, and a closely guarded secret in the tribes who brewed
and sold it. Ingredients included bark and leaves taken from acodanthera trees.
The leaves were boiled in water for about seven hours with a few other
ingredients until it was rendered down to a sticky tar-like substance. The
poison was deadly, active as soon as it entered the bloodstream, and could kill
an elephant within a couple of hours and a human within minutes. Before selling
the poison, its potency and effectiveness was tested on a frog or lizard jabbed by a
thorn dipped in poison or injected into an egg that apparently exploded.
Poison-making was a lucrative trade,poaching elephants an even more lucrative
trade.
Today,
instead of poison arrows, poachers use assault rifles which enable them to mow
down these lordly beasts with great proficiency and in massive numbers. China’s
growing wealth and insatiable hunger for ivory has triggered a growing danger of
extinction. Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines have also become
major purchasers of elephant tusks. In Hong Kong, one of the ivory trade’s main
transit points, seized ivory rose form 3.2 tons in 2010 to 7.9 tons in the
first ten months of 2013. This is the equivalent of 1,675 dead elephants. In
December, 2012, Malaysian authorities seized 1,000 elephant tusks smuggled into
the country hidden in shipments of mahogany. This seizure was worth millions of
dollars.
Of
the 50,000 elephants that roamed Chad 50 years ago, barely 2 percent are left.
In the neighboring countries of Central African Republic and Cameroon, the
population may be even lower. The killing of elephants in these countries, when
added to all the other countries where elephants are being slaughtered, adds up
to a bleak future for these highly intelligent, sensitive, and socially aware
animals.
According
to Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a Stanford ecologist who has written four books
based on her Namibian field research on elephants, these animals are much like us. “If
you watch a family group reuniting, their behavior is exactly like ours – the little
cousins darting off together, the elaborate greetings of adults. Elephants
offer a way of looking into the mirror, for better or worse,” she writes. “If
we value human right, we should also value animals that have the same level of
sophistication that we do. We should keep those beings with us here on earth.”
Check
out O’Connell-Rodwell’s books on elephants: http://www.caitlineoconnell.com/books.php
