This is a superb four-part television series made by National Geographic and currently available on Disney+, narrated by Natalie Portman and featuring the lovely and highly knowledgeable elephant expert Dr Paula Kahumbu. She is one of those commentators, the best kind, who does not attempt to hide but only wants to share her joyous amazement at what she sees.
I often find anything at all about elephants hard to watch. I love them so much that I cannot bear to see them struggling or suffering. The first three parts focus on African elephants, the fourth turns to Asian. When the word “Asia” came up at the beginning a sense of foreboding rose in the pit of my stomach. Of course terrible, terrible things happen to elephants in Africa mostly driven by Western and Chinese insatiable appetites for ivory. Perhaps we should stop using that word and call ivory what it is – elephants’ incisor teeth. Elephants’ Incisor Teeth Coast doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as the Ivory Coast or the rather more poetic and mellifluous Côte d’Ivoire, a name given of course, like those of the Slave Coast and the Gold Coast, by Europeans. The whole business is deeply weird, especially when you see trinkets made out of them in the shape of … elephants. At least, though, in Africa elephants are not tortured and enslaved. I have seen, on film, what they do to baby elephants in Thailand to break them and it is beyond horrendous, especially since it is done in front of the infants’ chained-up mothers and I have seen first-hand the sufferings of tourist and temple elephants in India and elsewhere.
The programme concentrated on wild, free Asian elephants however, and there were uplifting stories of projects under way to help them, so it was not a complete horror show, but neither was it all good. In Sri Lanka, 300 elephants a year are killed with explosives or poison. As ever, the problems arise when there is conflict with humans, who have stolen their land and blocked their ancient pathways. I visited an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka a long time ago, but even then, when I was considerably less aware of such things, I wondered how they all came to be in that situation.
We see a group of elephants ingeniously conducting a stealth raid, using wood to insulate themselves as they knock down electric fences and then moving in total silence to get at fruit – a man sat only feet away clearly has no idea they are there until dogs alert him and the elephants are driven away with firecrackers.
A particularly clever individual (”The Don”) has become known as a toll collector. From the roadside, he stops lorries transporting sugar cane and exacts a tax from the produce. This is tolerated since it is better than what might ensue if he and his friends take directly from the plantations.
Most heart-warming was an account of a tea plantation in India. Tea is bitter and elephants don’t eat it and so they were going hungry through what used to be a nutritious stopping point on their journey. A decision was made to stop using herbicides and let the weeds grow. Now, as the elephants pass through, they do the weeding and, while they’re at it, fertilising. This kind of thinking is what is most needed, but above all, as usual, it is wildlife that needs protecting from us, not the other way around.
The photographs above were taken in Tanzania.
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