The Last Elephants, compiled by Don Pinnock and Colin Bell, Hardie Grant Books, 2019.
The photographs are again from Tanzania.
‘A tale of two elephants, working out elephant management in a private reserve’ constitutes chapter 6 and it’s another which brought tears to my eyes although I don’t much like the word ‘management’ in the context. The author, Audrey Delsink, also made me laugh, describing an elephant known as Kwatile as the sort to “charge first and ask questions later.”
Immuno-contraception may well be the best of many bad options but I am not at all sure about ‘tusk-bracing’ whereby wire is embedded in an elephant’s tusk “with contact under the lip so when the elephant fiddles with or attempts to break electric wires, the tusk wire acts as a conductor and the elephant gets a shock.” Of another elephant she wishes she could explain to him that time is running out and that he needs to stop breaching a weak spot in a fence. I don’t doubt Delsink’s compassion and authenticity but that is exactly what Laurence Anthony managed to do as recounted in The Elephant Whisperer.
Dr Marion Garaï contributes chapter 7, ‘The amazing Jane. A rite of passage and a love affair’. She develops a profound relationship with Jane and other relocated elephants. Jane protects her and warns some of the others not to harm her, communicates to them that she does not pose a threat. She concludes, comparing elephants to humans: “They use tools and have a complex society that is so well adapted to their needs that they have survived for millions of years longer than us – and without destroying their environment. They have a highly complex communication system, which we are only just beginning to understand. They have feelings and a strong sense of family; they show emotions and empathy and have a knowledge of self … also a sense of humour … [they] can think complex thoughts and plan ahead. And they mourn their dead … The fact that we are decimating these animals is nothing short of genocide.”
Chapters 8 and 9 are about big tuskers, ‘Last of the big tuskers. For elephant society the loss of large tusks pales in comparison to the loss of the accumulated wisdom that disappears every time a tusker is felled before his natural time’ by James Currie, and ‘A tribute to the giant tuskers’, a portfolio of stunning images by Colin Bell. One of them, known as Isilo, weighed 7 tonnes, was 4 metres tall and had tusks weighing 45 kg each. He supposedly died of natural causes but his body was not found for two months and his tusks had been removed.
Elephants with smaller tusks are the ones that are now more likely to survive, being less profitable for poachers, even more so those with no tusks at all. The genes for that are starting to predominate. The percentage of tuskless elephants used to be between 3 and 5% but is now more like 60% or higher.
This handicaps them – tusks are important, useful tools serving many purposes.
It’s been seen that the presence of an older, wiser bull helps to calm the behaviour of younger males whilst, wonderfully, they may in turn, in their old age, be accompanied by younger males, “askaris”, who offer protection and assistance in finding food as teeth and senses deteriorate.
“Some may argue that the human-induced evolution of tuskless elephants is what will save elephants in the long run; that the sepia-toned photographs of enormous ‘hundred-pounder’ tusks are relics of a past era. But I argue that I want my children to see elephants as they are meant to be: large-tusked, healthy and unhindered by human greed.”
I absolutely do not disagree with any of this nor with warnings of our terrible loneliness in a world without elephants but it is rather anthropocentric. What about saving elephants for their sake?
Colin Bell’s photos include the magnificent big tusker Satao2. It is dreadful to know that he was killed by a poisoned arrow. Another, Tolstoy, broke one tusk in a sparring match with another elephant. The unbroken tusk was trimmed so that it did not drag on the ground which would leave a trail for poachers.
In chapter 10, by Dr Michelle Henry, ‘Big trees, big elephants and big thinking’, our attention is brought to the ‘elephant-tree continuum’. We do indeed need to think big. Elephants and trees have co-existed “since the dawn of the elephant lineage 55 million years ago.” The hominid line goes back a mere 5 to 7 million years. Elephants are ecosystem engineers, gardeners. They make the landscape, they escalate biodiversity. But we disrupt the natural cycles, by squeezing habitats and even when we create artificial waterholes with good intentions.
The great and wise Dame Daphne Sheldrick is quoted: “Animals are more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature’s fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world’s most emotionally human land mammal.” I love the respectful use of capital case for “Nature”.
Dr Richard WS Fynn and Dr Timothy G O’Connor (sic) are the authors of my least favourite chapter (11) so far, ‘Conserving elephants and biodiversity in Africa’s savannas’. I don’t doubt their knowledge and experience but there is far too much talk of elephants as destroyers, too much of areas “suffering” the impact of elephants. It is largely otherwise in similar vein to the previous chapter and they also explain the trouble with artificial waterholes. They consider in depth the importance of the size and type of areas for elephants – riparian woodland, for example, has very different needs from the open plains.
Chapter 12 is much more to my taste. ‘Constant gardeners of the wild. What we call destruction by elephants is often the exact opposite.’ Are elephants destructive? No, that’s us.
I was fascinated to learn how waterholes are formed. Like all mammals, elephants eat soil for the minerals and they do that in quantities sufficient to leave holes which fill with water. These may then be ‘puddled’ by buffaloes and rhinos and elephants continue the process when they wallow and throw mud over themselves, sealing the hole and benefitting all forms of wildlife. They create cylindrical wells too.
Their digestive systems are not terribly efficient and thanks to that their dung provides food for other wildlife including primates, birds, butterflies, dung beetles of course, termites and other insects.
In this way they also plant trees. It is absurd to complain about elephants pushing over or ringbarking trees when that constitutes only a very small percentage of what they have themselves planted. In terms of thinking big we need to look at things on a much longer timescale.
Their highways are Africa’s first access roads. The tender to build a tar road from Makuti to the Kariba Dam wall in the then Southern Rhodesia was won by Jim Savory whose price was by far the cheapest. He was able to do this because he didn’t need to waste time with surveys: the elephant paths would of course follow the easiest gradients and contours.
In the section ‘Playing God’ we read of appalling attempts to control tsetse flies. “Between 1919 and 1957 in Southern Rhodesia alone, 657,334 wild animals from over 36 species were slaughtered in a mania of fly control.” These included 374 Black Rhinos, 86,981 Kudus, 37,351 Sables, 5,347 Roans, 40,399 Bushbucks, 184,973 Duikers and 73,146 Warthogs.
Then hundred of miles of fencing were installed leading to thousands of migrating animals cut off from water and dying horrible deaths.
The third effort was even more disastrous. Following the public outcry over the first two, the department responsible was overhauled and a new director was appointed. Rather than slaughtering wildlife directly, he oversaw the wholesale destruction “of riparian woodland, riverine thickets, ancient forests of indigenous timber and any shaded areas in which it was considered that tsetse flies could take shelter from the bright sunlight in which they were unable to survive.” And the department continued killing animals until 1970, bringing the total to nearly 750,000. In just one country. And then there is elephant culling when we deem there to be ‘too many’ of them. Elephant populations regulate themselves. It should not be within our power to make these judgements, let alone act on them.
Between chapters there’s a lovely poem by none other than Virginia McKenna OBE alongside a photographic portrait of a bull elephant in Botswana, called ‘Rainbow Elephants’:
The elephants are blue
Blue in the evening’s indigo
The dawn’s first azure light.
The elephants are red
Red from the terracotta soil’s
Warm wallowed mantle.
The elephants are silver
Moon ghosts between the trees
And shining through night’s veil.
The elephants are grey
Without disguise of light or night
Grey shadows in the forest.
The elephants are gone
Mourned spirits in the air
Haunting our dreams.
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