Pachyderm people
ELEPHANTS have always been a threatened species of mammal.
Early man hunted mammoths and for many a year elephants have been killed or mutilated, albeit illegally, in Asia and Africa by ivory poachers.
Currently they are found in 17 Asian and 37 African countries. Now classified as a vulnerable species on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) ratings, the number of African elephants fell from 472,000 in 2007 to 436,000 in 2013.
China and the United States relatively recently added their signatures to those nations who totally ban the import of ivory. The symbolic burning of thousands of intercepted ivory tusks by the Kenyan government earlier this year has certainly quenched the flames of some conservationists. Thankfully, there are many organisations that will continue valiantly to protect elephants and which need financial support in their endeavours. I would like to draw your attention to three individuals past and present. Elephant Bill Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)
In a recent visit to Myanmar, I asked a young local historian whether he had ever heard of Elephant Bill. His reply, surprisingly, was very positive and I recounted to him my meetings with that gentleman in my boyhood days. Bill Williams, aka Jim Williams, often visited my next door neighbour’s house as an uncle to that family in West Cornwall, United Kingdom. He was a legendary figure who, like so many ex-service personnel, never recounted his wartime experiences.
He was born in St Just – a tin mining area – in 1897. His father, a Cornishman, was a mining engineer who had returned to Cornwall after many years’ work in the mines of South America, South Africa and Australia. Upon the end of his secondary education, Williams entered Camborne School of Mines, a famous training establishment which many Malaysian also attended. In fact, it was as a schoolboy hockey player that I first met Malaysian hockey players at that establishment.
During World War 1, Williams served as a transport officer in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, developing an understanding of both mules and camels. Upon demobilisation and fired by wanderlust, he joined the Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation as a forester, using 2,000 Asian elephants to extract teak logs.
During the Japanese invasion of Burma in World War 2, the Japanese Imperial army commandeered very many elephants for the construction of wooden bridges over the tributaries of the Irrawaddy River. As the Carthaginian general Hannibal took his armed force over the European Alps in 217 AD, so Elephant Bill led many evacuations of expat and Burmese families, on the backs of his elephants, into Assam, India, over 1,500-metre high mountains. His evacuation of elephants slowed down the Japanese advance.
In 1942, Williams joined the 14th Army as an elephant expert attached to the Royal Indian Engineers, retiring eventually in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and mentioned in dispatches on three occasions.
Back in civilian life, he returned to West Cornwall where he tried his hand as a flower farmer and later a cattle farmer, the latter leading to losses, for he was too kind-hearted because of his love of animals. This prompted him to write and he became a very popular author recounting his experiences with Asian elephants, which he adored. Sadly, he died from an emergency appendectomy operation in the local hospital at the early age of 60. His wife, Susan, continued his love of writing and became a successful author in her own right. David and Daphne Sheldrick African elephants (Loxodanta africana)
Whilst in Kenya 10 years ago, I visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Orphans’ Project adjoining the Nairobi National Park. Population pressure, war and tribal conflicts, deforestation, and drought have all led to ravages in the African elephant population, along with the inroads of illegal ivory poachers. There, a rehabilitation centre for baby and young orphaned elephants was established in 1977 by Dame Daphne Sheldrick, in memory of her late husband who, at 57, died that year of a heart attack.
David, like Elephant Bill, saw active service in Burma as a Major in the King’s African Rifles and was the son of a coffee planter in Kenya. At the youthful age of 28, upon demobilisation, he became the youngest and first warden to be appointed to the Tsavo National Park. He was a hands-on person and together the Sheldricks hand-reared orphaned rhinos and elephants in their home. To him, the protection of these species was paramount.
During my visit to the elephant orphans’ sanctuary, I witnessed the Kenyan keepers bottle-feeding the animals, at all hours of the day and night, with reconstituted elephant milk. They even slept alongside the orphaned elephants and took them for walks and baths and played football with them on a daily basis. They were orphans due to the butchering of their parents by ivory poachers. As they matured, they were taken by road to Tsavo National Park for a further period of rehabilitation before finally being released into the wild savannah grassland landscape. Later that day I stroked the nose of a baby leopard whose mother had been slaughtered for her skin. This trust fund is kept alive by public donations. Kate Evans African elephants (Loxodanta africana)
Many moons ago, I had the great pleasure of teaching the now Dr Kate Evans. She and her older brother came from a diplomatic family once stationed in South Africa where she would return during holidays.
This was when her love for elephants was first fostered. When she launched into postgraduate research on elephant behaviour at Bristol University, I asked her what aspect her doctoral thesis was focused on. In her no nonsense fashion she replied, “Would you believe it – elephants’ poo!”
Her research was carried out in Botswana and, whilst there, she established a trust fund named Elephants for Africa.
Evans and her husband Simon Buckingham have set up a research camp on the banks of the Boteti River in the Makgadikhadi Pans National Park in the Okavango delta area.
In her schooldays, Evans was always a get on and go and roll up your sleeves person and she has taken this attitude beyond into her present life. Her elephant camp sees research and conservation as the driving forces. It is a superb example of conservation through research and education.
There her educational programme has been extended to local children so that they may value and appreciate the wildlife which they daily rub shoulders with. Several of her Botswanan helpers have been encouraged and financed to gain postgraduate qualifications in conservation methods at Bristol University, returning to Botswana to take up the reins of elephant conservation in their own right.
Her work programme is geared towards the coexistence of wildlife and humans and today she is regarded as one of the world’s few experts on African elephants, frequently advising local people and zoos worldwide on elephant behavioural patterns.
If only mankind, through education, were more tolerant of the needs and habitats that our Asian and African elephants require, then these wonderfully giant pachyderms would continue to coexist. Certainly to meet such a goal, nations must speak unto nations and the desires of the corrupt, greedy and lawless for ivory totally eradicated.
Further information can be gleaned from ‘Elephant Bill’ by JH Williams, Penguin Books (1956); ‘The Footprints of Elephant Bill’ by Susan Williams, Kimber (1962); www. sheldrickwildlifetrust.org and www.elephantsforafrica.org.