101 YEARS OLD AND STILL COUNTING ELEPHANTS...

MUCH has been written and many discussions held over the dramatic decrease in the world elephant population in recent years but the elephant in the room in all these discussions is the even more dramatic increase in use of the phrase “elephant in the room” to signify a vital element that is being ignored or glossed over.

For the year 2000, our newspaper database records only four instances of the phrase “elephant in the room”, but in 2017, the figure had increased massively to 431.

The rise has been inexorable: in 2001 there were seven elephants in rooms, rising to nine and 15 in the next two years. It doubled to 31 in 2004, rose to 53 in 2005 and shot up to 153 in 2006.

The rate of increase then slowed down until 2011, when it exceeded 200 for the first time but it more than doubled to 455 in 2012 and has remained around 400 since then, despite the decline in overall elephant numbers. Clearly a growing percentage of the world’s elephants are finding themselves in rooms and I find this a matter of deep concern.

I therefore rang up Sir “Jumbo” McTusk, the chief executive of the leading elephant placement agency to ask whether they are behaving responsibly in putting so many pachyderms in rooms.

“You are quite right to be concerned,” he said, “but you must realise that placing an elephant in a room protects it from poachers.”

“But surely,’ I said, “when the poachers discover there are so many elephants in rooms, they will extend their activities to the rooms, where the elephants will be sitting ducks, if that is not mixing my animal metaphors.

“Indeed, with so many elephants in rooms, it can only be a matter of time before we find two or more elephants in the same room, which will become even more tempting to poachers.”

“We have a very clear one-room, one elephant policy,” Sir Jumbo replied. “But in any case, you are missing an important point which the bare figures conceal. The number of times the phrase ‘elephant in the room’ is used is not a reliable indicator of the number of elephants in rooms.”

“Are you saying that one elephant may be in several rooms?” I asked.

“Not at the same time, of course,” he replied, “but in the course of a year, one elephant may be deployed in many rooms. Even the longest conference which evades an issue by having an elephant in the room very rarely goes on for more than a fortnight, so our usual terms involve renting elephants for between one day and two weeks.

“So even the most slow-moving of elephants can visit at least 26 rooms a year, and it can be as many as 365, or 366 in a leap year. I’d guess that the 431 mentions of an elephant in the room in 2017 would have involved no more than a dozen of so different elephants. Bear with me a moment and I’ll get the precise figure.”

“If there’s a bear with you and an elephant in the room, is there not a danger of them fighting?” I asked.

But he had gone, and all I heard in reply was a very grizzly roar.