Elephant attack
Elephants are responding to poaching and human-wildlife conflict in unpredictable ways, and even an experienced guide can find themselves in trouble.
With unpredictable elephant behaviour increasing, learn how to view these creatures safely and respectfully
For some weeks, the elephants had been jittery – mock charges, weeping temporal glands, whole family herds on edge. In response, we fell back to a cautious viewing protocol, but still the elephants startled easily. This particular, fateful day started with two unexplained and unprovoked mock charges. Then, just 5km from our camp in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, we rounded a sandy blind corner to see a family group crossing only 30m in front of us.
Our approach unnerved them, but I immediately braked to a halt, switched off the engine and began to speak calmly to the elephants in front of us. With me were six students. The elephants resumed crossing after a slight agitated pause. We waited patiently for some minutes when suddenly a young bull of around 10 years old came thundering at me from my right side. I shouted loudly for him to stop and he drew up, dust about his heels, only a metre from my window.
I spoke calmly and firmly and he responded by moving away, then suddenly spun and came at us again. Once more I yelled and once more he stopped, ears flapping and trunk periscoped. He began to move diagonally in front of us, as if to cross the road. A small bush stood between the Land Rover bonnet and him. I continued to talk, leaning from the open window. As he reached the middle of the road he turned and came headlong at us shoving a tusk into the engine then withdrawing.
On the third collision, he collected the vehicle in his tusks and began to shove backwards. The front wheels were off the ground and the speedometer was registering 40kph!
Force of nature
When we slammed into a tree some 70m later, the forward momentum of the elephant carried him right through the windscreen. I saw the glass shatter, spider cracks speeding from the impact point and, in that moment, I ducked. The elephant’s massive tusk pierced a hole in my hat and lifted it clean off my head… along with the Land Rover’s roof.
The elephant withdrew but then crashed into the vehicle again, trying to roll it. There wasn’t a choice. I shouted to get out and the students slid out of the tilting car. We ran, using the raised car as a sight shield, and took shelter under a low fever berry tree. The elephant tossed and trampled the Land Rover, every now and then stopping to listen to the calls of his herd that was leaving him behind. Eventually, he ran after his family in a high-legged, pleased-with-himself way.
The Land Rover was destroyed and, as we were in a radio dead zone, there was nothing for it but to walk the 5km back to camp.
Luckily, I am a trained guide raised in Kenya’s wilderness. I now work throughout East and southern Africa, sometimes leading vehicle-based safaris, and teaching wildlife courses for Western universities. I engage with a variety of elephant characters wherever I go, but the change in behaviour is starkly apparent. The message is clear: we need to be more careful, more vigilant and wise in our wildlife interactions, especially with those species under poaching pressure.
The previous two weeks of unexplainable elephant behaviour in the Okavango’s Khwai area had been under discussion on the course I was teaching, which partly focused on conservation issues, such as poaching, human-wildlife conflict and guiding behaviour. Even during that fortnight, we had been privy to poor guiding approaches, and though my six students and I lived to tell the tale of this elephant attack without coming to any harm, many others have not been so lucky.
Unusual behaviour
Field researchers and experts usually agree that elephants are not normally aggressive, antagonistic or even easily moved to cantankerous behaviour. They are sensitive creatures that respect another’s space but do come into conflict with local communities.
Elephants who have had bad past experiences with humans, mothers with young calves or bulls in musth can be extremely dangerous but, in past years, an experience such as ours would have been described as a one-off incident. However, with the enormous increase in commercial poaching levels throughout Africa, elephants are beginning to change their behaviour, becoming warier, less approachable and in some situations more dangerous to tourists.
Certainly, these views were substantiated by some of the long-standing guides, antipoaching, tourism and safari operators I have spoken to. “There is undeniably a correlation between the poaching and the behaviour of the elephants,” says Paul Barnes, who has spent over a decade in Zambia’s Kafue district, both as an operator and an anti-poacher. “When we have breeding herds, bachelor groups or loan bulls wandering through the lodge, they are very approachable and relaxed. When they move out of the lodge perimeters, their behaviour and reactions towards us change dramatically. They become very protective, defensive and aggressive. More often than not when we encounter them on foot, or in a vehicle, it is initially a bad situation.”
In Ruaha, southern Tanzania, an award-winning safari guide, who asked to remain anonymous, says he has seen instances of a guide placing guests in a ‘mock’ danger situation to aggravate a response in the animal, drive the tourists to safety and increase the post-safari tip. Conservation Lower Zambezi in Zimbabwe reports private vehicles or self-drives often finding themselves inside the elephant’s safety zone, usually provoking an unsettling mock charge. But in Amboseli in Kenya, “it is the conflict between elephants and communities that end in threatening situations,” says Nikki Best, a conservation scientist from the Big Life Foundation.
This is an important point to note. With ballooning human populations, wildlife is coming into more frequent conflict with humans over crop raiding in dry times, the settlement of migratory routes, the erecting of fences and the building of roads. Elephants are smart and can learn how not to become road kill or raid a crop and escape but it doesn’t mean they don’t get aggravated and respond with aggression to speeding vehicles and pellet guns.
The elephants don’t go looking for conflict, but they will respond to a past or present situation. They will be drawn towards a juicy crop and will react
The old bulls and matriarchs are being exterminated, leaving young teenagers without mentorship.
accordingly to harassment from poachers, poor guides, ignorant self-drives, lodge supply vehicles or even predators.
Many in the field do believe that poaching may be leading to changing elephant behaviours, purely due to the social fabric of groups and families being torn apart – the old bulls and matriarchs that carry the best ivory are being exterminated, leaving young teenagers without mentorship. They haven’t fully learned who or what to be afraid of, which game trails are safe, what awaits them at the end of each changing season. As a result, they begin to display delinquent behaviours not as a consequence of direct poaching, but as a side-effect of the poaching pressures on whole populations.
We were forced to walk from our vehicle to safety that afternoon. On that short and terrifying walk, we met a herd of about 20 elephants, but they glanced at us, ignored us and marched on to the river. Not all elephants are bent on destruction.
However, poaching and increasing human-wildlife conflict is changing wildlife dispersal patterns and behaviours. So, as a traveller to Africa, you play as vital a role in conservation as researchers, lodge owners and wildlife services. Protective, defensive, delinquent and aggressive – these seem to be the key behaviours that visitors to the wild places of Africa need to look out for.
Making a difference
It is not enough, now, to visit an area and not be aware of its past history, its record of poaching, its access to the commercial poaching rings that are decimating wildlife numbers Africa-wide, and its current standing on human-wildlife conflict.
In a sense, you as the visitor can be the eyes and ears on the ground. It is your duty to report irregular wildlife sightings and behaviours. It is also your duty to keep your guide on the straight and narrow.
Obey park rules – there are no exceptions, whatever your guide leads you to believe. Do not tip bad behaviour, explain at the end why you have or haven’t tipped, so guides can learn what tourists respond to. Don’t allow your guide to overrule you – stay on a sighting if you want to, tell them if you feel they’re driving too fast, and write a fair and honest review. Don’t let things escape unmentioned or they
will never change.
FIND OUT MORE Conservation Lower Zambezi: bit.ly/lowerzambezi and Big Life Foundation: biglife.org