Battle to save the elephant
As the fight against ivory poachers gets bloodier, TV naturalist CHARLOTTE UHLENBROEK says without more help Africa’s magical giants will be extinct in 20 years
One of the most magical sights on earth is watching forest elephants gather in a jungle clearing. There is a carnival atmosphere as these elusive, shy animals congregate in clearings called bais, to renew friendships and play, to drink from waterholes and to plaster their skin with mineral-rich mud.
I witnessed it in the Central African Republic with a film crew: the youngsters come running when they see each other, eager to lark about. Adults exchange greetings, touching trunks while slapping mud over themselves, and infants are constantly caressed with affectionate gestures of their trunks.
It was wonderful to watch — all the more so because I was lucky to be alive. Before the elephants arrived, I had positioned myself on the edge of the clearing while the rest of the crew stayed in a hide on the far side to capture the scene.
As I embarked on my piece to camera, the first elephants cautiously entered the bai right behind me — a mother and her calf. I was downwind of them; they couldn’t smell me and they didn’t seem aware of my presence.
But suddenly, the breeze shifted and they caught my scent. The calf bolted, and the mother trumpeted in alarm, and charged me.
My instincts took over. I had no time to think — I just ran. I could feel her thundering closer and knew I couldn’t outrun her.
Still acting on instinct, I turned — she was less than 20 metres away and bearing down on me. Waving my arms, I screamed at her, then seized a lump of wood and hurled it.
If the mother had kept charging, I would have been crushed or tossed like a rag doll. Forest elephants can weigh up to six tons. But my sudden switch of tactic made her pull up short. For a moment she wasn’t sure what to do.
I turned and ran again. But by then the calf had reached the edge of the clearing, and the mother’s over-riding urge to be beside her baby took over. She wheeled away and was gone.
I couldn’t blame her for charging me. She had to protect her calf, and she wasn’t to know that we meant her no harm. All she knew was that humans could be poachers — and I had seen what ivory poachers do.
Their vile work is shown in these heart-breaking photos of elephant carcasses and tusks in north Cameroon, slaughtered in the largest mass killing of elephants in recent history.
More than 100 poachers on horseback armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), machine guns and AK47s killed several hundred elephants, including babies.
The good news is that, in some parts of Africa, units of armed rangers are fighting back.
AS The pictures show, military-style park rangers are risking their lives in the vicious battle to stamp out poaching. Leading a team over a river in Virunga national Park in the Congo — one of the most dangerous places in Africa to practise conservation — Ranger Rodrigue Katembo and his men are alert to the imminent threat posed by poachers.
That threat is well known to the rangers photographed around their vehicle in Chad’s Zakouma national Park. Issa Idriss Adoum, second right, lost his father in an attack that killed six rangers, gunned down by Sudanese thugs.
For me, these images bring back harrowing memories of another visit I took to West Africa, in Congo-Brazzaville.
On that trip, I had visited a forest bai with a French film crew. What we found there was barbaric. An entire herd had been killed, and their carcasses lay everywhere, with bloody holes in their heads where the tusks had been ripped out. I have never seen anything more brutal.
Most shocking of all were the babies. Valueless to the poachers, they had been butchered anyway.
That night, unable to sleep, I reflected that it was better, in a tragic way, that the babies had died with their herd. Deprived of their mothers, aunts and grandmothers, the youngsters could not have survived.
They would have perished slowly, probably from starvation or loneliness — when a baby elephant loses all its adult companions, it will often die from heartbreak.
What is harder to face is the knowledge that this disaster is unfolding on a far greater scale than what I witnessed. The awful truth is that elephants are facing extinction across Africa. An important new census, the first of its kind, has shown that across the continent, a third of the population has been wiped out in just ten years. In the worst areas, poachers have killed more than 80 per cent of the herds. The data covers only savannah elephants, which can be counted from the air.
It is impossible to know the full plight of the forest elephants, but reports suggest that they are being hunted even more mercilessly. My experience certainly backs that up.
There was a nightmarish sequel to my encounter with the charging elephant. Two days later, back at camp, we heard prolonged gunfire from the direction of the clearing.
Do not imagine that poachers come armed with old rifles, aiming to kill one or two animals. They use machine-guns and helicopters to locate their prey from the air.
This is the work of highly organised criminal gangs, the same people who run illegal guns and deal in drugs. To stop them will require concerted efforts involving local communities and their governments. It’s extremely difficult — but the census figures show that it can be done.
In Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and South Africa, elephant numbers are stable or actually increasing.
Partly that’s because herds are taking refuge there, fleeing from the killing fields in other countries. But mostly it’s because of great conservation work, tourist dollars going to local people, military- style antipoaching patrols and, significantly, a lack of government corruption.
But, in the long term, if we are to halt the ivory trade, we have to change people’s desire for ivory. In the Far East, and especially in China, where there is a rapidly growing middle class with money to spend, ivory is still coveted for jewellery and trinkets because people think it will bring them good luck or make them look successful.
The price of ivory tripled between 2010 and 2014 and now stands at over $2,000 a kilo. And, of course, the more valuable it is, the more some people want it. However, there is hope: a recent survey suggests that 95 per cent of people in China want ivory banned to protect elephants.
I hope social pressure increases rapidly to get the message across that even the prettiest piece of carved ivory is an ugly product.
But we can’t wait. If we do, the elephants will be wiped out long before fashions start to change.
It’s essential that the remaining 350,000 or so animals are protected.
A world without elephants is unthinkable. Of all animals, including humans, the elephant’s brain has proportionally the largest hippocampus — the part that processes emotion. We know they show grief, altruism and compassion. They also appear to suffer the equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder.
And we know that when in family groups, the females especially will constantly reassure each other, communicating through a complex range of gestures and noises, from snorts, barks and cries to infrasonic rumbles too deep for us to hear.
THEY also have a remarkable sense of humour. When watching elephants in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, I watched a herd play a practical joke on a convoy of tourists. The sightseers arrived in their Land Rovers, took some pictures and then prepared to move on.
The herd casually split in two as the vehicles started up: one half stood at the front of the line of cars, and the other half blocked the track behind them. There was nowhere for the tourists to go.
The elephants stared, as though saying: ‘Now it’s our turn to look at you!’ Finally, they moved aside.
Dr Joyce Poole, a leading elephant scientist working in Amboseli, has had playful youngsters pretend to charge her, rubbing their tusks against the earth in an aggressive display, before toppling over.
At first she thought they were tripping accidentally, but when it kept happening she realised it was jumbo slapstick: they pretend to attack and then fall down.
To think such joyful animals could die out in our lifetimes is appalling. But at the current rate of slaughter, they have perhaps 20 years left.
Their extinction cannot be allowed. Elephants are a ‘keystone species’, which means that they are essential to the ecosystem.
There’s a good reason why they are called Africa’s Gardeners — they disperse huge quantities of seeds, through their dung, across many miles, fertilising the land as they go. Some seeds have adapted so that they will only germinate if they have passed through an elephant’s gut. If the animals die out, those plants will be lost, too, and the creatures that eat the plants will lose their staple food — and the disaster will continue, rippling onwards.
It’s not too late to avert this catastrophe. Intense conservation efforts do work — and elephants appear to be doing all they can to save themselves.
They have learned to avoid gunfire and minefields, and they can sometimes escape by crossing borders to the safer regions. But the harsh reality is that elephants need space, and there is ever less available for them across Africa.
There are a few places where the herds are still thriving. We must do everything we can to encourage them, without turning our backs on the places where the poaching is worst.
But we have to act right now. The census is a stark warning that this crisis is even worse than we feared — and the world cannot afford to lose its wonderful giants.