The “humanity” of animals often outshines our own

WARNING:  Graphic Images

Bull

I haven’t written about my travels this summer because this year was very different than last, during which I endured endless hours on cross-country buses and bribed passage on a cargo ship, dark nights in remote villages, risky food choices washed down with Orange Fanta, mysterious injuries that wouldn’t heal, and the memorable interactions with various local characters along the way.  This summer was more cerebral and sedentary, teaching local students about development economics, working with US companies hoping to invest in the region, and writing technical papers requiring more laptop time and fewer bus rides.  

The one adventure I took was the time spent to enjoy the environment and wilds of East Africa, which boasts a pristine unrivaled natural beauty.  Nothing is more emblematic of this unspoiled wilderness than the great Maasai Mara in Kenya’s Rift Valley, home to thousands of species including some of Africa’s most iconic residents such lions, rhinos, giraffe, buffalos, cheetah, leopards, hyenas and hippos.  But it is the most recognizable among them that has finally compelled me to share an experience – the majestic African elephant; the largest living land mammal with males as tall as 15 feet, weighing up to 6 tons, and living to 70 years of age.  However, it is tragedy rather than triumph that breaks my silence.

Cow and calf

While in the Maasai Mara last week, on the way back to camp after an incredible day of safari, we came across a dead bull elephant that had just been killed by poachers for its tusks.  It was a shocking and deeply sad sight.  The hulking animal on its side with its whole head missing, having been hacked completely off in an effort to extract the elephant’s ivory to be sold on the black market.

Killed by poachers

According to the rangers who were already at the scene, the elephant had been killed shortly before our arrival after being poisoned.  He was part of a group of five bulls that traveled together as a clan in the area around where I was camped.  Perhaps most heartbreaking of all was how the four remaining bulls huddled around their fallen friend, protecting him, occasionally touching him with their trunks as if to wake him, and then placing leafy tree branches on and around his body.  It was a very hard scene to watch and photograph.

Trunk touching the dead bull

Occasionally, a small plane manned by rangers would make a low pass over the location and then make wide sweeping circles around the area looking for the poachers or clues to their whereabouts, but with little hope of actually finding them for the killers have just become too practiced and efficient to be so easily caught.  Unfortunately, the ivory business is booming in East Africa and the authorities are under-manned and out-gunned.

Bulls stand guard as plane searches for poachers

In the days that followed, on the way from camp back to the wild lands of the Mara, we would have to pass the dead elephant.  Each day the body would change as decomposition took over.  By the second day hyenas began to hover nearby, waiting for a bountiful meal of dead flesh, unwittingly taking the risk of ingesting the deadly poison that felled the elephant upon which they will soon be feeding. The poison, known as mbaya (Swahili for evil), is a concoction brewed from the leaves of two trees and the livers of puffer fish from the coast. Applied to an arrowhead or a spear tip, it is so powerful that it kills an elephant in five minutes and breaks down its flesh so quickly that after two or three days the tusks just slide out.

Severed trunk

Hyena near the body

The elephant is distinguished by its high level of intelligence, interesting behaviors, methods of communication, and complex social structure.  They are generally gregarious and form small family groups consisting of an older matriarch and three or four offspring, along with their young. When they meet at watering holes and feeding places, they greet each other affectionately. Female elephants have been referred to as Africa’s mothers because of how carefully and lovingly they look after their young.  Usually only one calf is born to a pregnant female.  If the mother dies, an orphaned calf will usually be adopted by one of the family's lactating females or suckled by various female members.

Smell is their most highly developed sense, but sound deep growling or rumbling noises is the principle means of communication. Sometimes elephants communicate with an ear-splitting blast when in danger or alarmed, causing others to form a protective circle around the younger members of the family group. Elephants make low-frequency calls, many of which, though loud, are too low for humans to hear. These sounds allow elephants to communicate with one another at distances of five or six miles.

Elephants also mourn and often seem fascinated with the tusks and bones of dead elephants, fondling and examining them.   Once an elephant dies, the others in their clan will often stand by the body for up to four days, taking in very little food and water as they stand guard.

Standing guard

The elephant I saw was only one of an estimated 100 elephants killed illegally that day, and that number has been dramatically increasing over the last several years, necessitating the existence of elephant orphanages like The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi National Park.  But despite the heroic efforts of organizations like these, they are only able to save and successfully reintroduce a fraction of the orphans that are found, and have no hope of keeping up with the current pace of elephant deaths at the hands of poachers.

Orphanage

In 1980, there were roughly 1.2 million elephants in Africa, compared to only 420,000 last year. The Wildlife Conservation Society estimates that the population of African forest elephants plummeted 76 percent in the last decade, primarily due to an insatiable and growing demand for ivory where it sells for $1,000 a pound in Asia.

In his novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad describes the brutal ivory trade as a wild, senseless wielding of power in support of the resource-hungry economic policies of European imperialists, describing the situation in Congo between 1890 and 1910 as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience."  Today, the darkness is spreading predominantly at the hands of the more than one million Chinese that have recently been dispatched to build Africa’s roads, bridges, ports, and railways.

Around Amboseli – one of Kenya’s and the world’s most prized wildlife parks – for 30 years there had been virtually no poaching until two years ago when a Chinese company got the contract to build a 70-mile-long highway just above the park where now hundreds are killed weekly. Ninety percent of the passengers who are being arrested for possession of ivory at Kenya’s airport are Chinese nationals, and half of the poaching in Kenya is happening within 20 miles of one of the five massive Chinese road-building projects in various stages of completion.  The ivory seized is only a fraction of what is leaving the country.  Many workers manage to make it home with a few pounds of ivory hidden in their suitcases, thus doubling their meager earnings, or they are recruited as carriers for higher-ups. But the real problem is the managers who have the resources to directly commission some local to kill an elephant and bring them the tusks, and diplomats, whose bags are not checked, and the Chinese businessmen who smuggle ivory in bulk through the port of Mombasa, hidden among the more than 1,700 containers exiting every day.

Of course, with such a lucrative opportunity in illicit trade, the Chinese have a lot of help in their criminality.  Last year, thirty-two staff including senior officers of the Kenya Wildlife Service were fired for involvement or suspicion of involvement in elephant poaching.  And recently Al-Shabaab, the Islamist militia that is in league with al-Qaeda and which controls most of Somalia on Kenya’s northern border, has been killing elephants to sell their ivory as a way to fund their terrorist activities.

Several efforts have been initiated to prevent poaching and even former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has become an outspoken advocate for more aggressive protection of elephants from poaching.  But more security, bigger guns, and better technology will not do the trick.  There is too much money at stake for those trading in illegal ivory to be deterred, and as incomes rise in China and displays of personal wealth through items like ivory increases, addressing demand is the only real option.

Africa is a complicated place, and never more so than in the last decade as the pressures of modernity and tradition vigorously pull one another in opposite directions.  Home to a billion people, 70% of whom still live in abject poverty toiling in low to no wage informal employment as subsistence farmers, even the more developed nations of the continent continue to struggle with age-old challenges such as corruption, disease, lack of health care, poor education systems, and ethnic divisions erupting in violence.  But this is the story of Africa with which we are all familiar.  The new African story is one of hope and promise, driven by rapidly growing economies, a burgeoning middle class, urbanization and technological connectivity, and a much more peaceful and democratic environment than ever before. Africa’s economic rise is underwritten by foreign interest in the continent’s vast, untapped natural resources, but the desire for its riches today is having dire consequences for its future.

Despite the dramatic increase in foreign investment into Africa’s long dead animals, which have been converted into fossil fuels extracted by oil and gas companies, the animals still very much alive and roaming the countryside are also a critical part of Africa’s economic growth by bringing in wealthy tourists from around the world.  The game drives provide an opportunity to see back in time as city dwellers get the chance to mingle among the wildlife on the African plains strikingly similar to how they have existed for thousands of years.

For most who are fortunate enough to come here – myself included – nothing is more memorable than that first encounter with an elephant in the wild, but it is perhaps their display of humanity, the affection they share for one another, and the profound sense of loss they feel when one of them dies that will have the greatest impact on my own sense of humanity towards others.