Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  The Elephant is known for its intelligence, its affection, and for never forgetting. Lawrence Anthony, writer of the bestseller The Elephant Whisperer, was beloved by all for his rescue and rehabilitation of animals harmed by human atrocities and was known for saving the zoo animals in Baghdad in 1993. On March 2, 2012, he died suddenly at his home. Two days later a stately procession of two groups of wild Elephants, thirty-one in all, arrived there. They had traveled in single file from twelve miles away. They had not visited him for years and they stayed for two days and two nights without eating and then turned and slowly marched away. How can one not be moved by the inexplicable arrival of these remarkable creatures? A great-hearted man had died, and it seems they did not forget him.

  Another uncanny story was told to me by a WCS biologist studying family structures of the animals. A young bull Elephant entered the lab tent and plucked a large femur bone off a shelf, took it outside, where he fondled it for several minutes, and then gently placed it on the ground and returned to the bush. The bone was that of his mother.

  We know Elephants grieve, comfort, and console others in their herd. They seem to have extrasensory abilities as well. They are consistently rated one of the most intelligent mammals on earth, along with pigs, dogs, dolphins, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Throughout history we have exploited Elephants’ brute force for our use, neglecting what we might have learned from them as supreme social beings.

  They were used for hauling as early as 4500 BC in Mesopotamia until they became extinct there by 850. Alexander the Great had one hundred of them in 326 BC as he fought his way across India, although he could not compete with the legions of thousands that some Indian kings presented on the battlefield. Elephants were the first tanks in warfare, impervious to arrows and even musket balls. When the cannon was introduced in the 1400s, Elephants could be felled by a single cannonball, and their warrior days were essentially over.

  The Elephant is still a beast of burden in parts of Asia, but as the wild population declines, so does the likelihood of taming one. As the land is squeezed by an increasing human population, feeding and housing a big Elephant becomes prohibitive. Ringling Circus no longer has Elephants in their shows; animal rights organizations finally convinced enough people of the cruelty involved in training an Elephant that the circus gave in. Even zoos are rethinking their Elephants. The Bronx Zoo is phasing them out. As the complex social lives of the animals became better understood, the zookeepers were reluctant to split up family groups and did not have the space to care for all of them adequately. Its last three Elephants will live out their long lives, and then one of the greatest zoos in the world will close its doors on the most iconic wild animal on earth.

  I was of two minds about this decision as a trustee. While in no way endorsing splitting a family apart I argued that there were many domesticated orphan Elephants who could use a home and give the public the opportunity to know a live animal through the zoo experience. The little girl in an apartment in the Bronx may never get to Africa or Asia to view one in the wild as I have been privileged to do, but at least she can come to know them at the zoo. The first introduction most people have to wild animals is in a zoo, making a direct visceral connection to the possibilities of experience in the wild and protection of those creatures.

  Without the zoo experience I worry that any media connection serves only to distance our children from the animals, which, after all, live forever on the screen even if they are gone in real life. Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods calls it “nature-deficit disorder.” Children today are joined at the hand to their tech devices and imprinted on visual imagery from birth. They prefer to be inside where the plugs are and engaging in virtual reality rather than in actual reality.

  Elephant ivory has been coveted as long as human beings have been artists. When I was a girl wandering through Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts I would gaze at a little statue of the Minoan Snake Goddess made of ivory and gold. She dated from 1500 BC and was exquisite in her tiered gown, holding two writhing cobras in her hands. Three thousand years later the trade in ivory increased dramatically as tusks were made into piano keys, billiard balls, boxes, religious objects, statues, and jewelry. Even my forebears couldn’t resist the little ivory necklace I inherited.

  With the added pressure of sport hunting the Elephant population began to crash. By 1978 the population had decreased from 26 million in 1800 to 600,000 and the Elephant was listed as “threatened” by the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This could have been a turning point—the species might have rebounded—but the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species dithered about banning all trade in ivory, overruled by countries for which it was too lucrative a commodity. By the late 1980s a growing middle class with money to spare in China, Thailand, and Indonesia began to purchase huge amounts of ivory objects and the demand skyrocketed.

  Another turning point came in 1989 when the first pyre of ivory was burned in Kenya, bringing world attention to the loss of Elephants, and CITES finally banned all trade in ivory. But just ten years later, in 1999, CITES allowed three countries in Africa to sell fifty-five tons of ivory to Japan, resulting in both legal and illegal ivory markets. Forged documents easily convince buyers that the ivory they are purchasing is legal and not contraband, and the level of corruption from high government officials on down, from the enforcers to the local spotters of big tuskers, is all pervasive.

  —

  There were many hand signals flying across the table as the tall, engaging men and I tried to communicate. There was a lot of laughter, too, as we failed. Our hearts were light and there was much to celebrate. The Maasai were about to manage a new park in Kenya where they had grazed cattle for centuries. The former WCS biologist David Western, Leakey’s successor as president of Kenya’s Wildlife Service, managed something of a miracle by convincing conservationists to put the new park in the hands of the Maasai.

  Kenya was devastated by poaching in the 1970s and ’80s, and the rising human population continued to press park edges with more farms, water diversion, and wildlife-human contact. The Maasai, angry that they had been forced out of their ancestral pasturelands when the parks prohibited them, retaliated by killing Elephants, Lions, and other wildlife. But the Maasai tribesmen had managed the land well for centuries, pasturing their cattle in the habitats of Wildebeests and other ungulates without detrimental effects. David Western worked with them and convinced others that the new park should be run by the tribal people. WCS supported David’s programs, and all of us were invited to a celebratory dinner in the center of the new park, with Mount Kilimanjaro’s white peak glowing in the sunset beyond us.

  Mount Kilimanjaro and Elephants, Kenya, 1996

  The Maasai men had changed from their tribal reds, which drape gracefully like Roman tunics, into the monochrome navy jackets worn by Western businessmen. Toasts went on for hours, and we consumed the beef before us dutifully. The teeth of the Maasai were so perfect and straight that I entertained the thought of becoming a convert to their diet of beef, milk, and blood in an effort to transform my own. After hours of toasts and a presentation to our chairman of a spear and a shield, we danced together to drums vibrating on hard-packed earth until the moon was halfway through her orbit.

  By 2100 half the children in the world will be African. That is UNICEF’s projection. The population will grow from 1.1 billion in 2014 to 4.2 billion. This is an unprecedented rate of growth and will impact the entire globe. Animals will continue to be stressed. In 2009 a severe drought caused many ungulates to perish or move out of the park to areas where they could find grasses, leaving carnivores with little to feed on. Lions became cattle killers and the Maasai herdsmen poisoned them. Half the Lions died. In 2010 rampant poaching began again as the price of ivory in Asia escalated. Ten thousand Elephants were killed in Tanzania alone.

  David Western and Cynthia Moss, another ecologist dedicated to Elephants, managed to create a safety zone for the animals to migrate fr
eely across Tanzania’s and Kenya’s borders. It spans sixteen parks and protected areas, securing corridors through which Elephants can move beyond the parks. Elephants are not welcome in agricultural lands, where they tear up crops and trees and sometimes kill people. Western and Moss began programs to reduce human-animal conflict and educate people about the benefits of wildlife. Elephants open forests to grasslands, dig to create water holes, and disperse seeds in their dung. The tourist trade ranks second economically.

  Independently, a young Maasai boy in Kenya, Richard Turere, charged with watching over his family’s cattle as all Maasai boys between the ages of six and nine are, came up with a simple solution to deter Lions. They were getting into the bomas, or enclosures, at night and killing the livestock, and then were killed in return. Richard observed that Lions shied away from flashing lights. He took apart his mother’s solar-powered radio and installed flashing lights on the posts of the boma and the Lions retreated. The concept was so successful that it was replicated elsewhere, and in gratitude to Richard, he received a scholarship to a fine school. He also was flown to the United States, where he gave a charming TED Talk in February 2013.

  Leela Hazzah grew up in Egypt longing to hear the roar of a Lion before learning from her father that they had long been extinct in North Africa. Young Maasai men traditionally hunt and kill a Lion as an initiation rite to become “warriors.” This was unsustainable in a Lion population that had plummeted from 200,000 to 30,000 in twenty-five years. Leela knew what she wanted to do from then on. Her Lion Guardian project is an unmitigated success with the Maasai. She convinced them that the more heroic task was being a lifelong guardian of a Lion rather than its killer. The Maasai warriors now use telemetry and cell phones as well as traditional scouting to guard their Lions. They are paid about $100 a month to be a guardian. The program extends throughout Maasai lands in Tanzania and Kenya and is resulting in a rebound of the cat population. Leela has heard the Lion roar.

  —

  Ivory is beautiful, it is valuable, and it is deadly. Elephants could be extinct in the wild within a decade if the carnage continues. The solution is to ban all ivory trade, to burn all existing ivory, and to put all the criminals behind bars. But different countries want different things and CITES has not found consensus on the issue yet.

  Desire is the hardest thing to kill. The United States has been fighting illegal drugs for as long as I’ve been alive, but the demand continues. “Just say no” is better suited as a phrase on a refrigerator magnet than as policy. Curbing desire is a cultural phenomenon. It results from enlightenment coupled with shame, a realization that something is no longer cool to do or acquire. The desire may go underground and a black market may thrive, but cultural changes will have occurred in society, cutting demand considerably.

  This happened with cigarettes when enough pictures of black and diseased lungs were imprinted on the minds of millions of Americans, and the surgeon general in 1964 reported that smoking was killing us. Forty-two percent of the public smoked then, compared with eighteen percent fifty years later.

  It also happened with the fur trade in the U.S. No one thought much about the animals being killed for fur coats back in the 1950s. Anyone who could afford a fur coat was stylish and warm in the winter. The more exotic the animal, the luckier the wearer. First Lady Jackie Kennedy sported a Leopard coat in 1962, beginning a craze for spotted-cat coats. Hundreds of thousands of wild cats were killed—133,064 Ocelots in Central and South America alone in 1968. A cutter for the fur trade remarked that it took twenty-five of the small cats to make one coat, and that “they must be killing these animals off very, very fast…they’re flown here with the blood still on their fur.”

  By 1968 the cats were becoming scarce in the wild and the price of a fur coat escalated. The anti-fur movement led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals began in earnest then and was fought vigorously by the fashion industry. Bill Conway wrote, “With what right and what conscience can a civilized woman adorn herself with the mummified reliquiae of diminishing wild creatures? How can she help but see an ugly death in a far-off land, the loss of one more portion of the international resource in beautiful wild creatures, each time she dons her ‘fun fur’?”

  The next year, 1969, the U.S. Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act. The plight of wild animals was part of the cultural conversation. A decade later most fur-bearing animals hunted for the trade were listed as threatened or endangered by the IUCN’s Red List, and contraband because of CITES regulations.

  Although this did not end the fur trade in farmed animals or the fashion industry’s annual parade of top models in dead mink, chinchilla, or fox, it did reduce the number of animals caught in the wild and succeeded in shaming women in prominent cities of the world. With the invention of new fabrics that are fashionable and warm, there is no need for anyone today to deck themselves out in skins.

  Even in South Africa, Isaiah Shembe’s Nazareth Baptist Church, which follows old Zulu practices relying on Leopard skins for ritual ceremonies, is making the switch to faux fur with the help of Panthera. It looks lush and is easier to come by. The Leopard population is rebounding.

  The connection between ivory and dead Elephants is being made in the places where demand is highest. Yao Ming, one of China’s wealthiest and most beloved celebrities, played for the Shanghai Sharks before being recruited by the NBA’s Houston Rockets. Now retired and living back home in China, Ming has become a voice for endangered wildlife. He led a campaign to stop shark finning, and the consumption of shark fin soup in China dropped by half. He has taken on the decimation of White Rhinos and Elephants. He made commercials telling people not to buy ivory and appeared in films such as Animal Planet’s Saving Africa’s Giants with Yao Ming. In one video an adorable baby Elephant, orphaned through poaching, follows the seven-foot-six-inch Ming through the African bush.

  The Chinese film star Li Bingbing is one of China’s top actresses. She visited Kenya in the spring of 2013 at the invitation of Iain Douglas-Hamilton and the Save the Elephants Foundation. Iain said that when she witnessed a slaughtered Elephant, its face torn apart for the tusks, she wept uncontrollably. She confesses that she had not made the connection between Elephants in Africa being killed for the ivory and the jewelry she purchased in China. Many sellers tell people that the ivory is from the dropped tusks of live Elephants, or ones that died naturally. Bingbing has become one of Asia’s leading advocates for Elephants, educating youth and changing the minds of ivory buyers everywhere.

  It is because of young conservationists like Yao Ming and Li Bingbing that Douglas-Hamilton says he has hope for the future. He has spent fifty years studying Elephants and has seen the horror during aerial surveys of the decimation of entire herds. He has witnessed the near extinction of Forest Elephants poached by warlords; Joseph Kony has used the sale of ivory to fund his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). When a deranged man like Kony has no conscience capturing 66,000 children to serve as sex slaves and soldiers in his “army,” the killing of thousands of Elephants means nothing. He and other terrorists are equipped with the latest in technical devices and weaponry to track down and kill Elephants and Rhinos and elude detection. It is an all-out war but a war that can be won with the will to do so. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first saw a security threat to the United States and Africa in Kony’s LRA becoming rich on the ivory trade. She and Chelsea Clinton, with funds from the Clinton Foundation, have committed to ending all wildlife trade.

  While Yao Ming, Li Bingbing, and conservation organizations like WildAid work on the buyers of ivory, well-armed enforcers in anti-poaching squads work to eliminate the sellers. In 2012 two jewelers were busted with $2 million worth of ivory, uncovering a large underground market in New York City, second only to Hong Kong’s in size. There are only eleven Fish and Wildlife inspectors at JFK airport and at Port Elizabeth in New Jersey and they have less than a day to inspect each huge container before the packages are shipped out. This shrin
ks the likelihood of nabbing most illegal trade in wildlife and body parts. Still there is room for hope. President Obama banned all trade in ivory in the USA in 2016, spurred on by very active organizations like WCS. More laws are sure to follow.

  Sometimes I wonder if we have not conjured Elephants. They seem mythical and sprung from our imagination with their strange long trunk, their huge feet and ears, their impermeable hide, their small eyes, and their flexible tail. We might expect them to be ungainly, but they are delicate and precise of movement, gentle except when pushed to anger, forgiving instead of vengeful. Clearly their minds are superior—housed in an odd huge body.

  I like to believe we are transitioning our thinking. Elephants will not be beasts of burden much longer, not when villages have machines to do the work. The poaching will end when there is enough enforcement to stop the killers, as Nepal has proved with their army at the ready, and if funds are there to ensure it. There are many ifs. If Iain Douglas-Hamilton has hope, then so do I. He has seen it all and he says the Elephants are still forgiving after so many decades of slaughter. In addition to their remarkable intellect, they have very big hearts.

  17

  Madagascar

  Madagascar existed like a giant seed held within the pod of Gondwana, supercontinent of the Cretaceous period. It was pressed on the northwest by Africa, on the south by Antarctica, and on the east by India. About ninety million years ago the landmasses separated, and Madagascar’s flowering in isolation began. It is one of the most fascinating places on earth.