National Geographic: Coming of Age with Elephants (1996)

[bunniefuu]

I learned to look at the world through

the eyes and ears of elephants.

Some people, other elephant people,

have told me

that I think I am an elephant.

In some ways, perhaps they are right.

Like Africa, the elephants

take hold of your spirits.

They can possess you and persuades you

to look at the world

in a different light.

There is something so grand about

the life of an elephant,

its great size, strength, and age.

Elephants have so many of the

qualities we like best about ourselves,

dignity, loyalty

to families and friends,

compassion, and a sense of humor.

Biologist Joyce Poole has taken

a journey,

without maps, into the heart of

the African elephant.

She came to know elephant like family.

She discovered biological forces

no one had ever suspected,

and elephant voices

no human had ever heard.

For years, Joyce fought for

their survival,

never imagining that one day

she would face a terrible choice.

Joyce Poole would have to give

the order to k*ll elephants.

This is the story of a woman

who loved elephants in a world

that had no room for them.

Looking back at how it all began,

it seems as if Africa has always been

my home.

Joyce Poole's family came to Kenya

in the 1960s

when her father worked for

the Peace Corps.

She grew up in Africa.

The family loved wild places

and often camped in

Kenya's Amboseli National Park.

I saw my first elephant as a child

of seven,

a huge bull in Amboseli.

And I remember asking my father

what would happen

if he charged the car.

And as my father said,

"He'll squash the car down to

the size of a pea pod," he came.

I remember a lot from Amboseli.

It was one of our favorite places,

but I remember most the elephants.

The swamps were home

to a huge number of animals.

But it was always the elephants

that captured my imagination.

At the age of 11,

Joyce knew what she was going to be

when she grew up,

a wildlife biologist.

When the time came to leave home, she

went out to live among the elephants.

Her journey would soon

change the way

the rest of the world thought about

elephants.

But in time,

it would change Joyce, too,

and turn all her dreams

for the elephants into dust.

It began in the shadow of Kilimanjaro

on the Kenya border.

Her new home was

Amboseli National Park,

where she had first encountered

elephants.

Her mentor was Cynthia Moss,

who had already embarked on the most

comprehensive study

of elephant society ever attempted.

Using a photo book with pictures of

the elephants in Amboseli,

Cynthia taught Joyce

how to identify individuals.

Just keep your eye on Tuskless.

Now look, here in this picture,

you would say M-57 was older than M-22

because of the angle of his head.

Yes, Yes.

He's much younger.

The elephants also got to know

the researchers.

Babies played on camp as if under the

watchful eye of their own aunts.

At first, all the elephants looked alike

to me,

large and gray with big ears.

But Cynthia taught me how different

each elephant really was.

Elvira.

Esmeraldo was born in 1948.

Joyce gradually learned to recognize

individuals by their familiar features.

Vee was named

for the V-notches in her ears.

Tuskless had no ivory.

Joyce was particularly fond of

jezebel, a noble old matriarch

with one tusk pointing skyward

and the other straight ahead.

Each new arrival was given a name

that identified it as part of

a specific family group.

Cynthia Moss's work was

already revealing

that elephant families formed

an unusually complex society

dominated by females.

But the lives of the males were

still uncharted territory.

Males leave their families

as teenagers

and never again live in stable groups.

Alone in her car,

Joyce followed them.

She was 19 years old and had no idea

what she was getting into.

To study the males Joyce needed

to get as close as possible.

But the shadow of a bull elephant

was perilous place to be.

A male that seemed placid

could easily turn around

and impale her car on his tusks.

When I first started studying

the males,

there were many times when I had

elephants corner me,

tower over the car,

and I thought it was all over.

Showing who's boss is something

male elephants do

from the time they're youngsters.

Most fights aren't dangerous.

Size normally dictates rank

and every male already knows

where he fits in the social hierarchy.

But every once in a while,

fights turn deadly serious.

What was it that changed

all the rules?

Joyce noticed several older males

dribbling gallons of urine.

Glandular secretions darkened the skin

behind their eyes as if with tears.

She saw one elephant

who also seemed to be suffering

from a fungal infection

she'd never seen it before,

so she named him Green p*nis.

But then other makes turned up

in the same curious condition.

Joyce soon realized there was

a pattern.

Each male had his own time of year

when the symptoms appeared.

And it appeared at the same time

every year.

In Asian elephants,

these symptoms were already recognized

as part of a male sexual cycle.

African elephants are

a different species,

and the experts all said they did not

have such a cycle.

It took long months of tracking

and recording the behavior

of individual males,

but Joyce proved the experts wrong.

At the age of 23, she had discovered

a driving biological force

that every other researcher

had overlooked: it's called musth.

Musth is a heightened sexual

and aggressive period or rut.

And the word musth actually comes

from the Urdu meaning intoxicated.

Males start coming into musth on

average around 28, 29 years old

and their first musth periods

only last a day or two.

With time,

they last longer and longer,

and by the time they're in their mid

to late forties,

they stay in musth

for three or four months at a time.

How do you study six tons of

intoxicated male?

It takes art as well as science.

They're predictably aggressive

when they're in musth,

and even though you feel you know

an animal a 100 percent,

when they're towering over the car

and starting to put their tusk

on the bonnet,

you don't feel quite so sure

of yourself.

But over time,

the musth males accepted her,

and Joyce came to feel

at ease with them.

His name is Beach Ball

because everything about him is round,

his ears are round, his head is round,

his tusks are round,

his body is round

and his p*nis is round.

Beach ball, you be nice, you be nice.

I hear you've been misbehaving out

at headquarters,

knocking down fences and gates.

You be careful with my car.

I've just fixed it.

Each of the males used to have a sort

of a ritualized way of greeting me.

Um, Agamemnon used to come and put

his tusks up against the windshield,

and then throw his head back and forth

over the top of the car

with his front legs up

against the bumper.

And Alfred always, you know,

put his trunk on the bonnet.

And this one, I mean, he just,

you know,

he likes to sort of press up against

the side of the car.

He's very sensual.

The old stories of aggressive behavior

by "rogue" elephants

suddenly made sense.

Males in musth can be hostile,

but mainly to each other.

These fights captured by Joyce

in videotape

could end injury or even death.

Who wins? Size is no longer decisive.

The male who is closer to the pea

of musth has the advantage.

What they are fighting for

is the right to mate with a female

at the height of her cycle.

The dominant male stays close

to the female.

Hormones in her urine tell him

whether she's ready.

When the time is right,

they mate frequently,

while her family surrounds them.

Joyce was intrigued

not just by what she saw,

but by what she heard.

She dubbed it

"the mating pandemonium,"

a sound heard at no other time.

Joyce's discoveries about musth

made it possible,

for the first time, to understand

the complexities

of elephant mating behavior.

But now the focus of her research

was shifting.

Joyce was about to unlock the secret

language of the elephants.

The language of elephants was

a complete enigma.

Sometimes elephants are

incredibly vocal.

Other times they seem to communicate

in silence-freezing

as if on command

or suddenly racing off together

with no apparent cue.

Even a charging musth male

barely made a sound.

I kept hearing a sound like, you know,

if you take a thick piece of cardboard

and you go

"whop, whop, whop" with it;

and they were flapping their ears

in a certain way,

so I thought the sound was the ear

flapping and it was a threat to me.

And then I realized afterwards that,

in fact,

it was vocalization

that was being made

and the ear flapping was just

in association with it.

In the mid1980s,

Joyce collaborated with

Katherine Payne,

and expert on whale songs.

Together they were determined

to uncover the secrets of

elephant communication.

We began making take recordings of

the elephants.

It turned out that we were only

hearing part of what they said.

The rest was at a frequency

too low for us to hear.

Sonograms revealed that humans miss

two-thirds of elephant conversation

like whales, elephants were using

a language

that was mostly below the range

of human hearing.

Joyce slowly learned to decipher

the sounds she could hear.

She came to understand 33 different

vocalizations,

calls that meant,

"lets go," or "attack"

or baby saying,

"help, I'm scared."

Females comforted their young

with rumbles

that were as specific as saying,

"It's okay, we're here."

It was a radically new way

to think about elephants.

What people used to believe was

just stomach rumbling

was actually a complex language.

These were intelligent creatures.

Now that she knew

what the elephants were saying,

Joyce knew when to be afraid,

and when it was just play,

even when to talk back.

Anyone who's watched elephants

would say,

you know, what is it that makes

elephants so much?"

Why do you like elephants so much?"

They're so funny.

Why are they funny?

Well, they're not just funny to look at,

they're funny acting,

they're clowns; not all of them,

I mean, they've got different

personalities,

but some are real clowns.

Joyce believed that elephants

had emotions,

a whole range of feelings,

from joy to grief.

She was moved to witness one family

come across the bones of

their own matriarch.

And it was very different from the way

elephants usually approach bones.

They gathered around her bones

in a defensive circle facing outwards

and gave a very loud rumble

that went on and on,

and they really were standing

over them

as if it was a member of their family.

And this whole, just turning the bones

over, ever so slowly and gently

and, you know,

feeling every little crevice,

paying particular attention

to the jaw and the skull,

and then, you know, backing around

and touching with the hind feet.

Joyce witnessed the death of

many elephants,

but the loss of one of her favorites

was especially painful.

It was the elderly matriarch Jezebel.

By the time Joyce arrived,

Jezebel's tusks had been stolen

and the corpse had been mutilated.

Feet have been taken!

She had been ill for a number of weeks

and I think when she fell,

she was tracked and her tusks

were taken.

The 1980s were ominous times

for elephants.

Amboseli had always been a sanctuary

for them

but throughout the rest of Africa,

elephants were being slaughtered

for their ivory.

I just found it devastating that

the more I was learning about

these incredible animals,

the faster they were being

slaughtered.

I just found that I had to

try and get out there

and do something about it.

The world was at w*r with elephants.

For Joyce Poole, it was time

to join the battle to save them.

In the late 1980s,

poachers were k*lling

thousands of elephants

to meet the demand for

ivory trinkets.

They targeted the males

for heavier tusks

and hacked the ivories

from their faces with machetes.

When the Amboseli elephants project

started,

there were 167,000 elephants

in Kenya,

now there were just 25,000.

In the vast area where the elephants

once roamed,

all that remained were

gleaming white skulls of the dead.

The social structure of the elephants

was on the brink of collapse.

Almost all the breeding males

were gone,

and many families unit

consisted entirely of orphans.

If the k*lling continued,

experts predicted,

Kenya's elephants would go instinct.

To save the country's wild life, the

government turned to Richard Leakey,

a third-generation Kenyan who

was already famous as paleontologist.

I am going to do my level best to

eliminate the elephant poachers...

In 1989, Leakey took over

Kenya's Wildlife Service

and immediately declare w*r

on the poachers.

He got off to a bold and

controversial start.

...and it would be my hope that

in the coming weeks

the press will not ask for permission

to film dead elephants,

but will have an opportunities

to film dead poachers.

Leakey turned Kenya's

Wildlife rangers

into a crack antipoachering army.

Now when poachers fire on them,

they have orders to sh**t back.

The first year the rangers k*lled

...they unearthed huge caches of ivory

from butchered elephants.

Then Kenya did something

that shocked the world.

At Leakey's urging

President Daniel Arap Moi

burned three million dollars worth

of ivory.

It was Leakey's way to wake up

the world to the horror of poaching.

It was a very emotional moment

watching the tusks of 1800 elephants

to go up in flames and smoke.

But at the same time,

I felt a great sense of relief

because I believed that the elephants

were going to have a reprieve.

A few months later,

the nations of the world

banned all trade in Ivory

with dramatic results.

The next year, instead of losing

Kenya lost fewer than 50.

But like any w*r ravaged society, the

elephants would need decades to recover.

They weren't going to get that time.

In the very years that elephant

population was being decimated,

Kenya's human population had doubled.

People and elephants were both hungry

for the same land.

The deal with the inevitably conflict,

Richard Leakey needed someone

who understood elephants.

He asked Joyce Poole to run

the National elephant program.

It would mean leaving

the idyllic world of Amboseli.

It was difficult to leave Amboseli

behind, but at the same time,

I was being given the opportunity

of a lifetime.

I had been so privileged to spend

so many years with elephants,

to have learned so much I felt a sense

of, almost of obligation,

of giving them something in return

and I felt that

with the knowledge I had

that perhaps I could make

a difference.

Joyce was convinced she could help the

elephants find a place in modern Kenya.

She didn't realize how difficult

it was going to be.

Joyce Poole had now entered the very

heart of the conflict over elephants.

At Kenya's wildlife service,

she recruited a team of

committed young Kenyans.

They were eager to develop

new programs

that would help people

and elephants live together.

One of the first tasks that I had

at Kenya wildlife service

was to survey the country and find out

how many elephants we had left.

I would have loved for them

to have been able to return

to their old haunts,

but there just wasn't

the space anymore.

I began to have this horrible vision

of a future world

where almost all of the land would be

taken up by people

and the only space left for elephants

would be inside a few national parks.

Other African nations had already

confined their elephants

to national parks.

Joyce hoped that would never happen

in Kenya.

She knew it would ultimately mean

controlling the elephant population.

Elephants need space.

An adult eats 300 pounds of

vegetation a day.

As the population grows,

elephants can have a devastating

effect on park habitat.

For other African nations,

the solution is to compute how many

elephants the land can sustain,

and k*ll the rest.

It's called culling.

I think culling is totally unethical.

I think it's barbaric.

I suppose I imagine it like taking a

group of humans and just deciding

we're going to take out this family

or we're going to take out that family.

Joyce believed she could avoid culling

in Kenya.

But now there was a new problem.

Elephants were beginning

to move out of the parks.

And when they did,

tragedy was waiting.

The elephants could no longer go back

to their old migratory routes.

Settlers had planted crops everywhere.

Families had staked their entire lives

on what had once been

prime elephant habitat.

The elephants were just going back

to their old haunts,

but from the settlers' viewpoint,

they were out of control.

The radio messages came in from

the stations, almost every day.

Elephants were on the rampage.

They were eating their way

through cornfields,

they were knocking down houses, and

they were trampling people to death.

Joyce knew she had to keep people

and elephants apart,

and it was a matter of life and death

on both sides.

She tried to protect vulnerable farms

with electric fences.

But the elephants learned

to short circuit the fences.

Elephants broke through here

last night,

and they went out into the shambas

out here.

Probably, one of the bulls

was in charge of this

and he must've broke in

and they went out.

Every day we have to keep repairing

after every breakage

and this is taking up resources.

The elephants were always

one step ahead.

Under cover of dark,

they constantly found new ways

to get through to the farms.

In one night,

an elephant could destroy a family's

entire food supply for the year.

If you can imagine having to

defend your entire livelihood

from some enormous beast

that came in the middle of the night

and weighed close to a hundred times

what you weigh.

You can't see it.

All you have is a small torch

and this,

this beast,

this monster can track you down,

can smell exactly where you are

and you can't see it.

It can crush you

in a matter of seconds.

That's what so many people

across Africa are up against.

When the elephants come, the farmers

have only rocks, sticks,

and the sound of their own voices

to defend their crops.

In the morning,

at least one family faces famine.

As you can see for yourself,

I have nothing left for my family.

All the crops were destroyed

by the elephants;

the beans, the corn, the tomatoes,

everything's gone.

The children will sit and keep quite.

They have nothing to eat.

They'll just sit quietly.

The close contact between people and

elephants sometimes ended horribly.

Many people are k*lled in Kenya

every year by elephants.

It's somewhere, probably between

Some areas are worse than others.

I don't think that in most cases.

I think that the elephant didn't

intend to k*ll the person.

But in some cases,

they've definitely gone out,

tracked down the person

and kneeled on them,

which is usually the way an elephant

would k*ll someone.

The most effective way to control

problem elephants was to sh**t them,

but local wildlife wardens lacked

the equipment

and training to do it properly.

Many of the elephants that were

being shot were the wrong ones,

that it wasn't the elephant that

had k*lled Mrs. So-and-so,

that it wasn't the elephant that had

gone into the shamba and destroyed it.

The elephants that were being shot

were taking hours to die,

it just wasn't right.

Joyce had to face a painful reality.

She'd come of age learning

how elephants live,

and she accepted the need

for some to die.

But now she was going to

have to give the order.

I realized that elephants were

going to have to be shot,

that we couldn't allow elephants

to go rampaging through people's

farms and k*lling people.

But if we had to k*ll elephants,

I wanted to make sure that we at least,

we k*lled the right elephants,

the ones that were doing the damage.

In 1992, Joyce established

a special team

and sent them into military training

to become marksman.

Their job was to k*ll problem

elephants, but to do it humanely.

I think the question isn't how we can

justify sh**ting elephants.

I think the question is how can we

justify not sh**ting them.

I mean, when you've spent the night

out in a maize field with people

who are just having their whole

livelihood destroyed right there

and then,

there is no other alternative.

Now when villages suffered repeated

attacks, Joyce sent her control team.

They watched by night

till the elephants came.

We're going to wait for the elephants.

They'll be coming in,

probably, in an hour or two.

We'll wait for them here.

As soon as we hear them

cutting into the maize,

we'll cut into the maize above them

and come around,

and try and get in front of them.

So if we can get them

coming towards us,

we can then pick out the ringleader

and we'll sh**t him.

We've got to sh**t one out of the

herd to stop them from doing this.

There's no other way we can stop them.

I'm so happy now that

this animal is dead.

I've been up every night,

waiting and looking after my crops.

The elephants have been bothering us

for the last five years

and destroying our crops.

Some of the farmers actually have not

harvested anything from their fields.

For now, this village's cornfields

were safe.

The k*lling of one elephant should

keep the other away.

Tonight the crops would not

have to be guarded

but what about all the other villages.

In 1993 alone I gave the order

to shot 57 problem elephants

and each decision was difficult, but

I knew it was the right thing to do.

For these villagers, the monster

that once terrorized them

was now just thousands of pounds

of meat in the morning sun.

Today, it would fed their families.

All over Kenya, deadly encounters

between people and elephants

were on the rise.

Joyce Poole and Richard Leakey

were under constant pressure

to k*ll more elephants.

I realized my worst fears were

probably going to come true someday.

Kenya was going to have to eliminate

most of the elephants outside the parks.

We would have to confine the rest

behind fences

as other African nations had done.

If elephants had to be

confined to parks,

Joyce wanted to find a humane way

to control their numbers.

She had her team had

a daring new idea.

They were going to test a form

of elephant birth control.

Make sure you don't let them go back

across the river.

Critics ridiculed the whole pain.

But Leakey gave her the go ahead.

For the test, Joyce relies on exactly

the sort of detailed knowledge

of individual elephants

that has always been her specialty.

Just bring 'em over here.

They are looking for a female

who already has a baby,

so they can be certain

she is not pregnant.

The marksman brings her down

with a tranquilizer dart.

Once again, Joyce is defying

the experts.

But this might be a way for elephants

to survive in the crowded world

of modern Africa.

Once the elephant is down,

Joyce and her team have only

They inject the elephant with an

experimental contraceptive vaccine

which should sterilize her.

Then they strap on a radio collar

to track her progress.

Joyce believes birth control for

elephants may mean hope for the future.

But it will take years to prove that

the contraceptive works.

Then just when they begin to get the

first positive results, it's all over.

Political infighting puts an end

to their plans.

I have given the best years of my life

to public service.

In march, 1994 his enemies forced

Richard Leakey out of office.

...and the stress and the pain of

being vilified

by senior politicians and others

is more than I think

is good for my health.

Under these circumstances I have

today sent a letter to His Excellency

the president offering my resignation.

Joyce and several of her colleagues

resigned the same day in support.

What was so devastating about it

was that KWS had had such successes,

and my own program... we had built up

such an extraordinary team

and we had really done so much

and I feel that people knew that,

people were on our side;

yes, they wanted us to do more,

but they realized we were

doing the best we could

and all of a sudden,

Richard is force to resign...

and everything is just left in limbo.

Joyce didn't know yet where her life

was going to take her.

But elephants still had a hold

on her spirit.

She went back to visit Amboseli.

She now had a daughter

named Selengei.

Joyce wanted to introduce her child

to her old friends.

We'd gone out one evening

to watch elephants.

And I saw Vee approaching us

with her family.

And then an extraordinary thing

happened.

It wasn't just any rumble,

it was greeting rumble.

And who knows what was going on

in the elephants heads?

I could only guess that

they had remembered me

and they were welcoming us

back to Amboseli.

For a few days, Joyce blended in

with the familiar camp routine.

Her old colleagues were still

pursuing their research.

Elephants would always be

part of Joyce's life.

But back in Nairobi,

someone else was going to have to make

the hard choice about their future.

I think in the long term,

let's say looking 50 years ahead,

that elephants and people will not

be able to coexist,

that elephants will be confined to

national parks,

many of them with

barriers around them.

And I think between here and now,

it's going to be a very painful

process to get where we're going...

and that there'll be a lot of

suffering on both sides.

To save what she loved most

in the wild, she had fenced it in,

controlled it, even k*lled it,

and it hadn't been enough.

I think that the dreams I had or

even have for elephants can never be.

There's not enough space anymore.

And what space there

is put aside for people.

I think all we can do is

look at each situation

and do our best to protect

what can be protected,

look for solutions for the conflict.

And where we can't do anything,

we just let it go.

It can't all be saved.

It can't.