This is the story
of one man's obsession...
..an obsession with the lives of
elephants.
Papa was the first person to study
the social behaviour
of African elephants in the wild.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
He's contributed enormously,
he's almost like the Godfather
of African elephant research.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton has been
immersed in
the study of our largest land mammal
for nearly six decades.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
Well, you know, Iain is an elephant,
so that's his legacy
and I married an elephant,
and the whole of our lives
has been elephants.
But his journey has not been
an easy one.
Forced to shift from pioneering
scientist to elephant protector.
Poaching is completely out of hand,
and the carcasses littered
everywhere -
if you were talking about people,
you'd call it genocide.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
In the eyes of many people,
I think Iain has taken way too
many risks,
but I think in his own eyes,
I think he is just trying his best
and I'm glad.
The guy has just kept pushing
the pedal to what he wants
to do and what he believes in.
Did he seek out danger?
He's always been very adventurous,
maybe occasionally reckless.
I think he did what he felt had
to be done
to resolve what was a w*r
against nature.
It's you and me with a big elephant.
Virgo! Come on, Virgo!
Come on, Virgo.
Virgo.
There are around 415,000 African
elephants in
the world today.
But without Iain Douglas-Hamilton,
there might well be
a great deal fewer.
For the last 20 years,
he's been working with close friend
and colleague David Daballen.
So that's Basil.
Between them, they can tell you
the stories of more than
1,000 individual animals.
Look at him, he's magnificent.
Yeah. He's coming out.
HE CHUCKLES
It's my first elephant fix in six
months.
Oh, my God.
HE CHUCKLES
That's beautiful.
An accident has kept Iain away from
the elephants of Samburu for many
months.
But now he's back
and keen to catch up on the animals
that are so close to his heart.
This is Keir.
He loves this camp very much.
Yeah, we are almost having him on
elephant-back safaris.
THEY CHUCKLE
What a lovely boy.
Wow. Big guy.
He's looking at us. He's looking at
us. He's looking at us.
Our escape route will be here.
Hm? Our escape route will be here.
I've been watching it all the time!
THEY CHUCKLE
He's picking the acacia pods. Yeah.
This story is an absolute contrast
to the poaching.
Here is a completely habituated
elephant who has found
some human beings that are nice
to him.
I think, like many elephants,
he can discriminate between
nice people and dangerous people.
I really think so, yeah. Yeah.
I really do think.
Right now,
he is totally ignoring us,
it's like we don't even exist.
Mm. But as soon as you get him
outside the park,
the story would be different.
Well, maybe, David, if you creep up
and pull a tail hair.
I'm tempted.
HE LAUGHS
I'm really tempted
and I'm very serious.
Each tail hair is
a sort of tape recorder of what
the elephant's been eating,
so you may have about a year
and a half worth
of data in that tail -
that's how long it took to grow
to that point.
We've known this elephant
for many, many years now
and we've known him from being
a little mummy boy
to now being a big grown boy who
challenges big bulls.
So right now,
he is very impressive,
so we'll follow his life
and see what he's going to do.
David, stand there at the corner.
That's nice, thanks.
Iain's childhood was spent far away
from the plains of Africa.
Prunella Stack, his mother, was
a renowned women's rights campaigner
and fitness pioneer.
His father,
Lord David Douglas-Hamilton,
was a legendary
Scottish fighter pilot.
Young Iain inherited
his parents' sense of adventure.
In 1965, aged 23,
he moved to Lake Manyara
in Tanzania to start
a PhD study on the African elephant,
an animal he knew virtually
nothing about.
The early '60s was a golden age
for wildlife.
Parks were very newly formed,
and the animals were tame enough
to watch them at close quarters.
My dad started his research in
the mid '60s, which was really
a period where
the wildlife was just everywhere -
it stretched all the way to
the horizon and beyond
and you couldn't possibly imagine at
that time that we would ever be in
the situation where we are now,
where everything you see
around you is becoming endangered.
In those days,
the African elephant population was
many millions strong.
But animal research in the field was
a new concept.
No scientist had ever studied
elephant society like this before.
I was there for
four and a half years,
absolutely immersed in this life.
Walking with the elephants every day
and feeling so alive.
Quite early on,
I became hooked on them.
Iain's study grew from a problem.
The elephant population of the
enclosed Manyara National Park
was growing.
And it was clear that this small
area couldn't sustain it.
The Manyara problem in
a nutshell can be summarised by
saying that there are too many
elephants in too small a space.
Over the last 50 years,
they've steadily been pushed
inwards to
the one remaining safe area.
Even one elephant is destructive,
but when you pack
a great many into a small area,
you're bound to have problems.
The question was whether elephant
populations in
an enclosed space
could self-regulate,
or whether they would
need to be culled.
As a scientist,
Iain realised the only way
to properly understand their effect
on the landscape was
to learn as much as he could about
elephant behaviour.
He started by identifying all
the individual elephants.
He realised that you could recognise
different characters by looking at
the shapes of their ears, the shapes
of their tusks and their size.
And that was how he was able to
identify different individuals
and he'd take photographs
and built up a little data book of
these individual elephants.
And it was through this work that he
made all those initial first,
big discoveries that now are
the baseline of
what we know about elephants.
Taking the families one by one,
I gradually built up a personal
dossier on almost every single one
of Manyara's elephants.
Within this dossier I kept
the pictures of each,
and a record of their life history.
For a while I gave them all numbers,
but then I found that names were
much easier to remember.
I think anyone who
studies elephants,
and certainly it happened to me,
becomes intensely aware that you are
dealing with
a sentient species,
that it's a species
where the individuals
are thinking their own thoughts.
There's a mind there,
behind that huge domed forehead.
Getting to know them as individuals,
I realised that their society was
led by females,
by matriarchs,
and then the more I got into it,
the more intricate I realised these
relationships were.
Very little was going on in
the field at that time,
it was mostly c*ptive work.
It was very interesting when I
met Iain,
I was on the way back after
a long spell studying
the chimpanzees,
which I began in 1960,
and nobody had studied chimpanzees.
And we were driving,
so we called in on Iain in Manyara.
And it was just immediately
we talked
as people who understood who
animals are.
Also, there are these lovely
stories that
Iain told me about herds meeting up
in great big groups...
..and the young ones having fun
and trumpeting.
And I loved the scenes
of them bathing in the river...
..splashing each other,
squirting water at each other...
..and sort of lying down just
with the tips of their trunks
sticking out of the water.
And so we just were two people
loving animals,
sharing stories,
and I don't think science came
into it at all.
Iain's journey took him deeper
and deeper into
the world of elephants.
For the first time, recording how
mothers care for their calves,
how different herds build complex
relationships with each other...
..and how they even have
a highly-sophisticated level
of self-awareness.
The thing about elephants is that
they have
a lot in common with human beings -
they've got about the same lifespan,
and they have a long childhood,
and during that childhood they learn
from their elders.
Their brain actually develops in
that period of adolescence,
so their social relations
are very, very important
and I think we're still learning
a lot about how elephants feel about
each other,
but they get very upset when one
of them is under stress.
The reaction of elephants to
the ailing or the dying or
the dead is quite extraordinary.
There are very few animals that show
a concern about dead animals or
indeed even recognise
the dead of their own species,
but the extraordinary thing
is how much they seem to care.
They must be inhaling terabytes of
information,
because their sense of smell is
so acute
and they have such huge areas of
their brain to process it.
They're probably smelling emotions,
smelling things that happened that
we can only dimly understand.
By the late 1960s,
Iain's PhD was well under way...
..and he'd begun to amass
a significant body of data.
But his life was about
to be turned upside down,
when he went to a party in Kenya
and met an Italian-Kenyan
photographer - Oria Rocco.
Iain was a friend of a friend
of mine who was at that party
so he invited him.
We were all sort of, you know,
publicity people that were smoking
and drinking
and making a lot of noise,
and Iain was very calm and shy
and he was totally different from
the other people who were there.
He was quite taken by me
and so we started dancing,
but he wasn't a very good dancer.
And then I said,
"Well, what are you doing here?"
And he said, "Well, I do elephants."
"You do elephants? What does that
mean?"
And so, it was the first time...
..it was the first time that
I'd met somebody who was actually
studying elephants
and not sh**ting elephants.
He said, "Well, why don't you come
and do some photographs for me?"
And I said, "OK,
but you have to pay me,"
and he said, "I'll pay you."
And so we got into his funny
little aeroplane,
he'd just learned to fly,
bought an aeroplane,
and off we went to Manyara.
And that was the first time
I had ever been in
the company of elephants
without a g*n.
Oria's view of elephants was
shaped by entirely different forces.
Her parents originally moved
to Africa in the 1930s,
when big-game hunting was widespread
across the continent.
Even in the 1960s, elephants were
more commonly viewed through
the sights of a r*fle than
binoculars.
It was interesting just to see
the different behaviour of Iain,
who was not aggressive
and didn't have a g*n,
and the hunters here, who were
the sort of prima donnas everywhere.
You know, they were tough guys and
they were hunters.
But they didn't really know anything
about elephants
because they shot them.
I was very, very nervous,
I was very nervous, yes.
And I said, "This guy is
completely mad,
"we're all going to get k*lled here,
"there's no question about it."
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
Anyway, here I am, 54 years later.
The only man who had a g*n was
the tracker.
That was Mahoja.
And he was a wonderful man for Iain
because he was exactly what Iain
needed.
He was a great tracker and
understood what Iain was trying to
do.
And that was the thing that
completely knocked me off my feet
because there was this relationship
that was developing between
the elephants, Iain and Mahoja,
who were out every day with
the elephants.
Eventually I calmed down,
and I also got very close
to elephants.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
By 1970, Iain and Oria had started
a family of their own.
Yes, there was a lovely scene -
I got pregnant, of course
I got pregnant,
I was living with Iain
and then Saba was born.
A year later,
the family grew again when they were
joined by Dudu,
Swahili for 'insect'.
Growing up in the bush,
the girls soon became accustomed
to life among the elephants.
It's looking, Mum.
We had this idyllic period in
our life.
He was studying elephants,
we were living in Manyara
and it was sort of unthreatened,
beautiful golden age.
Iain had built himself
a little house on the edge of
a river near a waterfall -
it was really lovely -
and all the elephants used
to come to that river
and drink. And we would walk down
and watch these elephants,
and slowly I understood that
there was some kind
of connection between the elephants
and Iain, there really was,
because we were not aggressive.
I think the elephants
understood that.
It's you and me with a big elephant.
That's a great picture. Wow.
She was called...
She looks so mad with you.
Oh, she was magnificent.
But she really looks like she really
didn't want anyone near her.
No, she didn't want us around.
They're all running away from me.
Yeah.
And she's facing me
because she thinks I'm the danger.
Well, you were.
And, you know, by thinking that,
she's risking her life.
And you're risking your life
by facing her.
I mean just look at the tusks,
I'm really, really impressed
with her tusks.
Aren't they beautiful?
They are so big back in the day, and
then you rarely see big tusks
on females these days like that.
Yeah.
I mean, if you look at all those
females, they have very big tusks.
That is Boadicea. Was Boadicea one
of your favourite elephants, Iain?
Oh, she was wonderful. Yeah.
You know, she used to charge,
absolutely guaranteed -
she disliked people so much.
SHE TRUMPETS
He had all the families,
and I think Boadicea's family was
his favourite family, yes.
Boadicea had
extraordinary behaviour,
she was so fierce.
SHE TRUMPETS
Boadicea would charge right up
to the car
but she never touched the car,
and eventually calmed down.
She was this huge impressive female,
who would always just come
thundering out of
the bushes towards you.
And I remember very clearly as
a child,
that elephant coming at us in
a completely open Land Rover
and being petrified
and could not begin to understand
why my father wouldn't start the car
and just get the hell out of there.
But of course he was doing exactly
the right thing,
which was just sitting there
absolutely quiet, not moving,
and allowing her to realise
that we were not a threat.
And then once she'd figured
that out,
she would just calm down
and walk away
and then suddenly that entrance into
elephant world would open up,
and you could to start seeing them
just being elephants.
It's good, Dad.
It's good.
One member of the family was
becoming particularly friendly.
Virgo, a distinctive one-tusked
female, with a young calf.
I got to a point where I was able to
walk up to this whole family
and take pictures and call Virgo.
I mean, we'd call her and she would
come out.
She... heard her name.
That was the extraordinary thing.
She wanted to make friends with Iain
and eventually they did.
She was this absolutely wild
elephant who would come
and take the fruit from Iain's hand
and put it in her mouth.
She got to know us so well.
He wanted me to meet Virgo
and so we found her.
I got out of the Land Rover and
reached out my hand
and Virgo reached out and touched it
with her trunk.
So it was an amazingly magic moment.
I think the fact that we both were
describing personalities.
We both were describing how
elephants on the one hand
and chimpanzees on the other can
feel fear, can be happy.
Their play is joyful.
They care for each other.
They show compassion.
They both can show altruism.
And, initially, certainly
I was castigated
for talking in those terms.
I suspect Iain probably was as well.
I didn't ask him.
And we didn't talk as scientists.
We talked as people who love,
understand
and want to help protect animals.
So, you know, when you get to know
elephants as individuals
you realise that, just like people,
they have their own unique
character,
their own personality.
The way that they deal with
challenges, the challenges of life,
the triumphs of life, is unique
to that particular person.
Virgo? Here, Virgo. Here, Virgo.
I give you it.
There was this extraordinary day
where I saw Virgo
and I had Saba in my arms.
I then called Virgo,
she was there,
and I had one of these fruits,
these wild fruits, in my hand,
and I called her
and she came up to me.
And Virgo approached her
with her own calf
and then reached out her trunk
and smelt me, all over my body,
and I believe brought her own
calf forward,
almost as if it was introducing it
to my mother.
And so, I don't remember anything
about that,
it's a story I've been told,
but I do always like to think that
I was baptised in elephant breath.
I mean, it was crazy.
Cos I could
so easily have been knocked down,
but it didn't happen.
There was a relationship between
these elephants and us.
If you weren't aggressive
and nasty to elephants,
you would eventually be able
to live together, which is what
we did.
Those early days were just magic,
really magic.
Within this calm environment,
Iain was able to complete his PhD.
He concluded that elephants in
the National Park should not
be culled.
His research had revealed that many
elephant families were not resident,
but travelled over long distances,
seeking out food and water.
So he suggested creating corridors
in and out of the park so
the elephant population could move.
It was an idea years ahead of its
time...
..but any chance of implementing
it was soon cut short.
THUNDER RUMBLES
And then there came the... the ivory.
There was this sudden thing about
the ivory
and everybody wanted ivory.
There was this huge demand
coming from
the Far East in particular,
and there just weren't enough
elephants to supply it.
JANE GOODALL: So much of it sold to
China and other Asian countries,
but also in the beginning Japan
and the US were buyers of ivory.
Oh, good afternoon, how are you?
People didn't think when they bought
an ivory bracelet
that this came from a thinking
being, a sentient animal.
IAIN: The price of ivory had gone up
and it was to go up yet higher
and there was an outbreak
of poaching,
and a breakdown of law and order,
principally fuelled
by the price of ivory.
And not in our wildest dreams did we
ever imagine
that armed men,
sometimes in uniform,
would come into the national parks
and start k*lling elephants...
..and yet it happened.
The elephants began
to be slaughtered.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
Iain was faced with
an unfolding nightmare.
Elephants across Africa were being
legally culled
and illegally poached
to harvest their tusks.
GAVEL BANGS
And the ivory trade was
making millions.
The dominant view
across governments,
many national parks
and even some conservation
organisations was that elephants
could be legally k*lled
to make money from their "products",
which then could be fed back
into conservation.
It is my view that we really do
need to stimulate
the proper and legal utilisation
of elephant products,
that this may be
a tremendous impetus
to African governments
and to countries in Africa
to properly manage their
wildlife resources.
Obviously the ill*gal trade needs
to be stemmed,
and, as far as possible, eliminated.
Being able to trade in ivory was one
of the ways
that one was supposedly
funding conservation,
but the illogic in that of course
was that it's like pouring
gasoline onto a fire
and expecting to put it out.
Systems of so-called humane culling
became commonplace.
Entire matriarchal groups
were annihilated,
right down to the tiniest calves.
But legal culling did nothing
to stem the ill*gal ivory trade.
Even in supposedly protected
national parks,
elephants were being slaughtered by
poachers.
The data Iain had collected over
the years proved that elephant
numbers were in dramatic decline
right across the entire continent.
So I got swept up personally
and changed from doing research as
a scientist into trying
to combat the ill*gal ivory trade.
That took over my life and for the
next almost 20 years,
I was looking at the survival of
elephants right across Africa.
This is unbelievable.
The problem is that whatever
theoretical idea you might have
about a nice, moderate cull
and harvesting the ivory,
it just hasn't worked.
The people who've harvested it
have been crooks,
they've been poachers and middle men
and big fish who've taken
a lot of the profit
and sent it out
and nobody has benefitted,
the country hasn't benefitted,
just a few individuals,
and they've wiped out
elephant populations.
Among the victims of
the poachers was elephant matriarch
Boadicea and most of her family.
We went through a horrible time when
all the elephants were being shot
and all our elephants
were being shot.
Many families,
they were all gunned down.
We used to come back to Manyara
and we'd see a whole lot
of elephants dead.
And they were our elephants that
we'd studied.
And then we'd go somewhere else,
there were more dead elephants,
the ivory was cut off them.
It's been quite extraordinary, how
it's spread from one place
to another.
Poaching is completely out of hand,
and the carcasses
littered everywhere.
If you were talking about people,
you'd call it genocide.
Is this another big one,
do you think?
Let's have a look.
Anyway, the tusks have been hacked
out, I can see that.
And it's a cow elephant,
which you can see because it has
fairly small tusks.
And this was probably in fact one
of the leaders of a group
because it's a fairly large skull
and it's on its last molar here.
I'm just furious to see that.
I mean, this is just wiping out all
those elephants that I knew.
These grand old matriarchs who
were the memory banks for
their families.
The families are going to pieces,
they're leaderless.
I find it... You know, it's the end
of the line,
it's the endgame of a huge tragedy
that's being played out
across East Africa.
We've seen these so-called protected
populations tumble one after
the other.
This curse of the elephant -
the ivory.
Iain felt that the only way
to stop the k*lling was
a total ban on the sale of ivory.
But with fortunes being made, his
voice became increasingly sidelined.
But I don't need to tell you,
Iain, that there
are reputable authorities
who are saying that the
amount of ivory that is being
taken is not excessive
and that the elephant is not
being overexploited.
I mean, what do you say to that?
I'm not sure how reputable they are
in the first place.
And secondly,
they don't know their facts.
There is absolutely no question
whatsoever that the elephant
is being overexploited for its ivory
and we can prove that.
We know that in the last ten years
East Africa alone has lost
more than half its elephants.
And if those kind of trends go on,
if that off-take continues,
there won't be any elephants.
But as for saying that the elephants
can sustain the present off-take,
that is absolute nonsense.
Quite.
You know, when I began I was very,
very angry...
..about the things that some people
were saying.
So that was in '87? Yeah.
That was in '87? It makes me quite
annoyed even when I watch it now.
Yeah. Hmm.
Why has nothing been done to stop
it?
People somehow don't get moved by
the fact that elephants, say,
go from one million to
half a million.
It's only when you get to
absolutely last-ditch,
when people believe that there
is going to be a total wipe-out,
that they get excited.
So in the case of the rhino,
the decline went on for years
and years and it was only,
you know,
it's only at the last moment that
people act.
And I suppose that that is what is
going to happen to the elephant,
too.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's why I'm very sceptical these
days when people tell me
there is no more elephant problem.
I have a large part of me that just
says that's too good to be true.
Because we've been through all this
before. Yeah.
But I was so angry against
those people who didn't use logic,
who wouldn't look at the facts.
They came with their very set views.
And their views were that they were
the only ones
who were doing it the right way.
And the right way was to sh**t
and exploit elephants through
hunting and they swayed the big guys
in the World Wildlife Fund and
IUCN, who basically sat on
their hands for quite a few years.
Of course we lost tens of thousands
of elephants.
There were new fashions afoot,
that it was more important to be
friendly to the ivory traders,
to try to understand them and see
whether they had the will
or the ability to control
themselves.
I mean, what a naive idea.
Traders are traders, they do it for
money.
But nobody wanted
to believe what he was saying,
so there was a long period
of time where he was
a complete outcast
and people were trying
to destroy his reputation
and destroy his credibility as
a scientist.
So there was a period that was
pretty bleak,
which was when he eventually just
decided that he had
to go and do something,
and just get out there and try
and stop the k*lling.
And that's what took him to Uganda.
He was being criticised and
he couldn't do his work
and so he decided to go to another
country.
He went to Uganda and Uganda was
going through a very bad time.
Throughout the 1970s, Uganda
suffered under the corrupt regime
of dictator Idi Amin,
which caused a complete economic
collapse.
They were terrible years.
You know, Uganda had descended into
complete chaos.
In the country at large,
people were being k*lled willy-nilly
everywhere under Idi Amin.
I have no any intention of...
..of fighting any country at all
without any cause.
Idi Amin declared w*r on the
Tanzanians, which was very unwise.
They had a bigger army and they
invaded Uganda
with the express purpose of getting
rid of him.
Although Idi Amin fled into exile
in 1979,
Uganda was still in turmoil.
It was into this world that Iain and
the family arrived in 1980.
There had been all sorts of terrible
rumours coming out of Uganda that
the elephants had been k*lled
and some of
the scientists had said there were
fewer elephants now than before.
And the parks' management replied,
"Well, maybe they just went away
somewhere else."
So we said, "Look, we'll make an
offer, we'll come
"and count them for you if
you like."
Now, frankly, everyone else in
East Africa was too terrified
to go into Uganda,
let alone with an aeroplane,
but we were given permission.
And so we went
to Queen Elizabeth National Park
and we counted,
and it was unbelievable
because the reductions in numbers
were extraordinary.
Everywhere we looked, we found dead
elephants littering the landscape.
They hadn't gone away - they'd died.
We counted, I think, 1,760 elephants
left out of 8,000.
Amin's regime and the w*r with
Tanzania had created chaos,
extreme poverty,
and a bounty of weapons.
Africa's become a dumping ground
for weapons.
Many of these then end up in
the hands of people who are living
around parks
and who can go and supplement their
income with some ivory.
And also it goes beyond that -
ivory is sold in order to buy arms.
As a result, the elephant population
was now nearing extinction.
We were then asked if we would
help come and combat the poaching,
which we did.
The rangers had no food,
they had no money.
It was awful.
But we managed to raise some money,
bring some food,
bring some ammunition,
get some uniforms,
get some vehicles -
everything from scratch.
Iain and his team took to
the front line,
confiscating illegally poached
tusks,
and regularly fighting g*n battles
with the poachers.
We were in the middle of a w*r.
We had to learn how to use g*ns
and his plane was shot at
many times,
hit, I was in the plane
when he was hit.
Meanwhile, Oria and the girls
tried to make the best
of a difficult situation.
Tanzania army smashed everything.
There used to be hotels,
and there was a little house which
actually was built when
the Queen came to visit Uganda,
it was right on the edge of
the river.
And we actually lived in
the Queen's house.
And the Queen's house had been
totally demolished.
The mirrors, the basins,
everything was smashed.
There was nothing left.
It was three rooms with not a single
door or a single window.
And that was our base.
I remember my mother had
one of those little canvas bowls,
which she filled up with water
and she put sort of a lump of cheese
and a bit of butter in it
and that was our fridge.
And then at night she just shoved
a safari chair into the door
to keep the hyenas out.
And it was just marvellous, so
exciting.
Uganda was a hugely formative period
for me and my sister.
They actually loved the funny little
house that they lived in.
We would have elephants walking by
our window on the veranda,
but they were orphaned elephants.
We became quite friendly with them.
One of my enduring memories was my
mum lit a fire
and she started cooking some food
for the evening meal
and then we had to go
and wash in the Nile.
We weren't allowed
to go any further than about
a metre directly under my father's
feet as he stood over us
with an AK47,
ready to sh**t any
crocodiles that might attack us.
We had a little dinghy
and one day the dinghy got loose
and it started drifting off down
the Nile.
And my dad had to dive into
the river
and swim like hell through all
these crocodiles.
Thank God he managed to get it
and bring it back to us.
I can't imagine what would have
happened if he hadn't,
because we were on the wrong side of
the river,
where all the rebels were
with the g*ns.
And there was no way of getting
across
and we were on foot
with no supplies.
A campaign to raise awareness
of the ivory crisis was now
gaining momentum.
Books and TV appearances helped
raise funds.
And gradually people around
the world started
to become aware of
the elephants' plight.
I suppose that one of the qualities
I admire most in Iain
is persistence.
He doesn't give up.
He goes on working to protect
the elephants.
He doesn't give up when he finds
some of his favourite elephants
k*lled.
It just makes him even more
passionate to conserve them
for future generations.
And he conserves them because
he knows them as individuals.
He knows each one of them is an
individual with a life worth living.
To begin with, he was a lone voice,
he was a lone voice out there with
a lot of people who didn't want
what he had to say to be heard,
but he persevered,
and a lot of other people eventually
came behind him.
While the rangers
and people in Africa
were working on conservation
and fighting the poachers,
the general public understood
the terrible plight of the elephants
because of k*lling them
for their ivory.
Because as long as there's demand
you will never stop the k*lling of
the elephants.
With the tide of public opinion
turning in favour of the elephants,
governments realised something had
to change.
This was ruining
the reputation worldwide of Africa,
and somehow the government realised
that they had
to get involved to stop the ivory
trade, they had to get involved.
The first country to act was Kenya.
There was a huge amount of ivory
in Tsavo,
a huge amount of ivory in the ivory
store in Nairobi.
Ivory was... it was a dirty name
and it was bringing
a lot of bad vibes to Kenya
and other countries
because there was so much ivory,
and it was very complicated.
You had this stack of ivory that was
worth a fortune.
What were you going to do
with this ivory?
Were you going to sell it?
Were you going to continue
to increase the ivory business?
And eventually the decision came
that they were
going to burn the ivory.
And then President Moi came
and lit the fire.
If the elephant is to be saved from
extinction,
poaching must be stopped.
I appeal to people all over
the world to stop buying ivory.
It was a triumph for Iain and
the team,
after the years of struggle.
This was the first time that this
had happened,
there was tonnes of ivory,
and the statement that they were
really trying to make
was that ivory must never go on
the market.
If there is an ivory trade, you will
encourage an ill*gal ivory trade.
So they burnt a fortune,
and they got rid of this whole thing
off their shoulders.
That was the beginning of Kenya's
whole attitude,
which was different
to everybody else.
They were not going to get involved
in ivory business
and the only thing they could do now
was just to get rid of it.
Following Kenya's lead,
the international trade in ivory was
finally outlawed worldwide in
the 1989 CITES treaty.
At last, African elephant
populations
had the chance to recover.
We went back to Manyara for
the first time
just after the ivory trade ban had
come into place.
And Manyara had changed completely,
from this landscape of beautiful
open grassland dotted with
a few acacia trees to this very,
very dense vegetation
because of course there just weren't
any elephants any more to clear it
and open it all up.
And we'd been searching for days,
looking for Virgo,
and had really got to the point
where we thought she was dead.
And then suddenly, one day,
she just stepped out onto
the road in front of us.
And my father stopped the car,
and he got out
and he walked very slowly round
to the front,
she must have been about maybe five
metres away,
and he started to call her in that
same voice
that he'd used all those years ago,
just softly.
"Hello, Virgo. Hello, my girl.
"Hello, Virgo. How are you?"
And she stopped absolutely frozen
in her tracks
with her ears out at 45 degrees,
which showed that she was listening.
And she just stood there listening
to this voice,
and it was almost like
you could see her going back in
her mind and in her memory...
..to this time where she'd known
that individual,
she'd known that voice,
she'd trusted that voice...
..and all the horror and the loss
and everything that she'd
experienced since then...
..she sort of connected back
and then suddenly she just shook
her head
and remembered her family
and whirled around
and disappeared off into the bush.
And we were just sitting there
with tears pouring down our faces.
And I remember my dad just
turning around,
we were all crying, and he said,
"You know, maybe it's better that
she learns to mistrust mankind."
Despite the CITES treaty,
poaching would remain a threat
to elephants
for many years to come.
Only in 2018 was the domestic trade
in ivory banned
in many countries,
from the UK to China.
But the relative calm of
the early 1990s at last gave Iain
a chance
to turn his attention
to setting up a foundation -
Save the Elephants.
It wasn't until we had the ivory
trade ban that came in 1989
that I was able to turn back
and have a field station,
and Samburu was a place that had
always interested me.
Iain had come out the other end of
the ivory crisis
and what he really wanted to do more
than anything
was get back into the field.
So we decided to come up to Samburu,
and it was just amazing because it
was after the rains
and it was just full of life and
the elephants were so boisterous
that Iain fell in love with Samburu
and he thought,
"Well, actually, this is where
we should come.
"This is where we should come
and set up Save the Elephants."
At last, the work started in Manyara
nearly 20 years previously
could continue.
But this time it couldn't be just
about science...
..it was about protecting elephants,
too.
From there, it grew and from there
we started identifying all
the individual elephants and really
started what we have here today.
Samburu folklore is full of stories
about elephants.
They have a legend about first
elephant.
That the first elephant was
a human being and lived with people
and everybody in Samburu knows that
legend.
I realised that we needed
a team of people.
To stay in touch with the elephants,
we just had to have a big, motivated
team where nobody was
the only person who could do it.
But luckily soon I was joined by
David Daballen
and he had a natural flair for it.
I was born and raised in Marsabit,
about 200km north of where we are.
An area that was very famously known
for big-tusked elephant,
so that's where I was born.
Both my parents were nomadic people
who were herding.
We just had so many cattle.
As a young boy just herding cattle
you always come across some
wildlife.
And particularly elephant because
they are so loud and they're so big.
Elephants were on top of everything.
When you come across elephants,
you are either heading to school
or coming back from school, so you
are always trying to avoid them.
It's a period in life where you are
really trying to survive amongst
them.
I just remember one of the days that
there was such a rumble from
elephant
and I just didn't know what was
happening
and I was running for my dear life
and I came across an ant hill.
And I went up this ant hill
and I just looked and I could see
them coming, group after group.
And I was just watching them.
And I was like, "My God, you know,
this is so interesting.
"What are they doing?"
You know, I went back home just
thinking about it, like, you know,
what was going on there?
I really wanted to know what is this
all about.
Why are there so many together?
The love and the care they have
for each other.
The intelligence they have.
So I think a lot of my curiosity
helped me to find my path
into what I wanted to do in my life.
And as I finished my high school,
I got an opportunity to come and
stay with some of my uncles
working here and there was Iain.
Iain and I got along very quickly
because I think our interest
was very much together there.
He was chatting to me -
do I want to fly with him?
I said, "Yeah," and I felt like
I had no choice.
I'd read a lot of crazy things
about him so I was just like,
"Oh, God, now I'm stuck
with this crazy guy,
"so I'm going to be with him."
But I thought, you know, forget
about all the fear and just do it.
He loved anyone who would be in
the plane with him,
who would concentrate on
the elephants, so I think Iain
and I very quickly bonded on
the flight.
I became his extra eye
and extra ear, you know, in the air.
The key defining seed, perhaps is
the best way to put it,
in my dad's life was the fact that
his father was k*lled in the w*r.
And he never knew... he never knew
him.
He was k*lled when he was two.
And I think that coloured
everything.
His father was a fighter pilot.
He was a hero.
He was a squadron leader in
the battle for Malta.
The fact that he lost his father
when he was so young,
when he was two, has been
this huge gaping hole in his life.
So he tries to find him and Daddy
really found something in the air.
That was his happy place. That was
where his soul was really set free.
And David lost his father when he
was young.
And in a way they found each other.
I think flying is absolutely central
to Iain.
Losing your father in an aviation
accident
when your father was an aviation
hero.
I don't think he could do anything
but be a pilot.
And him and his brother were both
pilots
and it was an obsession for both of
them.
Talk always turns to fighter pilots
and, you know,
and what that must have been like.
And they were really the glory days
of flying,
so I think that was always going to
be a part of his life.
It was really a very deep experience
for me.
And, you know, I have always been
connected through my father.
I couldn't help feeling
a bit emotional
because we were flying over some of
the country that he flew over.
And actually I came in over the same
route that he must have taken
on his last flight when he flew
his crippled aircraft...
..and it crashed.
He didn't come back.
Really, I think, my dad's passion
for flying,
his passion for elephants came
together very beautifully
because he was able to throw himself
into doing aerial censusing.
That was one of the reasons he was
able to put so much data
on the table.
Iain pioneered aerial censusing
in Manyara.
By getting above the elephant
families,
he was able not only to count them
but also to observe their behaviour.
Aerial view of elephants is quite
important
because elephants often are in thick
forests, or thick savanna,
areas that are inaccessible.
If you were to just use ground
monitoring,
you may miss a lot of information.
But when you use an aircraft,
you get a very good perception
on the size of the family,
where it's heading.
That is something you can only see
from an aerial view,
without disturbing the elephants.
It was from the air that Iain first
observed elephant families
moving over vast distances
and realised that they seemed
to know where they were going.
To find out more, he experimented
with radio collars.
IAIN: My experience of collaring
started in Manyara -
that's where we did
the first collaring of elephants.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
BEEPING
That's where we experimented with
the drug.
You can get enough of this drug in
a dry form
under your fingernail to put out
an elephant.
Or to keep a whole lot of hippies
happy for weeks on end!
Back then it was
a very different way of doing it -
it was quite risky,
and he'd go out there on foot,
he's often getting charged.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
ELEPHANTS TRUMPEBut that tracking data gave him
critical
and very rich information about
these individual elephants.
The old-fashioned tracking system
is just like the night fighters
in the Second World w*r.
You put an elaborate antenna
on the front of your aircraft
and you move the aircraft from side
to side and you can get a bearing
on where that collar is and you can
go straight towards it.
Elephants are brutal to collars.
They break them.
I've never yet found a collar that
a big bull cannot break
under any circumstances.
To date, Save the Elephants has
collared more than 500 animals...
..not just in Kenya
but in many other African countries,
too,
yielding even more profound
insights into elephant lives.
We are able to pick the locations
of elephants in near real-time
and where they are going and we can
almost predict the next place
they are going based on the previous
analysis of where they have been.
But getting a radio collar
onto an elephant
is still no easy task.
Maybe five minutes, seven minutes,
the drug starts taking effect,
but because of the experience that
we've had for many, many years,
we start driving slowly between
the darted animal
and the group to make sure that
we separate them,
because what they don't want to see
is actually one
of their own going down.
And they will be very defensive.
It's very hard to push them out of
this because they're trying to help.
So once the elephant is down,
a team is there to put a collar.
The team is there to take the tale
her, which gives us the history,
dietary history.
Putting collars on elephants play
such a critical role,
it's almost looking into
their brain -
what they do, how they're thinking,
how they take decisions.
So really there's so much data that
comes in just because of GPS
tracking data.
Through the collaring, Iain,
David and the team
have been able to reveal more of
the surprising decisions elephant
families take.
I just want to see the collar there.
I think that's Basil on the left.
Well, well, well.
Well, well, well, yeah.
I'm absolutely intrigued that
she went up
this steep-sided mountain today,
in the heat of the day,
because for an elephant you just
expend so much energy.
But I'm sure that they've got a very
good motive for being up there.
Yeah. And I'm pretty sure it's to do
with what they eat.
So there's one female way behind
the group.
And I think that could be Basil.
Let me just have a look.
So it's the reach, the rock reach.
Yeah.
Come down all the way to a very
green line below the ridge,
until you just see things moving.
I've got them. Yeah. Excellent.
But they look like mobile rocks.
A rock with an ear.
Some of the most interesting
tracking data
comes from the collars on bull
elephants.
Elephants have a hierarchy.
There's a very definite hierarchy
between the bulls
and from a very young age the young
male elephants will tussle
with each other and play fighting.
They learn exactly what the strength
is of every other male elephant
and that way they can avoid serious
fights.
Look at those two embracing each
other. Wonderful physical contact.
They are learning about each
other's strength.
But I think there is more
to it than that.
I think there is real friendship
there as well.
This is really beautiful behaviour.
I'm so glad you will be able to film
it.
You only get serious fights
when it's not obvious to them
who is going to win.
When a stranger comes in, say,
or where there are two very evenly
matched elephants
and they are both in this heightened
sexual state called must.
So they come into must
and then they have only got one
thought in their head, which is to
go and seek the females
and to find a receptive female and
do their stuff.
Seeking fertile females is one of
the reasons bulls range
over such vast distances.
Which is why they sometimes come
into conflict with people,
often raiding crops.
So you see, this is where he is now.
Yeah. That's him. Wow.
Oh, these are all, you know,
people's farms.
All the sort of physical wounds that
he had... Hmm.
..told us that he was probably
a crop raider
and I think now it's confirmed,
that is a crop raider.
But this is an area on
Thursday we're
going to put three more collars
to check on this crop raid problem.
So...
It's not an easy problem.
There's a human-wildlife
co-existence problem.
It is a very complex problem.
Both species really need the space.
But how can we make these two
species
co-exist, you know, peacefully?
And it is the biggest
problem today.
Sometimes villagers set up home on
the elephant corridors...
..and that inevitably leads
to clashes.
But by collecting data
of their movements for
the last 25 years,
Iain, David and the team
have created
detailed maps showing where
elephants are most likely
to go...
..avoiding trouble
for people and elephants.
These elephants are not just doing
the destruction they're doing
for the sake of it. It's because
sometimes they get pushed into
a corner where they have no choice -
they need to drink,
they need food to eat,
and their corridor's been blocked.
We just have to learn that, you
know, it is so wrong
to put your village in a corridor.
You will definitely get trouble
with elephants,
cos, you know, that's where they
will come through,
and this is what we need to talk
to the people.
What this data is telling us?
25 years of data is such a gold
pieces of information that
you can use
to bring everyone on and say,
"OK, we're not saying,
"'Let's conserve every single piece
of land, '
"but we're trying to say, 'Can we
make sure that we preserve some
"'of these corridors, these linkages
between one safe place to another?'"
There's even more pressure as
the climate changes
and prolonged droughts
become commonplace.
Elephants and people are in
competition for resources.
THEY SING
The next challenge will be
to coexist,
for human development
and animal development
to go side by side.
To be able to keep some of the wild
and beautiful places.
I think there's
a very great need for conservation
to carry on the movement towards
caring about human welfare at
the same time as animal welfare.
He's very positive.
He is someone who is very
optimistic,
even when things are really
looking bad.
So I think I feel like I've learned
a world with Iain.
Like, so much about what he can do,
what his capabilities are,
what his determinations are.
Iain is one believer of trying and
not taking no as an answer.
It's like, "Oh, this is too
dangerous." He says, "Why?"
And he pushes on and a lot of
his risks come from curiosity
and wanting to know the best.
I don't think he knows that he takes
too much risk.
He just finds himself in the risk.
We were walking that day.
We came across and strode
across here, walking quite fast
and walked about another 50 yards or
so in that direction.
And suddenly this young Samburu who
was with us said the word for
elephant.
And there was this elephant coming
our way,
moving at a fairly slow trot.
Presently, this trot quickened
and I thought, "Oh, well,
"this is just another of
these bluff charges."
So I ran at her and waved my arms in
a huge primate threat display.
She wasn't in the least bit
impressed.
She started giving short, sharp
little trumpets,
sort of rhrrr-rhrrr-rhrrr,
like this.
I said, "Look, we'd better get out
of here. We'd better run."
And I suddenly discovered I wasn't
running as fast as I used to.
And I got to here and she was just
behind me and I thought,
"Well, I'll run around this bush."
So I ran around here like this.
And she took a short cut through
here
and she was gaining on me
all the time.
Now I'm running as fast as I can and
I get to here...
..and she catches me.
And she hit me in the small
of my back and I'm flung forward,
propelled about ten feet through
the air.
And I fall down.
I turn around
and she's actually above me
and she's batting me around from
side to side with her feet.
And it's like being in a tidal wave.
You are just being moved around
and there is nothing you can do.
And my chest was heaving up
and down and then I thought
this is going to be very interesting
this next few seconds.
All she has to do is to pull back
and put her tusks through me
and that's the end of the story.
She then, to my amazement, backed
off and she went back over there.
And then she turned around,
looked at me very fiercely
and then she backed away
a little bit more.
And then, amazingly, she just left
me there.
I was so happy to be alive.
I thought about it again and again.
Why didn't she k*ll me?
Because actually when she knocked me
over
she ran over me and plunged her
tusks deep into the ground
about here and they went about nine
inches into the ground.
If she wanted to k*ll me,
she could have just pulled back and
put her tusks in but she didn't.
And it's always haunted me
ever since what was in her mind.
Considering the many scrapes my dad
has had in his life,
it is extraordinary he has lived
to the age that he has to be honest.
But I think the worst one happened
just a few months ago.
He had gone out for a walk
with my mother in the late afternoon
and they happened to pass an area
where some bees had been disturbed
and were on the warpath.
And they just attacked them both,
as a swarm.
And my father...
..immediately tried to protect my
mother and to use his body to shield
her and prevent her from being stung
because she couldn't run.
And so he got terribly, terribly
badly stung.
Basically, he went into anaphylactic
shock.
That was the most horrific part of
it.
I didn't think that he would
make it.
He was fading away.
And Saba and I really couldn't leave
his side
because we had to make sure that he
was going to fight.
And that do or die, it came through
with such a life force
and he was so determined not to let
go.
I went down to Nairobi hospital
to check on Iain.
It was such a very emotional reunion
with him, you know,
knowing who normally Iain is.
A strong character who never says
he is ill or this is a problem.
And I found him really helpless on
the bed.
And we had a...
I had to be really strong not to
show any emotion as much as I could.
And I said, you know, Iain, it was
never expected. There was a shock.
A shock wave that has hit, like,
the entire community that knows him
and also no-one ever thought that
Iain,
he will be taken out by a bee and
not a big bull elephant or a plane.
Throughout this period where he was
just going in and out of
consciousness
and us not knowing if he was going
to make it...
..the elephants and his work and his
passion and commitment
never went away.
In those little moments
of consciousness that he had,
his mind went back to the elephants.
His mind went back to
we have still got so much to do.
And I think that was another one of
the things
that just really pulled him through.
One of his goals was to make it
back to the bush, to the
place and the life that he loves
and the people that he loves and the
animals that he loves.
So it was a very big moment getting
him back here.
It's been a long time
since I was here.
Well, the bees. Yeah.
Hello, Iain. Lovely to see you.
Lovely to see you too. How are you?
Welcome back. Great, thank you.
Nice to see you here. Yeah.
February 24th was the day
the bees stung me.
February 24th? Yeah.
Was that the day?
I don't think you will forget that!
I won't forget it, that's for sure.
That's for sure. That's why you
picked the date very quickly.
David perked Iain up in
his recovery.
It's a very beautiful relationship
and it is like, I think
like a father-son relationship,
as well as so much more.
It's also about a shared passion,
a shared passion for the elephants,
a shared passion for this land,
for the people, for the future and
where it is all going.
Well, hello, everybody.
ALL: Hi.
David has become an incredibly
powerful voice and powerful leader.
I just want to say one thing. I just
want to say...
I would like to thank these four
gentlemen who came today here.
These are old allies.
We have been working with them for
the last whatever, 25 years at
least.
HE SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
David has an extraordinary ability
and capacity to navigate very
different worlds.
And he has been this incredibly
important person in Iain's life
and Iain has been an incredibly
important person in his life.
I would like to add my thanks.
We have seen the ups and downs.
At the end of the day,
we have still got the elephants here
and they're still some of
the nicest,
tamest elephants in
the whole of Africa
because they have been treated
nicely by human beings.
So thank you.
JANE GOODALL: There's no question
that Iain's legacy will last forever
because it was he who brought
the elephant as
a sentient being
to the attention of the world.
It was he who organised
the first fights against poaching.
So I think his legacy will be one
of a man who did
so much to help people understand
how majestic,
how wonderful elephants are
and to learn more about their way
of life.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
Why do you want to sh**t
an elephant?
I mean, why do you want to sh**t it?
And that's what we tried to rub out
and we've succeeded
and Iain has definitely brought that
whole way
of thinking into everybody's
lives now.
Hello, how are you?
Isn't that wonderful,
to see this orphan survivor
with her own calf?
I think that my greatest hope for
the future is that there will be
an ethic developed
of human-elephant co-existence,
and Samburu's a great place to start
because there's already
a rich culture of interest in nature
and elephants in particular.
So I have a side of me
that's really quite optimistic.
There's this saying that one has old
pilots and one has of bold pilots.
There are very few old, bold pilots.
But I think he is one of those.
And I think that a lot of things
that have been bothering him,
getting older, you know,
feeling that he wasn't able to maybe
contribute as much as he wanted to
or do all of the things that he
did before, I think all of that just
got flipped on its head
and he realised that he has a very
important role to play,
which is to be the wind under the
wings of this next-generation and
helping them to fly.
Welcome to our World! Where we serve you cookies to ensure you get the best viewing experience on our site.
Did you know that you can remove censorship board-wide, use our advanced search functions, be notified when new content is posted, join our memberships, set episodes to show in any order you want & more if you are logged into your account?
Register or sign in here: ucp.php?mode=register
Did you know that you can remove censorship board-wide, use our advanced search functions, be notified when new content is posted, join our memberships, set episodes to show in any order you want & more if you are logged into your account?
Register or sign in here: ucp.php?mode=register
A Life Among Elephants (2024)
Moderators: Maskath3, GabrielAlejo2341, sidolanters, Maskath3, GabrielAlejo2341, sidolanters