Elephants: A Love and Hate Relationship When Sharing Natural Habitats

Elephants may never win a beauty contest, but they are among the sensitive animals on the planet.

Watching filmmaker Martyn Colbeck’s Unforgettable Elephants on PBS Nature last week, my heart was taut over the challenges these splendid animals endure. Like Martyn, I’ve followed Echo’s life in the series, via his camera and commentary.

You see, the elephants have “adopted” Colbeck.

Brendan Borrell takes a less “winesappy” look at the elephant “problem” in his Slate article Why eBay’s ban on ivory will end up hurting the environment.

Borrell reminds us that eBay’s new ivory ban is a form of “greenwashing”, directly at odds with conservationists.

In his new book Ivory’s Shosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants, journalist John Frederick Walker makes several provocative arguments:

• the reality of African elephants is that they are 4-ton living bulldozers rampaging Kenyan cassava fields and threatening their lives of poverty-stricken children and households.
• Walker argues that we wouldn’t tolerate such conditions in our own American neighborhoods, and yet we regard Africa as our own private zoo that exists as part of our essentially imperialist vision.

The elephant problem is equally vexing inside the national parks of Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, whose burgeoning elephant populations must be managed to avoid their overwhelming the ecosystem. Elephants are the largest living land mammal, each consuming as much as 600 pounds of vegetation a day and drinking 50 gallons of water. In 1970, a hands-off policy to Kenya’s elephants in Tsavo National Park provided a bitter lesson to those who opposed culling. After ravaging the park’s fragile vegetation during a season of drought, elephants began dying by the thousands. Animals whose meat could have supported the region’s desperate farmers and whose ivory could have provided $3 million for conservation were rotting in the blazing sun. In the years since, South African wildlife managers have refined culling procedures to minimize trauma to elephant family groups, and they catalog and store ivory under lock and key in anticipation of future auctions.

This view of elephants is not the popular one here in America, and certainly not my own version of reality. How would I know?

Everyone agrees that the elephant problem is real. We just define the problem differently. The Borell’s Slate article adds a totally new perspective to the discussion.

While the mention of an imperialist American mentality regarding Africa’s elephants problem is an “ouch”, this article is excellent brain food.

Enjoy. Anne

Followup: How Hunting Is Driving “Evolution in Reverse”Newsweek