By Patricia L. Sharpe
People in the know whom I met this month found no fault with the article that appeared in Vanity Fair shortly before I left for Tanzania. Now that the Chinese, who built massive showpieces during the Cold War, are once again engaging with Africa, elephant poaching has increased exponentially, it says and they say. This time around, the technology of ivory snatching is more impressive than ever. Can you say helicopter?
DNA tests on intercepted shipments of smuggled ivory suggest that most of the contraband is coming from the Selous Game Preserve, which straddles the Rufiji River in Southern Tanzania. Hunting is not permitted in the northern portion where my grandson and I just spent four days (in addition to the time we enjoyed in other game-viewing areas). It is allowed in the Southern portion, in which I frequently camped with friends (yes—they killed game, for the pot, under license), when I worked in Dar-es-Salaam in the ‘80s.
Tanzania’s current hunting regulations are stringent and bring in scads of money for the Tanzanian treasury. All in all, it comes to some $250,000 to mount an elephant hunting expedition, I'm told. That provides for one elephant to be bagged in two weeks or less. Although the likelihood of bringing down a male elephant beyond breeding age with two perfect tusks on foot with approved weapons in that period of time is pretty low, local experts say that Russian oligarchs and Texans don’t seem to mind. Legal elephant hunting in Tanzania really is sport.
It’s easy to feel resentment, even anger toward those who threaten the survival of a magnificent species just to satisfy such ultimately trivial materialistic hungers. But there’s a far more depraved precedent for voracious ivory acquisition. Leopold II (1835-1909), King of the Belgians, was downright genocidal in his determination to make an obscene profit on the ivory trade. (For an authoritative and readable description of this sorry episode in European history read King Leopold’s Ghost by Alan Hochschild. ) The only thing that gave relief to Congo elephants was the discovery of an even more lucrative crop: rubber, first wild, then cultivated. The brutally exploited African peoples to whom the Congo river basin rightly belonged enjoyed no such respite. They continued to be kidnaped, sold and worked to death. Toward the end of the regime there was some thought of going easy on the forced labor, largely because the labor pool appeared to be shrinking disastrously, but the era’s equivalent of human rights activism was beginning to have an impact, too.
In our own time, humans must be shamed not only into ensuring the humane treatment of other human beings but also into taking care of nature itself, our land, air and water, as well as the creatures people used to fear. It’s become increasingly apparent that the very survival of elephants, as a naturally-occurring species, depends on human restraint, protection and management. This means relentlessly tracking down ivory poachers, stringently enforcing the regulations on legal hunting and de-glamorizing the possession of objects made of ivory—and horn. Rhinoceroses are closer to extinction than elephants are, thanks to a demand for dagger handles in the Arab world and aphrodisiacs in China. And yet it’s amazing that we should be contemplating the fragility of elephant populations at all. Poaching, it appears, is merely the activity that adds insult to injury when it comes to the diminishment of a once dominant species.
The tables have turned, it seems. I’ve been gnawing away at a book that’s a one-stop graduate-level course on the continent. It’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader, who explains why Europeans found the place so sparsely populated (by European standards) that they perceived it as empty and hence up for grabs. The story goes like this: When all humans in Africa were hunter gatherers, there weren’t very many of them, and they co-existed fairly easily with elephants. When humans became farmers, people and pachyderms competed for access to the fruits (natural and/or cultivated) of prime land, but so long as disease and climate kept human numbers severely in check, the huge, highly fertile elephants were pretty much in control of land use. Then, as population ratios began to shift, technology intervened. Guns made elephant control much easier.
In East Africa, in 1925, “elephants ranged across 87 percent of the region." By 1975, their range had been reduced to 27 percent. Today elephants are still an occasional threat to isolated villages and lone farmers, but they will survive the continuing disproportionate increase in human population only because people have created vast national parks and nature preserves.
In Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park, from the looks of it, the scheme is working. Everywhere you drive you encounter files of elephants processing serenely over the savannah, eating voraciously and leaving a telltale debris trail of broken acacia branches behind. They haunted the thickets near our camp, too, and one night they were snacking on the scrub around the pleasantly isolated tent to which my grandson and I had been assigned. I couldn’t see a thing. The moon was a useless little crescent–and, since the foragers were obviously so close, it seemed inadvisable to venture onto the verandah to verify my hunch. For a long while I lay there, in the dark, feeling more than a little vulnerable. In the morning the proof was all about: the broken branches and splintered wood that are to an elephant what fish bones are to humans.
And certainly the elephants in Ruaha are breeding. Hour upon hour my grandson and I watched, enraptured, countless small herds of elephants, each led, in the elephant way, by a matriarch, each composed of a nice balance of infants, children, adolescents, young females and subordinate mature females. (Adult males and young bachelors roam singly or as small roving stag parties.)
Elephants are breeding successfully elsewhere, too. In some parks, in Southern Africa particularly, the elephants have a population problem: too many for the land they’ve been relegated to. The relocation or culling of elephants is a hugely controversial subject, but indiscriminate poaching of breeding as well as non-breeding stock is hardly the solution to the balancing act. In Tanzania’s Selous Game Preserve, it's said, five elephants are disappearing every day, thanks to poachers who pay no attention to the age or sex of the creature. Tusks are all that matter. Annualized, that’s 1125 individuals above and beyond natural mortality.
The loss to poaching in Ruaha, by contrast, is practically zero. The difference has to do with the quality of supervision under competing governmental jurisdictions. So people have a choice. Elephant watching or elephant poaching. Elephants carved in ivory or real live elephants.