Wild life | 2 May 2019

Laikipia, Kenya

  ‘An elephant has fallen over,’ said the man running up to me. My first thought was that poachers had killed the animal for its tusks. ‘Has it been shot?’ The man shrugged. ‘He was eating leaves, then he just fell over.’ As Claire and I made our way to the place, I was worried. Around our home, where we see elephants almost daily, I have come to learn that our destinies are closely interwoven. Meet a calm elephant who goes on browsing while gently billowing his ears because his herds are not being hunted and we know our valley is at peace. A skittish elephant is a harbinger of danger, a sign that poachers or armed raiders are about. The time I found a carcass with its tusks hacked out — faceless, bloated, its grey hide streaked with white vulture droppings — is etched in my memory as the start of a season of raids and attacks. Elephants are also like a barometer of human survival in our area, because they require huge rangelands of forests and pasture. I know this does not apply to most of Africa, but around us happy elephants mean healthy landscapes. As the charcoal burners destroy the wilderness, as the bush is cleared to make way for shacks and farms that swiftly become dusty wastelands, the rains disappear with the topsoil and the elephants die out but they do not go quietly. In the shadow of Mount Kenya’s melting glaciers, I have seen an elephant-flattened man, bashed repeatedly into the ground. What was most striking about the scene was the evident vengeful anger of the attack — as if that animal had done it as a warning to the rest of us. We found the elephant lying on his side in a pool of mud and surprisingly, he was still alive.