We R Elephants

One of the most well told Masai stories tells of how elephants and humans are related. It happened a long time ago when a young bride was leaving her home with her new husband. She couldn’t resist one last goodbye and turned to look back at her parents as walked away from the house of her childhood – this act invoked the wrath of the Maa God whose curse turned the young bride into an elephant! From her all elephants descended.

To the Maa speaking people of East Africa, elephants and humans are therefore one spirit. This is why the Masai give the same respect to dead elephants as they do to dead people. They bless the skeletons of elephants each time they pass them by placing a few sprigs of grass into the skull. And, they believe that elephants respect the remains of people in the same way. Indeed it has been observed that elephants cover remains of people with bushes and branches.

This story of how elephants and humans are related, is just one of many African stories of how humans and animals are powerfully connected. It's not just that we share the land, but that we are connected by blood. The Masai people tell me that they aspire to be like elephants, family oriented, wise, strong, powerful, caring, compassionate, protective and brave.

Could these beliefs save the world? Could acknowledging our connectedness to elephants, allow us to realise that we are no better than other animals, and that our future depends on our ability to respect other animals and nature in general? COULD OUR COMMON LOVE FOR ELEPHANTS TRANSCEND ALL OF OUR DIFFERENCES AND LEAD TO A UNIFIED APPROACH TO SAVING THE PLANET?

I am an ecologist and I my research on elephants was decidedly following classical science methods. Elephants are amongst the most studied animals in the world, and what we are discovering through laborious field observations and complicated statistical analyses, is that these majestic giants which have a brain just as if not more complex than our own, have social lives, communication skills and compassion for their own and other creatures far exceeds our own. Thousands of scientific publications seem to be proving what the local people have always know n - that elephants are special and they are very important to humanity – to our human identity.

Benson in his mud walled home in Amboseli - a master storyteller. The Masai people have few personal possessions. Instead of investing in things, they invest in and value relationships, culture, traditions, pasture, wildlife and cattle. Are they happy? Yes. Their lives have powerful meaning.

I've been sitting in Seattle for a few days telling stories to friends about elephants. I see them wiping tears from their eyes when they discover that Qumquat and her entire family were gunned down for their tusks leaving only baby Kwanza who was rescued. The image of an orphaned teenage elephant struggling to to make her life out in Tsavo, but she is still experiencing the trauma of that violent day and it affects her ability to trust humans and other elephants. She, like so many injured and traumatized elephants might be jumpy, easily frightened, easily angered, ... triggered to attack at the slightest provocation. We see parallels in this story for ourselves and this evokes powerful emotions in everyone that I tell this story to.

Seattle is a stunning city in the west coast of north America. I see elephants everywhere. They are on jewelry, children's toys, books, prints on clothes, blankets, on lamp shades, on corporate logos. I even heard people in a shop talking about them! People in America love elephants! Actually, people around the world love elephants. It’s no coincidence that we give our children elephant toys at birth, we wrap them in elephant print blankets, dress them in elephant pyjamas, and show them cartoons and documentaries about elephants. We don't have the same attachment to condors, kangaroos or polar bears.

I say it’s no accident that we reserve a special space and love elephants, because I believe that we have elephants tattooed on our DNA. Think about it for a minute, it's not such a far fetched idea. We know that humans and elephants evolved together in the African savannas. We feel at home in a savanna environment. So, why wouldn't we love the animals that we evolved with? We didn't just see them out there, we probably co-existed in a real sense - elephants helped humans to survive in those harsh environments. They dug for water and enabled us to survive droughts, they shook trees and we harvested fruits, they bulldozed pathways through dense forests and created glades that other wildlife visited creating productive hunting grounds for tribes that hunt (the Masai do not hunt). Early anthropological research suggested that humans either hunted and ate animals or domesticated it. But now the story looks far more complex, we did not just eat elephants, we learned from them and became dependent on them for our own survival. Their ability to smell water over 20 km away, their ability to sense danger, to talk to each other over vast distances, gave us a window onto the world through them. One tribe in Kenya calls elephants "Thunder" because the arrival of elephants each year is a sign that rain is coming and they follow the elephants to pastures, Today we fear elephants, many people view them as dangerous - but it wasn't always that way. I've met one man from rural Kenya told me that as a child he grazed the goats with the elephants, and he played games like hide and seek with his friends by running in between the elephants, even going under them! He said the elephants were calm.

The disappearance of elephants was always calamatous. Without elephants grazing disappeared under a mat of sprawling thorny bush and this impoverished people. The change also altered water and rivers dried up. Entire species disappeared and vegetation lost it's diversity which meant less natural foods and medicines for the village. So, I posit that the African stories are true, elephants and humans have always been related and our love for them is not a creation of the images we see through childhood, our love for elephants is deep within our genes and it is a powerful reminder that our past and our future is connected to these great animals. This is why we have a global imperative to stop the slaughter of elephants, and protect them - it's for our own sake more than theirs.