I recently attended an indaba on the state of captive elephants, run by the EMS Foundation at Hermanus, on 6 September: "Taking the elephant out of the room:... Africa's role". Here's what emerged for me.
The logo of
the EMS Foundation is inspired – an elephant profile deftly doubled with a
human figure, arms spread in flight or embrace. The Foundation was started up
by Michelè Pickover, whose work to support vulnerable groups, both human and
animal, exemplifies this union: I last encountered her in person when she was
still archivist at Wits, and involved in a project to record the post-traumatic
experiences of soldiers from all sides of the decades of conflict in Southern
Africa. As has been conclusively demonstrated again and again, elephants and
humans share all-important familial bonds, hefty pre-frontal cortexes housing
deep memory and communicative complexity – and therefore suffer similarly from
orphanhood, isolation and enslavement. In a crucial sense, elephant welfare –
all animal welfare – is human
welfare; environmental justice is
social justice.
Yet for the
vast numbers of people who have not grown up with animals, let alone
wilderness, and see no particular reason why they should, let alone feel
extraordinary compassion, it’s still a hard sell. In many such minds, animal,
environmental and human concerns exist in largely sealed-off silos. Michelè,
author of the go-to text Animal Rights in
South Africa, elected to hold this indaba,
“Taking elephants out of the room”, in Hermanus, partly because a local
entrepreneur named Craig Saunders has been flighting a controversial proposal
to import elephants to an ecologically sensitive area near the resort town.
This deeply unwise scheme was raised by Michelè in her opening remarks, but
thereafter disappeared from the programme. It was meant to be a touchstone for
the indaba, which was aimed at
promoting a coherent refurbishment of government’s Norms and Standards for
elephant management, especially those in captivity. But neither the relevant government
agencies, nor Cape Nature, which would presumably have jurisdiction over
Saunders’ idea, saw fit to accept invitations to attend. When the ministries of
power will not even join the conversation, let alone do anything proactive, one’s
optimism for the future wavers.
As all who
attended the conference knew, elephants are in dire straits across Africa: some
70% have been killed by poachers since the ivory trade exploded in 2008.
Paradoxically, of course, here in the South, we have arguably the opposite
problem: too many elephants crammed into inadequate spaces, and therefore
threatened periodically with culling, or the non-lethal but still traumatic
experiences of forced contraception or translocation. Indeed, it can be argued that all elephants in South Africa are
captive in varying degrees, from the reportedly appalling treatment and
condition of Lammie, a sorry elephant imprisoned in Johannesburg Zoo, to even my favourites, the calmly meandering, but still fenced-in herds of
Addo. Even the vast space of Kruger has its limits: elephants everywhere are
subject to forced removals, breeding regimens, harassment by noisy tourists,
isolation from herd life, and being hunted; and at worst brutal taming, reduction
to paranoid behaviours in confined and impoverished spaces, and subjection to the
humiliation of performance on command and being ridden by jabbering humans. Don’t
get me wrong: I understand that there are genuine orphans who could never
rehabilitate to the wild, that there are sanctuaries whose methods are as humane
as can be achieved, and that snuggling up close to an elephant, being intimately
considered by that ruby eye, can be a life-changing experience. But the substrate
on which the indaba was premised is
an achingly sad one.
The pathetic
– or dangerously ignorant – non-response from government aside, the indaba was not as well attended as one
might have hoped: the plush Overberg Auditorium was less than half full. I didn’t
encounter any actual zoo, circus, elephant-park or sanctuary people, though the
Western Cape holds the most captive elephants of all our provinces. Moreover,
there was almost no representation from South Africa’s majority populations.
Though plenty of useful information and heartfelt intervention emanated from
the dozen or so formal presenters, it was largely preaching to the converted. I
hope the live streaming of the event was, and will continue, to reach a wider
audience. As Marion Garai, head of the Elephant Specialist Action Group (ESAG)
stressed on her skype appearance, this needs to be the start of something much
greater. What was said here – though there was not much that is radically new,
and we surely now possess all the research data necessary to do the right thing
– needs to have real impact on the various authorities. (The opinion of several
scientists and experts, backed by 300,000 signatures on a petition, failed to
persuade Johannesburg Zoo to release Lammie.)
All that
said, the indaba was interesting,
rich, and replete with expertise. Two premier researchers and activists from
the US, Joyce Poole (author of Coming of
Age with Elephants) and Gay Bradshaw (author of Elephants on the Edge), joined by skype to lay in the ground-strokes
for the gathering, outlining who (not
what) elephants are in terms of their
capacities, sensitivities, and fundamental needs (those routinely denied them
in captivity). The Chief of the South
Peninsula Khoi Council, shoulder draped in springbok hide, delivered a
vigorous, even angry paean to the historic linkage between Khoi people and the
totemic elephant: “If you kill the elephant, you kill my people!” Simplistic,
perhaps; I found his promise to “fight to have the elephants freed” over-aggressive,
and his mantra that elephants “rightfully belong to the Khoi nation”
over-narrow. But chair Don Pinnock opined that this is exactly the kind of
voice that needed to be heard across the world. Indeed, perhaps ears have
become dulled to the litany of science, emotion and legalism that indeed
characterised the presentations that followed, excellent though they were.
As befitted
the policy aim of the indaba, several
of these came from the legal fraternity. David Bilchitz, a professor of
constitutional law as well as director of Animal Law Reform SA, argued lucidly
for an ‘integrative’ rather than an ‘aggregative’ approach to elephant
treatment, one that respected the individual, even within a ‘sustainable use’ model.
He argues that a notion of ‘respect’ for animals is implicit in the
Constitution itself, and that National Parks, for example, would be
contradicting their own mandate if they did not include explicit animal welfare
in their policies. Two legal minds from north of the border were also
impressive: Lenin Chisaira is fighting what sounds like a lonely battle on
behalf of animal legal rights in Zimbabwe, where the wholly disgusting and unacceptable
(and ongoing) export of captured baby elephants to China and Vietnam was
another abusive touchstone for the conference. (Chisaira was equally
courageously backed up by Lynne James of the Mutare SPCA.)
Jim Karani of WildlifeDirect
in Kenya, touted as Africa’s first ‘animal lawyer’, ‘staged’ his presentation
as a kind of legal case, with audience as jury, and received huge applause for
his critique of current ‘conservation education’ and promotion of an extension
of notions of ‘person-hood’; if there can be such a thing as ‘corporate
personhood’, why on earth not elephants? His compatriot Kahindi Lekalhaile,
director of the Africa Network for Animal Welfare and recipient of conservation
awards for his elephant work in Samburu, raised some of the most challenging
questions: How are policy-makers to be included in the conversation? When ‘public
participation’ is called for, who is that public, with what requisite
diversity? Most importantly: where are the ‘wilds’ we would like to see
elephants returned to? In almost all of them, people live too.
 |
| The Kenyan delegates |
In
conversation, I asked the tall, angular and voluble Lekalhaile if Kenyan
conservation still experience echoes of old colonial structures, as we do in
South Africa, what with the racially-skewed formation and maintenance of ‘fortress
conservation’ areas – to which he replied, No, but the present government was
worse! Indeed, my impression was that the Kenyans are operating on a different
level to us southerners: certain hang-ups have been shed, new issues tackled
with an eloquence, self-awareness and sharpness we have mostly yet to match.
Such animal activists remain rare and embattled in Africa, their courage
inspirational. Which is not to belittle any of the work being pursued by local
organisations or the odds they’re up against, in a somewhat different register.
There was much more, including some bright spots. Brett Mitchell, who like Lekalhaile moved out of tourism into
elephant affairs, founding the Elephant Reintegration Trust, which claims some
success in the tricky task of reintegrating human-habituated elephants into the
wild. Twitching his big shoulders in self-confessed discomfort with public
speaking, Mitchell presented detailed figures from around the globe of captive
elephants – where they are housed (1770 elephants in 468 facilities, 1228 of
those wild-born, the US and China the biggest culprits); recent exports to zoos
(South Africa and Zimbabwe by far the biggest suppliers); life expectancies
(much lower in captivity); and so on. The good news: there has been a 23%
reduction in captive elephants in South Africa from a few years ago, mostly due
to closures of facilities. I wonder where the surviving elephants went, though?
Another encouraging sign: several speakers had been at the most recent
gathering of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), which has barred further transportation of live elephants
other than in ‘exceptional circumstances’. Almost all the delegates here seemed
suspicious of CITES’ bona fides; it’s both toothless and, allegedly, too
financially beholden to the very traffickers they are mandated to control. Be
that as it may, this prohibition is a step in the right direction.
What
direction, though? Crucial issues remained, or were only tangentially raised.
Is it time, as Bill Smuts of the Landmark Foundation advocated, for much more
aggressive litigation? How best, asked a representative of Voices for African
Wildlife, to reach the minds of the young, who will inherit the losses we have
inflicted on the world? All but unspoken, there’s the insoluble tsunami of
human population growth and associated habitat constriction. Nor is the grand
problem merely about saving elephants; as Oxford-based ecologist Keith Lindsay
noted, it’s about whole ecosystems, all of which, however one defines them,
have become both polluted and fragmented. Elephants are just the biggest
symptom of runaway anthropogenic damage.
As the whole
hubbub closed, Don Pinnock asked from the chair for one-liners that would
capture what should be the clarion message from the indaba. I don’t know what people wrote on the pieces of paper that
went forward – for what it’s worth, I
wrote something utopian about the need to abandon an attitude of capitalistic
profiteering for animal-based luxuries – but most of those that were broadcast
echoed Joyce Poole: Return the elephants
to the wild! I agree – but Kahindi Lekalhaile’s words keep resonating: Where
are those wilds?
