Earth Protect Blog

Highly emotional and completely guileless, elephants mourn their dead—and across Africa, they are grieving daily as demand from China’s “suddenly wealthy” has driven the price of ivory to $700 a pound or more. With tens of thousands of elephants being slaughtered each year for their tusks, raising the specter of an “extinction vortex,” Alex Shoumatoff travels from Kenya to Seattle to Guangzhou, China, to expose those who are guilty in the massacre—and recognize those who are determined to stop it.

Another carcass has been found. On the Kuku Group Ranch, one of the sectors allotted to the once nomadic Maasai that surround Amboseli National Park, in southern Kenya. Amboseli is home to some 1,200 elephants who regularly wander into the group ranches, these being part of their original, natural habitat. More than 7,000 Maasai live in scattered fenced-in compounds called bomas with their extended families and their cattle on Kuku’s 280,000 acres. Traditionally, the Maasai coexisted with their wildlife. They rarely killed elephants, because they revered them and regarded them as almost human, as having souls like us. Neighboring tribespeople believe that elephants were once people who were turned into animals because of their vanity and given beautiful, flashy white tusks, which condemned them, in the strangely truthful logic of myth, to be forever hunted and killed in the name of human vanity. And Maasai believe when a young woman is getting married and her groom comes to get her from her village she musn’t look back or she will become an elephant. “But in the last few years, everything has changed,” a member of the tribe told me. “The need for money has changed the hearts of the Maasai.”

In 2008, post-election ethnic violence followed by the global recession halved tourism to Kenya, making the wildlife in the parks even harder to protect. Then, in 2009, one of the worst droughts in living memory hit much of the country. More than 400 elephants in Amboseli died. The Maasai lost many of their cows and are still struggling, while the price of ivory is higher than ever, so increasing numbers of them are risking the misfortune that killing an elephant could bring on their families, according to their traditional thinking, and are getting into poaching. There are brokers just across the Tanzania border who are paying cash—around $20 a pound—for raw ivory and selling it to the Chinese. Or perhaps there is a series of transactions, a series of middlemen, but ultimately what is not being picked up by the Kenya Wildlife Service’s sniffing dogs at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, in Nairobi, is making its way by all kinds of circuitous routes to China, where raw ivory is now fetching $700 or more a pound. Ninety percent of the passengers who are being arrested for possession of ivory at Jomo Kenyatta are Chinese nationals, and half the poaching in Kenya is happening within 20 miles of one of the five massive Chinese road-building projects in various stages of completion.

There had been almost no poaching around Amboseli for 30 years before a Chinese company got the contract to build a 70-mile-long highway just above the park. Since the road crews arrived, in 2009, four of Amboseli’s magnificent big-tusked bulls have been killed, and the latest word is that the poachers are now going after the matriarchs—a social and genetic disaster, because elephants live in matriarchies, and removing the best breeders of both sexes from the gene pool could funnel the Amboseli population into what is known as an “extinction vortex.”

Unfortunately, this problem isn’t limited to just Kenya. Across the continent, in their 37 range states, from Mali to South Africa, Ethiopia to Gabon, elephants are being killed, some believe, at the rate of around 100 a day, 36,500 a year. But like so many things in Africa, it is impossible to know how many elephants there really are (estimates run from 400,000 to 650,000), how many are being slaughtered for their tusks (figures range from “more than 4,000” to “as many as 60,000” a year), or how much ivory is being smuggled to Asia (over the last 10 years, an annual average of roughly 45,000 pounds has been seized in Asia or en route). But the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) believes roughly 100 elephants are being killed each day, and this lines up with two of the most plausible estimates.

A Kenya Wildlife Service official and Soila Sayialel, the deputy director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, have invited me to come along as they investigate the carcass found on the Kuku Group Ranch.

Soila, a local Maasai woman in her 40s, has been working with Cynthia Moss—the revered 71-year-old American conservationist who started the project in 1972—for 25 years and wants to know if this latest victim is one of Amboseli’s elephants. A week earlier, K.W.S. rangers shot dead two poachers right outside the park who had just killed Magna, one of the big breeding bulls.

The poaching is even worse in the northern part of the country. A few weeks ago, two poachers were killed and a ranger was wounded in a firefight in Meru National Park. Al-Shabaab, the Islamist youth militia which is in league with al-Qaeda and controls most of Somalia, has been coming over the border and killing elephants in Arawale National Reserve. Ivory, like the blood diamonds of other African conflicts, is funding many rebel groups in Africa, and Kenya, K.W.S. director Julius Kipng’etich told me, “is in the unenviable position of sharing over 1,700 kilometers of border with three countries with civil wars that are awash with firearms: Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan.” Nothing less than a full-scale military operation is going to stop the poaching in the north.

But Kenya’s poaching problem is nothing compared with that of some other African range states. It’s only losing a few hundred elephants a year. (Kenya has zero tolerance for poaching and banned the sale of all ivory, including its old stock, in 1989. There has also been a blanket ban on all hunting since 1977.) Gabon, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania are losing thousands. Chad, home to 15,000 elephants in 1979, has less than 400 left. Sierra Leone is down to single digits.

This April was the cruelest month in the current wave of killing. Then, in the first week of May alone, a ton of ivory was confiscated in Kenya, more than 1,300 pounds in Vietnam—from Tanzania—and a Chinese man was arrested at Entebbe airport in Uganda with 34 pieces of ivory. To top it off, a South Korean diplomat was caught trying to bring 16 tusks into Seoul. The carnage is escalating.

During the great elephanticide of the 1970s and 1980s, Africa’s elephant population was cut from an estimated 1.3 million to some 600,000, and Kenya’s elephant population went from 120,000 to 15,000. (It is now about twice that.) At the height of the slaughter, it is believed, 70,000 elephants a year were being killed continent-wide. The death toll may be half that now, but there are only half as many elephants left.

The previous slaughter was driven by Japan’s economic boom. This new crisis is driven by China’s nouveaux riches, or bao fa hu (the “suddenly wealthy”), who are as numerous as the entire population of Japan. The main consumers are middle-aged men who have just made it into the middle class and are eager to flaunt their ability to make expensive discretionary purchases. Beautiful ivory carvings are traditional symbols of wealth and status.

oila expertly navigates the cavernously potholed dirt road that leads to Kuku, at one of whose bomas we pick up Johanus, the Maasai scout who found the carcass. Johanus was looking for lion tracks down by the river a few mornings ago when he picked up the blood trail of an elephant and started to follow it. The wounded elephant was making for the safety of nearby Tsavo National Park. It was accompanied by another elephant who was not bleeding, and they were being followed by two men—local Maasai, Johanus tells us, because they were wearing tire-tread sandals of local manufacture. Johanus shows us the four sets of prints, which we pick up at the river. We follow them up a slope of jagged red stones—an old lava field, with patches of grass and thickets of flat-topped acacia trees, which several stocky, mud-reddened zebras and frisky impalas melt into as we approach. After half an hour of tortuous progress, Johanus says we are here.

We are greeted by the nauseating stench of rotting flesh. Fifty yards from the blood trail, the dead, decomposing elephant is kneeling in a pool of its own fluid, which is swarming with flies. The carcass was covered with branches by the poachers so it wouldn’t attract vultures, which would alert the K.W.S. pilots who make daily flyovers to its presence. Its face is completely gone, hacked off by a machete: no eyes, no trunk, no tusks. The trunk, Soila suspects, was taken by hyenas. The tusks were chopped out with an ax. The elephant’s cheekless mouth is a gaping black hole, like one of Francis Bacon’s silent-scream paintings. The elephant’s tail has been sliced off. Bracelets of black elephant-tail hair are still bought by tourists. The animal has been speared on both sides, 23 times. Soila counts the holes. This was a savage, low-tech, local poaching. An opportunistic poaching. If it had been a deliberate one, poison would have been used. If poison had been used, the elephant would not have had to be speared so many times or have gotten this far.

The poison, known as mbaya (Swahili for evil), is a concoction brewed from the leaves of two trees and the livers of puffer fish from the coast. Applied to an arrowhead or a spear tip, it is so powerful that it kills an elephant in five minutes and breaks down its flesh so quickly that after two or three days the tusks just slide out.

Soila puts on rubber gloves, draws some blood from the carcass, and slices off a section of flesh to send to the lab at Duke University, which will determine if it has the Amboseli genotype. She thinks it is no more than two or three days old. The poachers could have been some of the scouts who were employed by a private foundation to protect the ranch’s wildlife but have been dismissed until further notice because of a power struggle with the group-ranch leadership. The scouts know the movements of the elephants on the ranch and are now in desperate need of money. Suspicion falls on one in particular, a reformed poacher who may have gone back to his old ways. “We will get them,” the K.W.S. official assures me.

We return to Amboseli in silence. On the other side of the Chinese road, a huge bull, with magnificent, perfectly symmetrical tusks, emerges from the trees. “It is Upendo [love in Swahili],” Soila says. “He has recognized the sound of the vehicle and come out to say hello.” Upendo lifts his trunk into the air and, swiveling it like a periscope, gives us the sniff-over, which indicates a certain level of suspicion. He detects strange male testosterone in the vehicle and hears the excited clicking of cameras; flapping his ears with a parting snort, he quickly backtracks into the thicket. “He is telling us, ‘I’m fed up with you guys. No more pictures,’ ” Soila explains.

There are still a few hours of daylight to watch the elephants in the park. The rains have come, and with all the newly flushed grass they are able to congregate in extended-family groups of 70 or more. We observe one group twisting up bundles of grass with their trunks and stuffing them into their mouths. A full-grown elephant needs to eat about 300 pounds of vegetation a day. They can live to 65 or more and, like humans, reach sexual maturity in their early teens.

Babies are running between the legs of their mothers, trying to suckle some milk from their teats. Two two-year-olds have locked trunks and are having a tug-of-war. A randy bull in musth—Hindi for intoxication—is hanging around the periphery. It was here in 1978 that Cynthia Moss’s colleague Joyce Poole discovered that musth is not a disease, as it had been thought to be, but a phase of up to five months in the reproductive cycle of bulls during which their testosterone levels can shoot up 100 times above normal.

Constant little dramas are going on in this group. An eight-year-old bull, still a mama’s boy dependent on her milk, lets out a wounded bellow as his mother, having a newborn to feed, tells him with a jab of her tusk to shove off. Elephants are highly emotional. Whatever they are feeling, they let it out immediately, and the histrionics are over and forgotten in a moment, lasting no longer than the cloud formations that are constantly coming apart and re-forming overhead. There is no guile in pachyderms. They are highly sentient, totally alive to what is going on, fully in the moment in ways we are only beginning to understand. They can pick up the rumble of a distant thunderstorm seismically through the soles of their feet, and family groups a mile or two apart keep in constant touch with an assortment of far-carrying infrasounds too low for us to hear. No one really knows what they are saying or thinking. Scientists are only starting to talk cautiously about “empathy” and “neurocognition.”

Soila says that each elephant has its own personality. “Some are talkative, some are bad-hearted, some are stupid,” she says. “They are very much like us. Sometimes when I am watching them, I forget that I am working. I forget that they are elephants and I am human.” But elephants are not human, of course. They are something much more ancient and primordial, living on a different plane of existence. Long before we arrived on the scene, they worked out a way of being in the world that has not fundamentally changed and is sustainable, and not predatory or destructive. We have been in close association with elephants from the beginning. The few dozen humans who left Africa may have even followed an elephant trail, but the proboscideans are on a distant branch of the tree of life, closer to manatees and aardvarks than to primates. It is amazing, really, that something so antediluvian and unlike us is still here. This is the feeling we get as we are watching these elephants. They are what they are, and they put things into badly needed perspective. The world needs them. We need them.

I have been in running contact with elephants for 30 years, but only on this six-week reporting safari am I beginning to understand the wavelength they are on. I have already had communication breakthroughs in the last month with three elephants, moments when “Adam’s wall,” as the barrier between us and animals has been called, seemed to come down. The first was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where I spent a few days with a 28-year-old Zimbabwean ivory orphan named Bubbles, who was raised from the age of two by an animal trainer named Bhagavan Antle. “Bubbles is my oldest and most devoted friend,” Antle told me. He trained her to be an entertainment elephant—she has been in Doctor Dolittle with Eddie Murphy, the second Ace Ventura movie, and a Janet Jackson video.

I went swimming with Bubbles in the Intracoastal Waterway, and she kept playfully hoisting me out of the water with her trunk and tossing me over her head back into it. She is totally habituated to humans and “doesn’t get along with other elephants at all,” Antle told me. “When I’m not on the property, she guards it like a pit bull. Even the staff can’t get close to her.” The two of us rode her into the forest, where every few feet she would snap off a branch of wax myrtle and stuff it into her mouth. “The world is her salad,” Antle explained. He said that Bubbles could recognize the sound of his pickup making its way home through the rush-hour traffic, and that she always recognized a guest who had been there before and gave him or her special attention, and over the years she had done her routine for tens of thousands of them. “Bubbles is an ambassador of what is being lost, and she takes her job very seriously,” he told me.

Bubbles’ eyes especially got to me. Screened by thick black lashes, they were dolorous, humorous, knowing, forgiving, the eyes of an ancient sage, a highly evolved being, the eyes of Einstein.

As the sun sets in Amboseli, the clouds break and we catch a glimpse of Kilimanjaro’s summit cone, coated with new snow. All the elephants head for the swamp in long single-file columns, huge convoys making their way across the timeless savanna toward the vanishing point, as they have been doing for eons, “as if they had an appointment at the end of the world,” Isak Dinesen wrote in Out of Africa.