Authors: Thomas French
The elephants began to arrive in 1987, when Mick was still a teenager. From the start, they were controversial. There were a dozen of them, all trucked in from South Africa, all of them calves only a few years old. They were survivors of the annual culls carried out to control the country’s elephant population. Though the calves had been spared, they had witnessed the slaughter of their families. Not everyone was sure it made sense to bring them into Swaziland. How would they survive without their mothers? Even if they did make it, would they be haunted by memories from the culls?
Ted Reilly brushed away the questions. He agreed that the calves would be happier roaming the bush beside their mothers. But their mothers were dead. Weren’t they better off, Reilly said, starting new lives in Mkhaya and Hlane?
The elephants survived. They did so well, in fact, that within a few years of their arrival, they exceeded the parks’ resources. Elephants are among the most beloved animals on the planet. But they are also voracious eaters that feed for up to eighteen hours a day. They have a remarkable ability, unrivalled by any species except for Homo sapiens, to alter their surrounding ecosystems. The elephants inside Mkhaya and Hlane were tearing the bark off so many trees and knocking down so many other trees that they were systematically deforesting entire sections. The destruction threatened the future of the eagles and owls and vultures that nested in those trees. It also posed a serious challenge for the black rhinos, one of Africa’s most endangered species, which depended on similar vegetation for their diet.
In the months before the eleven elephants were loaded onto the plane, some animal-rights groups argued that there was plenty of room inside Mkhaya and Hlane, that the overcrowding had been exaggerated, that the Reillys had invented a crisis so they could justify selling the elephants to the zoos.
But the magnitude of the problem is obvious to anyone who tours the parks, even today. The devastation inside Mkhaya is striking. And in Hlane, it is catastrophic. Standing at one of the interior fences, looking toward a section of the park where there are no elephants, visitors see a lush expanse of green trees and bushes. If they turn their heads a few inches and look on the other side of the fence, toward the area where Hlane’s elephants live, all that meets the eye are miles of dead trees. Many have been pushed to the ground. Hundreds of others stand like twisted silhouettes, their branches black and broken and bare.
Gazing across this moonscape, it seems impossible that the elephants have managed to survive, much less any other species.
Above the waves and the clouds,
the 747 soared on. Sunlight burned along the wings. A thin trail of exhaust tapered behind, etched across a canvas of perfect blue.
Inside the hold, some of the elephants drifted in and out of sleep. Others were more alert, the effects of their Azaperone and Acuphase injections slowly wearing off. Mick, beyond exhaustion by now, was still patrolling back and forth between them, talking softly in the human language they were most likely to recognize.
“Kahle mfana,”
said Mick, speaking in siSwati, the native tongue of Swaziland.
“Kutwulunga.”
Steady, boy. It will be OK.
A South African veterinarian named Chris Kingsley worked nearby, assessing the elephants. The vet watched their respiration patterns, checked to see if they responded to sounds, made sure that none were shivering or showing other signs of trauma.
Chris and Mick had been working for more than forty hours straight. They began their labors before dawn early that Wednesday morning, where the crew tranquilized the elephants inside the boma—a fenced corral where the animals had been kept in preparation for the journey—then lifted the animals via a conveyor belt and a crane onto flatbed trucks to be driven to Manzini, the nearest city with an airport. Loading them onto the trucks took all day, and then the drive to Manzini took most of the night. The airport didn’t have a runway big enough for a 747, so the elephants were shifted onto a pair of Ilyushin IL-16s, and then when they flew into Johannesburg, they had to be unloaded from those two planes, with forklifts moving the crates, and reloaded into the hold of the 747. It was winter in that part of the world, and cold enough that night that Mick could see ice glinting on the tarmac. Despite the chill, there were formalities to be observed. They had to wait for customs officials to sign a stack of release forms. By the time the freighter jet accelerated down the runway, the sun was up, and it was Thursday morning.
Chartered for $700,000, the plane had more than enough thrust and weight capacity for the task at hand. A few more tons would have been no problem. Still, the pilots were not eager to cause their passengers any distress, so they eased their ascent, taking off at a gentle angle before heading across the tip of the continent toward the Atlantic.
As the 747 carried them across the equator and backward through eight time zones, the divide between morning and afternoon began to blur. Mick and Chris were enveloped in the hum of the engines and the breathing of the animals. Watering cans in hand, they checked on the elephants’ progress, making sure that they had enough to drink and that the trays underneath their crates were not overflowing with urine. Elephant urine is so corrosive it can eat through metal.
All of the elephants were juveniles, between ten and fourteen years old. Four were headed for Tampa, and the other seven would travel on to San Diego. So far they seemed to be doing well. Early into the flight, Chris had been concerned about Mbali. Named after one of Mick’s two daughters, she was the youngest and smallest of the group. After takeoff, Mbali wasn’t eating or drinking. She simply lay in her crate. The vet had the impression she was depressed. A few hours later, the young elephant seemed to have recovered. She was back on her feet, drinking water with her trunk, responding to the humans’ voices. The other elephants were vocalizing too, sending out waves of rumblings that Mick and Chris could feel in their chests. The two of them were startled when one of the males trumpeted. The bulls were more restless than the cows. Already, some strained at their confinement. Mick could see them leaning against the interior of their crates, pushing with their feet, testing the strength of the walls. A sickening thought occurred to him: What if one broke out?
His mind fixed on the image. He visualized the male elephant charging toward the front of the plane. He saw it bulldozing into the cockpit, trampling over the pilots, then finally bursting through the nose.
The bull would plummet toward the waves far below. The shattered 747—no more pilots, no controls—would tumble close behind.
At first,
when the Reilly family was trying to find an answer to the elephant problem, they did not even consider zoos. After decades of fighting to create open spaces for wildlife, the notion of constraining animals inside a zoo seemed appalling. Anne Reilly, Mick’s sister, admits that when she originally heard that her father and brother were considering sending some of the parks’ elephants to San Diego and Tampa, she was aghast.
“I thought, Isn’t that why we have them here—to keep them out of zoos?”
Both Ted and Mick acknowledge that they, too, had difficulty contemplating the possibility. In his head, Mick pictured animals pacing in reeking cages.
“We would have personally preferred the animals to go into a wild situation,” he says. “I never visited zoos much in my life, and my idea of zoos was the traditional sort of zoo that was around fifty years ago.”
Neither contraception nor surgical neutering was an option. Trials were being conducted on elephants in the field, but no viable methods had been fully tested. An assortment of difficulties—the nature of the females’ cycles, the length of time required to perform vasectomies on the males, the threat of violence from other elephants watching on—made it impossible to seriously consider such procedures. Besides, there were already too many elephants inside the parks.
The Reilly family searched neighboring South Africa for other parks that could take the elephants. But every time they thought they might have found a new home, the permits were denied. South Africa already had more than enough of its own elephants to contend with. The government, the Reillys say, would not allow any more to be brought in.
They considered other places in Africa. But almost everywhere they looked, the threat of poaching seemed too great. Some countries even sanctioned organized elephant hunts. In Botswana, where the elephant surplus is even greater than in South Africa, a wealthy American tourist can pay $50,000 to join a safari and shoot down an elephant bull, then climb atop his fallen corpse for a victory photo. The Reillys did not want Mkhaya’s and Hlane’s elephants to end up dead, their meat and tusks sold on the black market, their bodies treated as trophies. But if they could not find an alternative, Mick and his father concluded they would have no choice but to destroy some of the herd themselves. They already controlled the populations of warthogs and impala and other animals inside the parks with culls. They were prepared to do the same with the elephants, even though they recognized that no other species triggered quite the same depth of emotion among humans.
With their size and intelligence and emotional complexity, elephants were irresistible. People admired the tender attention with which they reared their young, the way the calves were raised not just by their mothers but by their aunts. Their extraordinary memory was cited as evidence of self-knowledge and an awareness of both the past and future; ethicists pondered whether these qualities proved that elephants achieved personhood and should be accorded a moral status and rights equivalent to those of humans. The social hierarchy of the herd—a matriarch directing their lives with almost no interference from adult bulls, who usually roamed the bush on their own or in smaller bachelor groups—appealed to feminist sensibilities. To many, elephants embodied modern notions of progress and benevolence. They were seen not just as awe-inspiring animals, but as nature’s great vessels of enlightenment. For all of these reasons, the public identified with the species more intensely than with almost any other.
Even so, elephant culls had long been a reality in other African countries, especially after the ivory trade was banned in the second half of the twentieth century and elephant populations surged in the southern regions of the continent. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, culls were used to thin herds inside Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. One early method, pioneered in Uganda, required a team of hunters to quietly take position near a family of the animals, then deliberately signal their presence by coughing or breaking a stick. The startled elephants would circle around their young and bunch together, making it easier for the hunters to shoot them down. In Zimbabwe, where close to fifty thousand elephants were culled over the years, the techniques were more efficient. Low-flying planes drove the elephants toward a team waiting in the bush with automatic weapons. Bulls in breeding herds were usually shot first, and then the matriarch and other older females. Killing the matriarch early was standard protocol in many countries, since she anchored the rest of the herd. Without their leader’s guidance, they would become confused and not know what to do or where to go. Sometimes, a gunman would scale the matriarch’s body, wait for other elephants to venture close, then pick them off too.
The brutal choreography evolved inside South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a massive reserve where more than fourteen thousand elephants were culled over the decades. Every year a quota was designated to keep the park’s population within manageable limits. Helicopters buzzed over the targeted animals, pushing them toward a preselected kill zone. Sometimes the elephants would be forced to run for miles. The preferred sites were away from the eyes of tourists but close to patrol or firebreak roads so that cranes and trucks could clear away the massive carcasses. The helicopters would spook the elephants toward the killing ground, then circle overhead to keep them close together. Calves, struggling to stay with their mothers, would fall. The adults would roar and raise their tusks as the shadow of the helicopter swept across them.
For a time, the rangers darted the animals from the air with Scoline, a neuromuscular anesthetic used in human heart surgery. An armed ground crew—sometimes as many as sixty men—would then finish off the immobilized giants. But the practice was deemed inhumane after it was discovered that the darted elephants were paralyzed but fully conscious for several minutes and sometimes suffocated to death before the ground crews could shoot them. Eventually the use of Scoline was prohibited. Instead the marksmen leaned out of the helicopters with large-caliber rifles, waiting until they were positioned just above and behind the elephants, and would then fire through the backs of the elephants’ necks and into their lower skulls. The elephants did not make for especially difficult targets. Usually they ran in a straight line, with a smooth gait and relatively little bobbing of their heads. When hit by a clean brain shot, the elephants would collapse in midstride, dropping so fast and hard that their tusks would plow into the ground.
The men aiming the rifles understood the logic behind the slaughter, the cold necessity of reducing the herds to save other animals and protect some of the park’s most irreplaceable plant life. Kruger’s elephants had grown so numerous that they were wiping out entire groves of baobab trees, some of which had towered over the savanna for four thousand years. Knowing these things did not make it easy to squeeze the trigger and watch a young calf tumble to the dirt beside his mother’s carcass.
“Don’t ask me if I enjoyed it,” a game ranger warned a British reporter who witnessed a cull inside Kruger in the early ’90s. That day, the ranger and his team had killed three hundred elephants.
“Elephants are beautiful creatures. Of all the animals in the Kruger Park, I respect the elephant most,” he said. “We play God, but we are not God. Every time you cull, it takes something away from you. This is not a nice job, but it has to be done.”