Authors: Thomas French
The aftermath was just as unsettling. Calves old enough to have been weaned and survive on their own were often spared to be sent to other game parks or sold to zoos in the United States or Europe. Sometimes, to prevent the calves from running away, they were tied to their mothers’ bodies until they could be pushed or dragged toward transport crates. Around them, disposal teams dressed in overalls and white boots moved between the dead elephants, slitting their throats with pangas to bleed them and then preparing the carcasses for removal. Vultures flapped their wings in nearby trees. In the distance, hyenas waited.
The disposal teams cleaned the killing ground as thoroughly as possible. They didn’t want other herds that had not been targeted to enter the area in days to come and stumble onto evidence of the massacre. After years of observing the species inside the park, the staff knew that elephants—unlike most animals—were aware of death and were drawn to the remains of their kin, sometimes burying them in branches and grass. Some researchers even believed that elephants could identify the fallen body of a cow or bull they had known in life. Once, after a cull in Uganda, park rangers had stored severed feet and other body parts of the fallen inside a shed. That night, other elephants pushed their way into the shed and then buried the body parts.
Kruger officials had no desire to instill lingering fear or hostility in surviving herds. They didn’t want emotionally scarred elephants seeking revenge against the thousands of humans who tour the park every year. So the culling crews were instructed to remove every trace of the carnage. The cranes and trucks rolled forward onto the blood-soaked ground, and the bodies of the dead were lifted and then hauled away to Kruger’s abattoirs. The ivory tusks were collected and stored in warehouses, away from poachers. The meat and hides were sold.
The dead were erased.
Despite these efforts, in Kruger and elsewhere, the other herds somehow seemed to realize that something terrible had occurred. After some culls, elephants would come from every direction, gravitating toward the kill zone. They would stay for a while—lingering at the scene as though they were investigating. Even more remarkably, the behavior of these surviving elephants suggested that they were aware of the threat even before the shooting stopped. In the middle of some culls, herds far from the site were observed to begin moving away from the helicopters and the gunfire. In Zimbabwe, elephants ninety miles from a cull apparently became so alarmed that they fled and hid. Later they were found in the far end of their game park, huddled together.
How did they know to be afraid? In some cases the wind could have carried the scent of blood to their extraordinarily sensitive nostrils. Or they might have heard the pulsing chop of the helicopter blades. Elephants are believed to be capable of hearing storms more than a hundred miles away. As researchers discovered more about the physiology and habits of the species, another answer emerged. The rattled herds, it turned out, were almost certainly responding to long-distance distress calls from the elephants under attack.
Elephants routinely communicate with one another through snorts, shrieks, roars, bellows, and trumpets. They also exchange information through low-frequency rumbles, most of which humans can’t hear. Sometimes people in the vicinity of elephants can feel these rumbles; the vibrations have been described as “a throbbing in the air” similar to thunder. One researcher in Kenya, listening to the infrasonic calls on a specialized recorder that picked up low frequencies, reported that they sounded like soft purring. Elephants tune in to these rumbles not just with their ears, but also their feet. Through motion-sensitive cells in the soft pads of their feet, they can detect low-frequency sounds as they ripple in seismic vibrations along the ground. Elephants use these infrasonic signals to attract mates, to assert dominance, and to find and rescue calves who have fallen into watering holes or gotten into other trouble and are calling for help.
The trauma of the culls, then, could not be completely contained. As the targeted animals ran in vain from the helicopters, they would have been capable of sending out terrified warnings to other elephants beyond the horizon. It’s easy to picture the distant herds freezing as the messages reached them. The elephants would have held completely still for a second or two, then turned their heads back and forth, ears stiffened and spread wide as they waited for more information.
Who knows how long the distress calls would have lasted. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe half an hour. The cries would cut off, one by one.
Swaziland’s elephants
had been born into this bloody history. They were among the hundreds of calves who had survived the Kruger culls. They had all run from the helicopters, heard the rifle shots, then watched as their families were butchered.
In the years since, this generation of orphans had wreaked havoc. In different parks around southern Africa, some of these elephants were displaying classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They were easily startled and showed elevated levels of aggression. With no older bulls or cows to guide them as they matured, the young males became notorious for their rampages. They knocked down fences, pulled up pipes, trampled farmers’ crops. They seemed to be attacking humans and other species with increasing frequency. In a startling display of aberrant behavior, some bulls sexually assaulted rhinos and then killed them.
The Reilly family had encountered these problems with their orphans too. Over the years, several of the males inside Mkhaya and Hlane had exhibited aggression toward the white rhinos. Four bulls had killed rhinos. One bull had fatally attacked three rhinos within twenty-four hours. Mick had shot and killed the aggressors himself. Luckily, these incidents were fairly rare. Most of the three dozen elephants living in the parks were females and seemed to have adjusted well to their new surroundings—too well, given their appetites and the destruction of the trees. By 2001, just seven years after some of the elephants arrived from Kruger, the devastation in Mkhaya and Hlane had reached the point where the Reillys felt they had no choice but to consider a cull of their own.
“We had run out of time,” Mick says.
It was right about then that the two American zoos—first San Diego, then Tampa—suggested another possibility. Officials from both zoos flew to Swaziland to describe the new homes they could offer the elephants. San Diego already had a three-acre elephant exhibit. Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo was willing to build one of similar size. The zoos invited the Reillys to see the facilities for themselves. Mick flew to the United States, toured both zoos, and was impressed—not just with the exhibits but with the expertise of the staffs and the care they offered. The animal clinic at San Diego, Mick said, was more sophisticated than any hospital inside Swaziland. At Lowry Park, he was struck by the zoo’s manatee hospital, where over the years dozens of injured or ailing manatees had been rehabilitated and then released back into the wild.
That was it. If there was no more room in the game parks, then San Diego and Lowry Park made sense.
“There are zoos,” says Ted, “and there are zoos.”
With the blessing of King Mswati III, the Reillys and the zoos began the long process of applying for the necessary permits. The zoos agreed to pay the game parks $12,000 for each elephant. The money, the Reillys said, would go to management of Mkhaya and Hlane, protection of the animals within, and the purchase of more park land. In their permit applications, Lowry Park and San Diego pointed out that the arrival of eleven wild elephants would benefit zoos around the United States. It had been more than fifteen years since any African elephants had been brought into the United States, and now the captive elephant population was aging and having trouble reproducing. Bringing in the wild elephants—all designated for breeding—would rejuvenate the genetic pool.
Mountains of paperwork awaited the lawyers and the bureaucrats. But even more was required of the zoos and the game parks. They had to figure out how to transport eleven elephants across an ocean and prepare for their care once they arrived. San Diego already had an African elephant exhibit, but still needed to ship some of its current occupants to other institutions to make room for the new arrivals. Lowry Park had not exhibited elephants in ten years, ever since 1993, when an Asian elephant killed one of the zoo’s keepers. After the young woman’s death, the zoo closed the exhibit and sent its two elephants to new homes. Now Lowry Park had to build new facilities, hire new elephant keepers, and adopt updated protocols to protect the staff.
In Swaziland, the Reillys had to figure out which elephants would be chosen, then move them temporarily into the boma and ready them for their journey. Working with the zoos, the Reillys designated thirteen elephants from two herds at Mkhaya and Hlane—the eleven elephants intended for the trip, plus two more in case any became unfit for the flight or died during the stress of the preparations. They didn’t want any females with young calves or any that were in the third trimester of a pregnancy and at risk for a miscarriage from the stress of the long journey ahead. Elephant pregnancies, however, are difficult to judge without an internal exam. To be certain they weren’t choosing any cows late in a pregnancy, the parks decided to bring in two veterinary specialists from Berlin, widely considered among the world’s authorities on elephant reproduction.
There was another challenge. The Reillys worried that the elephants who were not chosen might be traumatized if they saw members of their group being tranquilized and taken away by ground crews. To their eyes, the mass removal to the boma could easily look like another cull. To avoid that shock and any resulting hostility toward the park’s rangers and visitors, the Reillys decided on a different plan. In March 2003, when the thirteen were to be gathered, a helicopter crew darted every elephant in the two parks, knocking them all out so none would be awake to see the removal. The two German vets, flown in to assist, moved among the unconscious elephants and performed field sonograms on the selected females. Two of the females were pregnant, but neither had entered her third trimester. The elephants were loaded onto trucks and taken to the boma in Mkhaya. The Reilly family assumed the elephants would only have to stay there for a few weeks. But by then, a coalition of animal-rights groups, including Born Free and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), was protesting and organizing letter-writing campaigns and filing a lawsuit in federal court to block the importation of the elephants. “The Swazi Eleven,” the activists were now calling them.
“If the elephants are euthanized,” Katherine Meyer, a lawyer for the animal-rights groups, told a judge, “that would be a better outcome than to have these elephants put in crates, put on an airplane, brought over here, trained with bull hooks, put in cages, and live the rest of their lives in captivity.”
In Swaziland, the Reilly family was denounced by members of parliament, the local newspapers, even other elephant experts. Nine researchers studying wild elephants in Kenya, including Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole, renowned for their studies on elephant behavior and communication, released an open letter protesting the move, citing the intricacy of the emotional lives of the species and the damage to those lives in captivity. The researchers wrote:
(W)e believe the time has come to consider them as sentient beings and not as so much money on the hoof to be captured and sold and displayed for our own use. We should be beyond the exploitation of animals as complex and magnificent as elephants.
PETA offered to pay for moving them to other parks in Africa. One politician accused the Reillys of attempting to smuggle the elephants out of Swaziland. Others suggested that the Reillys’ talk of a cull was an empty threat, designed to pressure officials in the United States to approve the permits.
Mick and Ted were unprepared for the vitriol. They knew the reputation of Dr. Moss and the other researchers who had signed the letter of protest. But Kenya was not Swaziland. As for PETA’s offer to bankroll another alternative to the culling, the Reillys were skeptical. They were sure the offer would come with too many strings. Besides, just because another park was willing to take their elephants didn’t mean that the permits would be granted. The Reillys noted that there was no international outcry when they culled impalas or warthogs. Why didn’t PETA or Born Free issue press releases and launch petition drives for them? In court and in the media, the coalition hammered away at how San Diego and Lowry Park were angling to buy the elephants because they were a so-called “flagship species,” an animal so beloved that their presence in a zoo’s collection was sure to increase profits. But the Reillys argued that it was the animal-rights groups who were guilty of exploitation, whipping up the outrage for their own gain, capitalizing on elephants as their own flagship species guaranteed to draw a flood of donations from horrified animal lovers around the world. If the coalition truly believed the crisis in Mkhaya and Hlane was a convenient fiction, why didn’t they send someone to see the parks and all their dead trees? The smuggling charge made the Reillys laugh. How exactly, they asked, did one smuggle eleven elephants past customs?
By now it was August 2003, and the elephants had been in the boma for five months. The staff did what it could to keep them comfortable; sometimes their caretakers hand-fed them marula fruit, one of their favorites. Even so, the animals chafed at having their movements restricted. One day, several tried to break through the electrified fence, using another elephant as a battering ram. They chose Mbali—the small female named after Mick’s daughter—and thronged together to push her through the fence, apparently so they wouldn’t have to touch it themselves. When the current traveled through Mbali and shocked them, too, it put a quick end to their plan.
In Washington, the legal arguments went back and forth in federal court. The government permits had been approved, but now memoranda were being filed, injunctions requested, motions granted and denied and appealed. Finally, on August 15, two circuit judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington denied one last emergency motion from the animal-rights groups.