The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony (the ebook reader txt) 📕

Every week or two they came up to the house, so we eventually strung an electric wire around Françoise’s garden otherwise they would have trampled it flat and gobbled up the shrubbery. But even that didn’t deter them from visiting; they would stand patiently at the wire until I came down and said hello.

One week I went to Durban on business and on my return was surprised to see all seven elephants outside the house, waiting expectantly as if part of a reception committee. I put it down to coincidence. But it happened again after the next trip, and the next. It soon became obvious that somehow they knew exactly when I was away and when I was coming back.

Then it got … well, spooky. I was at the airport in Johannesburg and missed my flight home. Back at Thula Thula, 400 miles away, the herd was on their way up to the house when, as I was later told, they suddenly halted, turned around and retreated into the bush. We later worked out that this happened at exactly the same time as I missed my flight.

The next day they were back at the house as I arrived.

I soon accepted that there was something extremely unusual about all this; something that transcended the limited realm of my understanding. What has been scientifically proven is elephants’ incredible communication ability. As I had learned, elephants transmit infrasound vibrations through unique stomach rumblings that can be received over vast distances. These ultra-low frequencies, which cannot be detected by the human ear, oscillate at similar wavelengths to those transmitted by whales; vibrations that some believe quaver across the globe.

But even if those wavelengths only vibrate for hundreds of square miles, which is now generally accepted in the scientific community, it still means elephants are potentially in contact with each other across the African continent. One herd speaks with a neighbouring herd, which in turn connects with another until you have conduits covering their entire habitat, just as you or I would have a long-distance telephone call.

When scientist Katy Payne, of the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University, discovered these elephant sound waves it was a startling breakthrough, one which would change our entire concept of elephant behaviour. There is a concrete link between advanced congenital intelligence and long-distance communication. For example, a frog’s communication skills consist solely of primal mating croaks as its pond constitutes its entire universe. It has no need to expand further.

But elephants are communicating across vast distances, which shows that these giants of the wilderness are far more developed than we ever believed. They possess a vastly greater intellect than previously thought.

If you doubt this, consider the following: would elephants have evolved such incredible communication abilities just to transmit a series of meaningless rumbles and grunts? Of course not. Evolution is ruthless; anything not essential to survival withers on the gene-pool vine. Thus it is only reasonable to postulate that elephants are using these advanced long-distance frequencies for a specific purpose – to communicate coherently, one to another and herd to herd.

So are they are telling each other about what is happening to their world and what we as humans are doing to them? Given their intelligence there is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what is happening.

chapter twenty

Even though the Ovambos were long gone, poaching continued sporadically and while we tried our best to stamp it out, losing the odd impala on a game reserve whilst galling, was tantamount to shoplifting from a department store. But suddenly the situation changed. The Buchanana police station commander called me in and said he had information that rhino and ivory poachers were in the area. As any game ranger knows, these thugs were in a different league altogether: highly organized, heavily armed professionals who wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who got in their way. They knew what they were doing, as we soon found out.

We didn’t even hear the shot. It was fired from a .458 calibre rifle on the far side of the reserve, quiet and lethal. We only discovered the victim days later when out on patrol I noticed scores of white-backed vultures circling down in an aerial funnel.

Something had died. Something big and we needed to get there fast to find out what it was. However, the corpse was in dense thornveld, far off any track, and by the time we had hiked there we were scratched, tired and greasy with sweat.

Hyenas had already made gaping red inroads into the carcass, opening up the armour-plated skin for the vultures which swarmed over the rank grey cadaver. There musthave been a hundred of them squawking, flapping and fighting to tear at the carrion.

Those that had fought themselves into prime positions were stretching their elongated necks deep into the festering intestines, gorging themselves. Moving about on the edge of the melee were two black-backed jackals darting in and out between the huge birds and snatching at the meat. Judging by the state of decomposition the mound of putrefying flesh seemed about three days old.

It was a southern white rhino female, her gore-congealed snout grotesquely crumpled as both horns had been cleanly severed – probably with a chainsaw. Even though she had only been with us for less than a year, I knew her well, always stopping at a safe distance and ‘chatting’ to her whenever I saw her. She was the one we had distracted Mnumzane from with the horse feed, the day rhinos were first introduced on Thula Thula. My distress was compounded by the evidence that she was pregnant, the remains of the foetus scattered amongst the disgorged entrails.

This was the work of expert poachers. They must have been hiding inside the reserve for days watching the rhino’s movements and ours and meticulously planning the murder of this magnificent animal. Nature had lost a prime breeding female and we would feel the loss keenly. We only had four rhinos