O what a rogue and peasant-killer is he

Nicholas Harman

Jumbo is not such a jolly fellow when you meet him on his own ground. Douglas Chadwick points out that in India, where the great beasts are regarded as pretty much under control, wild elephants poach some 150-200 people every year, and a couple of hundred elephant-minders are killed by their supposedly domesticated charges.

African elephants, with their great raggedy ears, are still more dangerous to man. In Uganda once I saw a woman and her children who had been squashed flat overnight in their wretched hut, apparently in a wandering herd's idea of fun. Her family and friends were angry that the army refused to come and shoot the murderers with heavy machine-guns, as they used to in Idi Amin's day. That would have provided a proper funeral feast.

Some elephants are as nasty as some rattlesnakes, some Serbians or some of many other species put on earth by God's, or Darwin's, mysterious ways. Quite possibly some whales are just as foul, in the privacy of the deep. But there they are, huge and undeniable, their collective public relations massaged by Dumbo and Babar. They may not be there much longer, at least in their wild state. If you feel the pachydermatological itch, and want to spy one before they disappear behind park fences or into gene banks, you had better hurry.

Wild elephants will disappear because more and more people want to grab their former territory for homes and farms. This humdrum and inevitable process lacks drama. To spice it up, ready-made villains abound in the ivory trade, from poachers (most of them hungry Africans) to collectors (most of them Japanese lovers of netsuke). Mr Chadwick went to see a netsuke craftsman, and found him inconve- niently loveable.

The Chadwick book will tell you all you want to know, and more, about elephants everywhere; slaughtered ones and

pampered ones in Africa, processional ones in India, white ones (well, sort of greyish- pink) tethered in a Thai stable. He explains their ecological functions, why conservation will not work, exactly how they breathe and mate, and how horrible elephant-hunters are. He usually writes between the pictures in the National Geographic magazine, so you can be sure his facts have been checked and checked again. Since reported speech is his preferred mode, he records some amazing nonsense, such as the elephantine boasts of a Zimbabwean white hunter about his skill in slaughtering both animals and Africans.

Jeremy Gavron would not kill a fly. He actually likes Africans as well as elephants, and writes beautifully about their one-sided rivalry for land. His way of imparting elephant lore is as English as Mr Chad- wick's is American; he sneaks it in surrepti- tiously rather than encyclopaedically, and spots the funny bits. The scientists who purport to enumerate Chad's elephants by counting their droppings established four dung classes, of which Class A is 'intact, very fresh, with odour'.

Ray Bonner, too, confines his elephant discussion to Africa. He does not seem to like them much, and on the rare occasions when he goes into the bush finds it alarming. He dislikes people even more. As a prize-winning New York Times man he seems to believe, in the manner of that great newspaper, that boring memoranda deserve publication simply because some ass has stamped them 'confidential'.

The windmill that Mr Bonner quixotical- ly attacks, and whose private memos he loves to quote, is the World Wide Fund for Nature (or rather, confusingly, its Ameri- can branch, still called the World Wildlife Fund). The WWF gets lots of money from ultra-rich suckers who hope that donations will buy them an introduction to its top people, who include Prince Philip (of Edin- burgh) and Prince Bernhard (of the Netherlands). Mr Bonner claims they have sold the pass to the animal rights dema- gogues, and betrayed the wild animals they promise to protect.

Grandees, including the princely World Wildlifers, have known for generations that wild things survive only when the peasants

`To absi,nt parents!'

are paid to put up with them. In these islands, for example, deer and foxes eat farmers' crops and chickens, but have been preserved because people enjoy killing them expensively.

Mr Bonner accurately describes the ghastly East African game parks where safari vans by the dozen, cameras on the flash, surround overfed lions. He attacks those who oppose any killing of elephants, arguing that the surest way to destroy what is left of Africa's wild ranges is to preserve more and more large animals on smaller and smaller acreages. Above all, he thinks more elephants would survive if rich people were encouraged to kill them for fun and for ivory, and charged stiff blood- money for their 'sport'. His full headmasterly scorn is reserved for those, including the World Wildlifers, who have sought an all-out international ban on the sale of ivory. In summary, his view is that sentimental pro-elephantism overwhelmed rational discussion; that selling ivory culled from surplus tuskers could raise much of the cash needed to run game parks properly, and to compensate Africans for the expense and danger of sharing their landscape with huge and dangerous wild beasts.

That argument would probably be right if all fresh ivory could be somehow certificat- ed, so that only properly culled stuff actual- ly got onto the market. But the commercial ingenuity of African politicians and customs men would certainly defeat any such scheme, however well planned; and anyway the sales ban that he deplores has in practice been followed by the collapse of ivory prices, and a consequent drop in ivory-poaching.

Because colonial administrators liked shooting them, and ivory sales were profitable, African elephants have been preserved by law for very nearly a hundred years, and are in many places more numer- ous now than they were at the turn of the century. Mr Bonner argues that this was achieved by ignoring the problems of the black people who are supposed to live with the animals. In Zimbabwe, alongside the man-made Lake Kariba, he finds and admires a scheme called Campfire (a dreadful acronym) whose white managers direct a share of the profits from eco- tourism to the local villagers.

Unfortunately, the tireless Mr Chadwick, who also visited Campfire, coolly points out that it is no more than half successful (`The most coherent thing [the headman] uttered was that I should come back when he was not so drunk'), and shows that the emphasis on it was

partly propaganda, hastily cobbled together in response to the attacks on Zimbabwe's pro-ivory, pro-elephant-hunting stance.

The people who get the elephant- preservation business right are in southern Africa. What they get wrong is the people- preservation business. Their ivory- protection squads, cheered on by the pro- elephant lobby, keenly shoot down black ivory-poachers. Their successes prove only that powerful and destructive beasts can survive in controlled numbers if they are fenced off from farmers in ruthlessly policed, profitable, glorified zoos like the Kruger National Park. Of these three jumbo books, the one that hits the spot is Mr Gavron's elegy for a passing species.