Sacred Elephants

I love a man called Luis Arranz. He doesn't know me and probably never will but this man, this weekend, has captured my heart and if things were different, I'd be packing my bags and on my way to stand and fight beside him.

I shall explain.

Some time over the summer I had a no-way-near-deep-nor-extensive-nor-long-enough email 'conversation' with my friend who will be known henceforth as Sarah about reincarnation. Sarah claims, and I have to quote her here because she's an eloquent one, oh yes:

I group this idea together with the reincarnation idea: they lend an interesting twist to hindsight. If we view the past with divine providence in mind, we can be more comfortable with our track record. If we think of the experiences that branched out of our choices as 'meant to be,' then we are more likely to forage them for meaning and lessons, to try and understand the schema that motivated those choices, and to gain insight and fortitude in our attempt to move forward. But I think that looking ahead at future decisions with that kind of helplessness is irresponsibly fatalistic.

I happen to want there to be such a thing as reincarnation because one life, wonderful and complicated as it is, is just not enough. Those of you who know me know that I do my best to cram in as much as I can and, please G-d, I have a long way to go yet, but in parallel universes, I'm the same age I am now and I am:

1) A doctor and surgeon working for The Red Cross in refugee camps, or on disputed borders (I'm still aiming for this in the back of my mind)

2) An intrepid explorer, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes; or at least an anthropologist off studying forgotten tribes, or maybe a zoologist tagging elephants

3) An entrepreneurial executive career woman with a mega-successful company that is very PC and helps save the world (rather than being a boring, pointless money-making one), because there is this business-head side of me I've never really explored and that's as much of an exploration as any other

4) Working for The EU in Chad with this man, Luis Arranz.

There are plenty of others but the list is rather long and I figure I need to get to the point at some stage.

I poached (weighty word) a National Geographic magazine from work this week because it featured the plight of my favourite creatures on earth, who are now, chokingly, an endangered species. I have loved elephants with a deep empathy (shush Harry- no jokes about ears or weight, thank you) since I was a little girl; Dad used to buy me silver pendants with elephants on them, I bought books about them, collected effigies of them and my favourite wildlife programs featured those most intelligent and mystical of creatures. Mum, sis and I visited elephant sancturies in Nepal and rode on one together (Mum will tell you the hilarious story sometime) and if I had thought about my life just a little bit more carefully when I was a crazed youth, I'd be doing what Luis is doing.

This guy I now love, Luis Arranz, works for the EU, running the Zakouma conservation project, a national-park-sized refuge in Chad that gives some of the last surviving African elephants armed protection against poachers. The international ivory trade was only made illegal in 1989, which is so disgustingly recent, but ivory is still, weirdly, very much in demand. (Who, who in their right minds would want it, knowing what's involved??) The article brought tears to my eyes - pictures of the carcasses of twenty elephants slaughtered in one attack; a male bull with his face cut off in another; the knowledge that their numbers in the Central African region have declined from 300,000 in the early 1970s to around only 10,000 today.

"It is a sad fact," writes J. Michael Fay, "that the vast majority of elephants in southeastern Chad don't die of old age. They die at the hand of man. Yet when I see the Zakouma elephant, all I see is joy. No rage or thirst for revenge - just a desire to protect their young."

How can they not hate us? Why don't they willfully attack us or fear us with a contemptuous, vicious loathing?





(Photo by Susanne Geigerich, www.fotocommunity.de)


Of course, I read the article and that was it. What am I doing with my life? I should be there with my man Luis, an AK-47 slung over my shoulder, riding my hoss into the war against the poachers, fearless, defiant, knowing six of Zakouma's guards have been shot by them in the last year. But a survey in 1985 of the range of heffalumps in the northern part of the Central African Republic showed a sickening ratio of live ones (4,308) to carcasses (7,861)...

Hmm. Apart from the obviously romantic notion of zipping off to Africa (never been to Africa!) is the idea that in this life, we have a chance, maybe even a duty, to do something worthwhile and meaningful. Saving the elephant, to me, is that thing. I can weight that up with wife-iness and motherhood, my own efforts to reinforce the numbers of Am Israel, of making Aliyah, of whatever else I may be achieving (and if there is something else, I can't pinpoint it right now) but I put the magazine down and sighed, and wondered if it was enough to let other people do these seriously important things and whether I could continue to feel satisfied merely loving them from afar.

I know I have a family and all and instead I have to hand the principles of my life over to people like Luis, but it does make you wonder.




(Mario Blaimauer, fotocommunity)


I'm leaving you with an excerpt from Sacred Elephant by Heathcote Williams, a book I've poured over since I was given it (by Tim, I just discovered!) in 1990. This is not for you to consider the elephant, because the elephant is my own particular love; but to consider the thing that means something to you in your life, and whether you can take any action that would really make a difference to both your sense of worth, and to our likkle planet.

"The elephant can walk on the tips of its toes
Along mountain paths that are near-vertical.
It can move in silence without leaving a trace,
And is unembarrassed by its bulk...

The trunk through which it breathes,
The nose and upper lip,
The ringed probiscis,
With sixty thousand muscles
Has nothing to do with baggage...
With it an elephant can remove a thorn
Or pick up a pin,
Uncork a bottle,
Pull up a tree by its roots,
Detect trip-wires and traps,
Doodle in the sand,
Dowse for water underground,
Walk along riverbeds,
Swim across inland oceans,
And sense alien presences many miles away...

...A captive elephant will perform the same last rites
Upon itself.
And from a shared aquatic past
The elephant inherits the one quality
That Homo sapiens has always arrogantly assumed
Distinguishes him from the brute beast -
An elephant in distress
Will weep salt tears.

It is said that when an elephant is in trouble
Even a frog will kick it.
One small, final indignity,
The fate of all minorities,
Is for the elephant to be the butt in a rash
Of seemingly innocent
Archly disparaging jokes...
'How many elephants can you get in a...?'
The answer could soon be none."