National Geographic: Coming of Age with Elephants Page #3

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In the very years that elephant

population was being decimated,

Kenya's human population had doubled.

People and elephants were both hungry

for the same land.

The deal with the inevitably conflict,

Richard Leakey needed someone

who understood elephants.

He asked Joyce Poole to run

the National elephant program.

It would mean leaving

the idyllic world of Amboseli.

It was difficult to leave Amboseli

behind, but at the same time,

I was being given the opportunity

of a lifetime.

I had been so privileged to spend

so many years with elephants,

to have learned so much I felt a sense

of, almost of obligation,

of giving them something in return

and I felt that

with the knowledge I had

that perhaps I could make

a difference.

Joyce was convinced she could help the

elephants find a place in modern Kenya.

She didn't realize how difficult

it was going to be.

Joyce Poole had now entered the very

heart of the conflict over elephants.

At Kenya's wildlife service,

she recruited a team of

committed young Kenyans.

They were eager to develop

new programs

that would help people

and elephants live together.

One of the first tasks that I had

at Kenya wildlife service

was to survey the country and find out

how many elephants we had left.

I would have loved for them

to have been able to return

to their old haunts,

but there just wasn't

the space anymore.

I began to have this horrible vision

of a future world

where almost all of the land would be

taken up by people

and the only space left for elephants

would be inside a few national parks.

Other African nations had already

confined their elephants

to national parks.

Joyce hoped that would never happen

in Kenya.

She knew it would ultimately mean

controlling the elephant population.

Elephants need space.

An adult eats 300 pounds of

vegetation a day.

As the population grows,

elephants can have a devastating

effect on park habitat.

For other African nations,

the solution is to compute how many

elephants the land can sustain,

and kill the rest.

It's called culling.

I think culling is totally unethical.

I think it's barbaric.

I suppose I imagine it like taking a

group of humans and just deciding

we're going to take out this family

or we're going to take out that family.

Joyce believed she could avoid culling

in Kenya.

But now there was a new problem.

Elephants were beginning

to move out of the parks.

And when they did,

tragedy was waiting.

The elephants could no longer go back

to their old migratory routes.

Settlers had planted crops everywhere.

Families had staked their entire lives

on what had once been

prime elephant habitat.

The elephants were just going back

to their old haunts,

but from the settlers' viewpoint,

they were out of control.

The radio messages came in from

the stations, almost every day.

Elephants were on the rampage.

They were eating their way

through cornfields,

they were knocking down houses, and

they were trampling people to death.

Joyce knew she had to keep people

and elephants apart,

and it was a matter of life and death

on both sides.

She tried to protect vulnerable farms

with electric fences.

But the elephants learned

to short circuit the fences.

Elephants broke through here

last night,

and they went out into the shambas

out here.

Probably, one of the bulls

was in charge of this

and he must've broke in

and they went out.

Every day we have to keep repairing

after every breakage

and this is taking up resources.

The elephants were always

one step ahead.

Under cover of dark,

they constantly found new ways

to get through to the farms.

In one night,

an elephant could destroy a family's

entire food supply for the year.

If you can imagine having to

defend your entire livelihood

from some enormous beast

that came in the middle of the night

and weighed close to a hundred times

what you weigh.

You can't see it.

All you have is a small torch

and this,

this beast,

this monster can track you down,

can smell exactly where you are

and you can't see it.

It can crush you

in a matter of seconds.

That's what so many people

across Africa are up against.

When the elephants come, the farmers

have only rocks, sticks,

and the sound of their own voices

to defend their crops.

In the morning,

at least one family faces famine.

As you can see for yourself,

I have nothing left for my family.

All the crops were destroyed

by the elephants;

the beans, the corn, the tomatoes,

everything's gone.

The children will sit and keep quite.

They have nothing to eat.

They'll just sit quietly.

The close contact between people and

elephants sometimes ended horribly.

Many people are killed in Kenya

every year by elephants.

It's somewhere, probably between

Some areas are worse than others.

I don't think that in most cases.

I think that the elephant didn't

intend to kill the person.

But in some cases,

they've definitely gone out,

tracked down the person

and kneeled on them,

which is usually the way an elephant

would kill someone.

The most effective way to control

problem elephants was to shoot them,

but local wildlife wardens lacked

the equipment

and training to do it properly.

Many of the elephants that were

being shot were the wrong ones,

that it wasn't the elephant that

had killed Mrs. So-and-so,

that it wasn't the elephant that had

gone into the shamba and destroyed it.

The elephants that were being shot

were taking hours to die,

it just wasn't right.

Joyce had to face a painful reality.

She'd come of age learning

how elephants live,

and she accepted the need

for some to die.

But now she was going to

have to give the order.

I realized that elephants were

going to have to be shot,

that we couldn't allow elephants

to go rampaging through people's

farms and killing people.

But if we had to kill elephants,

I wanted to make sure that we at least,

we killed the right elephants,

the ones that were doing the damage.

In 1992, Joyce established

a special team

and sent them into military training

to become marksman.

Their job was to kill problem

elephants, but to do it humanely.

I think the question isn't how we can

justify shooting elephants.

I think the question is how can we

justify not shooting them.

I mean, when you've spent the night

out in a maize field with people

who are just having their whole

livelihood destroyed right there

and then,

there is no other alternative.

Now when villages suffered repeated

attacks, Joyce sent her control team.

They watched by night

till the elephants came.

We're going to wait for the elephants.

They'll be coming in,

probably, in an hour or two.

We'll wait for them here.

As soon as we hear them

cutting into the maize,

we'll cut into the maize above them

and come around,

and try and get in front of them.

So if we can get them

coming towards us,

we can then pick out the ringleader

and we'll shoot him.

We've got to shoot one out of the

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