The grey issue

Posted on 4 February 2010

Another excerpt from my interview with Peter Allison, former safari guide and best-selling author of Don’t run, whatever you do and Don’t look behind you!

It’s a silly question, but do you have a favourite African animal?

I do get asked that a lot. Yup, elephants. For a lot of reasons, but one is that every time you’re watching an elephant, you learn something new. You can never feel like you’ve got a handle on elephants because they’re as different as individuals as we are. I firmly believe that they’ve got strong characters and a strong variety of characters. I’d love to get inside an elephant’s head for a day, just to understand their social interactions.
I’ve read a lot of research on it but you still feel there’s an emotional and intellectual level that we’re not tapping into. Every time you read about the world’s smartest animals, it’s always chimpanzees or dolphins or even, these days, octopus. But still it’s really hard to build a maze for an elephant. So I think they’re underrated – that they’re very smart, sensitive and perhaps empathetic animals. And empathy at the moment is about the only thing we’ve got to distinguish us from animals.

What do you think about culling elephants?

I worry that sometimes sentiment gets in the way of sense. I think that first of all the problem is misread when it’s said that there are too many elephants. Well, how about saying there are too many people and not enough elephants? Obviously no government is ever going to take that stand and you’re going to take a lot of flak expressing that opinion because we will always place our own species first. But I’m not saying I want people to starve, or that I want people to live in high-rises to make more room for elephants.

I’m not a scientist so I don’t have facts and figures in front of me, so if culling is the best thing to do and that’s what’s determined by the bulk of the scientific community, I wouldn’t want my sentiment to get in the way of that. I wouldn’t want a lot of animals to suffer because I don’t like the idea of elephants being shot – and I do, I hate it. But if it’the right thing to do and that’s what the consensus is, I’ll go with it rather than ending up that the Kruger Park becomes a wasteland. I know that there’s a very clever Zimbabwean who figured out how to move whole herds of elephants at once, but where are you going to move them to?

I think people are looking at the situation hoping for a right and wrong answer and there isn’t. There’s just wrong and less wrong. Perhaps culling is the less wrong answer – at the moment. We’ve got to hope that something better comes along. We’ve got to hope that people don’t decide ‘Okay, we’ve gone with culling’ and stop looking for a better option. But I don’t think people will. I think elephants raise enough passion in people that we will keep looking.

Do you think the Peace Parks offer some hope?

That really is a beacon. That would give elephants so much more wandering room. I do get a bit nervous about the idea of elephants that have been so well protected for years in the Kruger wandering into Zimbabwe at the moment. It’ll take them a while to realise they can go back there, but it will be great when they do.

One thing that I saw in the Okavango is that the Okavango looks like it should have 10 times more elephants than it has, but there just aren’t a lot in there. Whereas up in the Linyanti, where they’ve absolutely trashed the environment, it’s filled with elephants. It looks like there’s not enough food for a single big bull and yet there’re 60, 70 thousand of them there every winter.

You know the story of the little boy and the starfish? I’m not normally a person of Hallmark card sentimentality, but I love that story, because that’s always been my attitude towards conservation: It matters to this one. You can drive yourself to depression by trying to save everything and feeling so impotent at your inability to save every elephant. Whereas if you say, ‘I’m going to save five’, then at least you’ve saved them rather than sitting in a corner and weeping because you can’t save them all.






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