For the record, this detail does not soothe me as the guns make their way toward the elephants under the tree. I have not yet figured out how to dislike elephants enough to want to see one shot. In private treason against my hosts, I am thinking, Not now, not now. Let it please not get shot today.
We near the creatures. The big bull shifts its ears, and it is a significant event, like the hoisting of a schooner’s rigging. Jeff lifts his binoculars. As it turns out, the bull is missing a tusk, probably broken off in a fight. So it will not be shot, its ultimate reward for the tusk-snapping tussle.
We creep back to the jeep. Robyn is electrified, breathing hard, her blue eyes luminous with adrenaline: “That was big!” she says to Will. “As soon as we got out of the truck, was your heart going?”
“Nah, but when he turned and his ears spread and he went from huge to massive? Yeah.”
“Huge,” says Robyn. “It could just mow us down.”
“We’d be jelly,” says Will. “But you wouldn’t want to have shot him on your first day, anyway.”
Fair warning: An elephant does get shot in this story. It gets shot pretty soon. Maybe that upsets you, as it did 100 percent of the people (hunters and nonhunters) to whom I mentioned this assignment.
Elephants are obviously amazing, or rather, they are obvious receptacles for our amazement, because they seem to be a lot like us. They live about as long as we do. They understand it when we point at things, which our nearest living evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, doesn’t really. They can unlock locks with their trunks. They recognize themselves in mirrors. They are socially sophisticated. They stay with the same herds for life, or the cows do, anyway. They mourn their dead. They like getting drunk (and are known to loot village liquor stashes in Africa and India). When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry.
So why would you want to put a bullet in one? Well, if we are to take hunters at their word, it is because the experience of shooting an animal yields a thrill, a high that humans have been getting off on since we clubbed our first cave bear. And if you go in for this sort of thing, then it arguably stands to reason that the bigger the beast, the bigger the thrill when it hits the ground.
On the subject of hunting’s pleasures, Robyn Waldrip has this to say: “It kind of taps into your primal instincts. I think everybody has it in them.”
But an elephant?
“It was on my bucket list of hunting. It’s the largest land mammal, and just to go up against something that big, it’s exciting. I ran into this mom at the grocery store and she was like, ‘What are you doing for the summer?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Africa to do an elephant hunt.’ And she said, ‘Why in the world would you wanna do that?’ and I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’”
Jeff Rann has a similar take: “Hunting’s almost like a drug to people that do it.” In his 38-year career, Jeff has presided at the shootings of around 200 elephants, and he has never had a trophy get away from him. It is Jeff Rann whom King Juan Carlos I of Spain calls when he wants to shoot an elephant, as he did in April 2012. (King Juan Carlos likely will not get the hankering again. He broke his hip on the safari—in the shower, not on Rann’s watch—and amid the general outrage sparked by leaked photos of the king posed alongside his kill, Juan Carlos was booted from the honorary presidency of the World Wildlife Fund and compelled to issue a public apology.)
Rann is the most perfect exemplar I have ever met of Hemingway’s speak-softly-and-shoot-big-things-without-being-a-blowhard-about-it masculine ideal. He is lethally competent and incredibly understated and cool, even when he’s telling swashbuckling stories, such as the time he nearly got killed by a leopard: “The leopard charged. I shot him. It was a bad shot. He jumped on me, and we just kind of looked at each other. I remember those yellow eyes staring back at me. He bit me twice and dropped to the ground. He also pissed all over me. For about a year, I’d wake up in the night and I’d smell that strong cat smell. But I don’t think about it anymore.” Or the time he led the Botswana Defence Force into a camp of poachers who’d been hunting in the land he leases from the government. “We went into camp, and there were two old guys and one kid about 16 years old. The agents just opened up on them. Killed the two old guys outright. The one they shot 11 times, the other they shot 14 times. The kid took off running, but they shot him a couple of times in the back.”
Q. So you, like, saw three guys get shot and killed?
A. Yeah.
Q. Whoa. Wow. What was that like?
A. Didn’t bother me.
Q. Wow, really? Weird. Do you think that’s because maybe you’ve seen so many animals killed over the years that seeing the poachers get shot, it’s, you know, just another animal?
[Patient silence during which Rann seems to be restraining self from uttering the word “pussy” in conjunction with visiting journalist.]
A. I don’t know. Hard to say. Those guys [illegally] killed a lot of animals. It pissed me off.
In addition to million-acre leases in Botswana, Rann has a hunting concession in Tanzania and a 5,500-acre rare-game ranch outside San Antonio. The economic downturn did not put much of a bite in Rann’s business, a happy fact he credits to the addictive nature of hunting’s elemental pleasures: “Our clients might not buy a new car as often, or buy a second or third home, but they’re still going to go hunting.” But this new hunting ban is poised to do to Rann’s elephant-hunting business what economic calamity could not.
There’s been a regulated hunting industry in Botswana since the 1960s. Before the ban took effect, the government was issuing roughly 400 elephant-bull tags per year, of which Jeff Rann was allowed to buy about 40. And counterintuitively, even in the presence of an active bullet-tourism industry, Botswana’s elephant population has multiplied twentyfold, from a low point of 8,000 in 1960 to more than 154,000 today. These healthy numbers, as people like Rann are keen to mention, mirror elephant populations in other African countries where hunting is allowed. Despite a recent uptick in poaching problems, both Tanzania (with 105,000 elephants) and Zimbabwe (with 51,000) have seen similar patterns of population growth. Kenya, on the other hand, banned elephant hunting in 1973 and has seen its elephant population decimated, from 167,000 to 27,000 or so in 2013. Some experts predict that elephants will be extinct in Kenya within a decade.
As the pro-hunting side has it, elephant safaris assist conservation by pretty simple means: a bull killed on a legal hunt is, in theory, worth more to the local economy than an animal slaughtered by poachers. In the most far-flung parts of the Botswana bush, the hunting industry has been the chief employer, offering a paycheck to people in places where there simply is no other gainful work.
When locals’ livelihoods are bound to the survival of the elephants, they’re less likely to tolerate poachers, or to summarily shoot animals that wander into their crop fields. Furthermore, hunting concessions are uninviting to poachers. Hunters like Jeff Rann employ private security forces to patrol the remoter parts of the preserve.
Hunting’s critics maintain that, in practice, the industry tends to fall short of these ideals. For every professional hunter who follows the rules, there are others who overshoot their quotas, or engage in illegal ivory trafficking, or cheat their employees of a living wage. In countries more corruption-plagued than Botswana, crooked officials commonly siphon off safari profits before they reach the elephants’ rural human neighbors on whose mercy and financial interest the fate of the species ultimately depends. And lately, in Tanzania and Zimbabwe (where last year 300 elephants were poisoned in a single massacre), the hunting industry has proven no antidote to poaching. Citing “questionable management” and “lack of effective law enforcement” in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in April 2014, suspended the import of elephant trophies from both nations.
/> But Satsumo, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks employee who’s tagging along on the Waldrips’ safari, believes that Botswana’s hunting ban may ultimately turn out badly for the elephants. “There will be more poachers,” she says. “More elephants will get out of the reserve. They will go to people’s crop fields. The hunters pump the water for them, but now they will have to move to the villages to find it. It’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing.”
Abhorrent as the practice is to most Western, Dumbo-adoring sensibilities, elephant hunting occupies an awkward, grayed-out space in the landscape of conservation policy. Some nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund have quietly endorsed it as part of a conservation strategy but decline to discuss their position on record. The issue is such an emotional live wire, for people on both sides of the debate, and is so deeply laced with PR perils, that it’s just about impossible to find a frank and disinterested expert opinion about hunting’s efficacy as a means to help conserve the species. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find anyone on the anti-hunting side who could convincingly answer this question: if hunting is so disastrous for the long-term survival of the species, why do the countries where it’s legal to hunt elephants have so many more of them than those where the practice is banned?
With the next couple of tourist seasons, most of Botswana’s elephant concessions will be converted to photographic-safari destinations, which many conservationists promote as an effective way to monetize the animals and thereby protect them. But according to Jeff Rann, photo safaris aren’t all that difficult for poachers to work around. “[Photo tourists] are not armed. And they stick to a set, predictable routine, so the poachers just go kill animals in parts of the concessions where they know the photographics aren’t going to go.”
Obviously Rann’s got a vested interest in this perspective. But looking at the case of Kenya, home to one of Africa’s largest photo-safari sectors and a poaching problem of catastrophic proportions, you sort of have to give Rann his due. Of course, there’s every possibility that some combination of public policy, private money, and anti-ivory market pressures will render hunting obsolete as a conservation instrument. But for now, if you are one of those people who chokes up at reports of poachers poisoning elephants by the herd, you may have to countenance the uncomfortable possibility that one solution to the survival of the species may involve people paying lots of money to shoot elephants for fun.
The hunt continues. We are not back in the truck 10 minutes before the tracker calls for a halt. Robyn and Will linger in the Land Cruiser while Jeff and the tracker go off into the bush to investigate. On the heels of our run-in with the monotusker and his pal, it feels as though the day has already coughed up a full lode of potential prey. So it registers as something of a surprise when Jeff returns with this news: “There’s five bulls, all of ’em pretty good size.” One of them is carrying at least 60 pounds of ivory, Jeff’s threshold, I gather, for trophy viability. “It’s a shooter,” he says. “If we get a shot, we’ve gotta shoot it.”
Robyn shoulders her rifle. Her eyes are incandescent. Off we troop over the sand.
The bush resounds with a din of timber destruction. The sun is making its descent, and perhaps a hundred yards off, through the brambles, tusks glow in the rich light. The animals are fanned out ahead of us, noisily munching. We come in closer, and the elephants begin to take note, though we register more as a mild irritant, not a mortal threat. The trophy animal is in a lane of dense shrubs, mooning us. Robyn could conceivably flank it and get an angle on its head, but in the thick undergrowth it would be a poor shot, and that first bullet might be all she’d get. There’s a risk that she would only wound it and her $60,000 would sprint off into the weeds. Jeff and Robyn whisper tactically. The elephant’s obliviousness is exasperating. It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain.
Not 30 feet from us, the elephant with the missing tusk, the same elephant we just ran into, suddenly appears, having made its approach way more stealthily than an animal the size of a bread truck ought to be capable of. The bull is pissed. It nods and snorts and tosses snoutfuls of sand our direction. Okay, whatever you are, it’s kind of annoying, so get the fuck out of here, please.
I find the performance convincing. It keeps coming. Two more strides and the elephant could reach out and touch someone with its trunk. The elephant looks to be about 12 feet tall. The trunk weighs hundreds of pounds and is easily capable of breaking a human spine.
Apologies if that sounds like sensationalistic inanities you’ve heard intoned sotto voce by Discovery Channel narrators trying to ramp up the drama of snorkeling with porpoises and such. But the elephant is about 15 feet away, and I will now confess to being scared just about shitless. The elephant snorts and brandishes its vast head. Lunch goes to lava in my bowels. If not for my present state of sphincter-cinching terror, I would well be in the market for an adult diaper. This is an amazingly pure kind of fear. My arteries are suddenly capable of tasting my blood, which right now has the flavor of a nine-volt battery.
Jeff Rann is in dialogue with the elephant. This consists of whispering menacingly and jabbing his rifle around in the air. The elephant does its pissed-off little shuffle for perhaps a minute, probably less. And then the tape runs in slow reverse. The elephant retreats backward into the shrubs, eyeing us, curtsying hostilely as he goes.
“Wells, you good, buddy?” Robyn asks, grinning. Apparently I’m visibly, risibly freaked. I regain my bearings, and we resume our approach to the trophy bull.
It requires the same strategy. The target is in the middle of the fan of five. The elephants have arranged themselves such that it’s kind of difficult to get an angle on the prize without straying into the paths of the others. A disquiet, a shared unease, is taking hold among these fellows. The racket of salad consumption is tapering off. The elephants are beginning to push on. But, goddamn, these guys could use a coach. The interaction with the one-tusker notwithstanding, their defense pretty much sucks. They’re moving, but it’s not so much flight as a slow and cranky mosey.
The light is caramelizing. If Robyn can’t get a shot in the next five or 10 minutes, the sun will sink past the trees and it will be lion-o’clock out here. The sun, too, seems murderously slow in its descent. We move past one elephant, past another, until we are on the trophy beast. Again, its butt is to us. Nothing in the animal world tops an elephant’s ass as an emblem of indifference and reproof.
Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today.
And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress.
Robyn raises her rifle. For the past few months, she’s been rehearsing this moment in her bedroom closet in Texas, aiming, reloading, aiming again. She shoots.
The rifle’s thunder is somehow insignificant. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk. But an elephant brain is a big piece of equipment—it can weigh as much as 12 pounds. Robyn’s bullet did not apparently sever enough vital neurons to kill the animal in a single shot. He shakes his head, as if to wag away the pain of a wasp’s sting. There is a second shot that strikes him in the neck. He turns to flee, but his right foreleg has buckled. He strives to stand. The effect is of a cripple trying to pitch a broken circus tent. In the franticness of his movements, one can sense the elephant’s surprise that his body, a machine that has served him well for over 50 years, has suddenly stopped accepting his commands. To see so large and powerful an animal vised in an even larger and more powerful inevitability is, for lack of a better word, intense.
The other elephants scatter. Robyn and Jeff jog toward the animal. In the fervor of the moment, Robyn has moment
arily forgotten to put fresh rounds in her gun. “Reload, reload, reload,” Jeff instructs. They advance to a distance of maybe 25 feet. “Okay, shoot him right in the hip.” The gun fires twice. The tent sags right and seems to sort of sway and billow, as though surrendering to wind.
“Okay, come with me,” Jeff says. He leads Robyn along the animal’s left flank. At the sound of the hunters coming in close, the elephant struggles more direly to rise, but instead, he loses ground against gravity and settles closer to the earth. “Just watch his trunk. [Be sure] he doesn’t hit you with it.”
Jeff leads her to a position perhaps 10 feet from the elephant’s left temple. “Okay, hit him right in the ear hole.” At this point there is little the elephant can do except to turn his face away. The last shot claps into the elephant’s ear.
“Perfect,” says Jeff Rann. “Brain shot. You brained him.”
And the elephant, still swaying on its haunches, a slow faucet of blood trickling from his forehead, is no more.
So that is how the elephant got shot. Once in the forehead, once in the neck, twice in the hip, once in the ear. How it felt to watch the elephant get shot is something else. As I watched the elephant go down, what obtruded into my consciousness was a kind of a thing, a psychological sensation with a very particular shape and weight and texture, a geometry as discrete and seemingly physical as a house key or a tire iron, but which I don’t have any useful language to describe. This thing, this mute-pseudo revelation, had something to do with adrenaline’s power to catalyze time into taffy. Forty seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last, yet what happened in those 40 seconds seemed to happen out of time. It was another kind of time in which a new understanding of death impressed itself upon me more rapidly than my cognition could accommodate.
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