Ecological Intelligence

by Ian Mccallum

  Animals trusted him, stepped

  into his open look, grazing,

  and the imprisoned lions stared in

  as if into an incomprehensible freedom…

  There is no doubt that some people have a way with animals. Notwithstanding the bonds that build up over time between animals and their handlers, mutual trust, sometimes immediate, has much to do with the demeanor, the attitude, and the intention of the animal handlers themselves. The following remarkable and well-documented story is an example of what I mean. It involved a Botswana-based American safari operator, Randall Moore, and a wounded elephant bull in the Pilanesburg Game Reserve in the Northern Province of South Africa. The wound had been caused by a deep hippopotamus bite to one of its legs which had then become infected, resulting in a need for surgical intervention. The animal was darted, anesthetized, and the infected area appropriately treated. The wound did not heal immediately, however, and it was soon realized that several interventions would be needed. The surgeon was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, the animal needed to be treated, but on the other there was a serious risk to the elephant if it was to undergo repeated anesthetics. Moore, who had released this animal from captivity into the wild twelve years previously, was called in from his elephant-back safari operation in Botswana to help. To the astonishment of all involved, the elephant immediately recognized Moore’s call and approached him as if to greet him. Moore, in turn, expressed his intention to help in the way that he “spoke” to the animal, telling it what was required. As if permission had been granted, the sugeon was able to treat the animal’s wound and, over a period of several days, the elephant would stand and quietly allow the wound to be bathed and dressed.

  In another fascinating story about animal-human communication, Heinz Koors, a veterinary surgeon involved in an elephant relocation program near Kruger National Park, was asked why “his” elephants seemed to be so relaxed while those handled by another operator kept breaking out of their enclosures. He answered, “I speak to the matriarch in the group and ask her not to break out.” When I asked him to confirm this story, he confessed that he couldn’t be specific about it. However, his reputation had preceded him and a fellow wildlife man-ager supported the popular version of Koors’s particular gift.

  Does this imply that there is some special technique for communicating with elephants or other animals? I suspect there is, but it is not something one can learn from a book. I believe, even if it is on a subconscious level, you would have to know the animals with whom you are relating, and if they happen to be elephants, you would have to know the elephant in you.

  To me, the aim of human-to-animal communication is clear. It is not about trying to get the animals to like you, or to have them at your beck and call. Instead, through body language, tone of voice, or even music (on several occasions I have inflicted the gentle strumming of a guitar on elephant bulls as well as spotted hyenas), it is to let them know that you mean no harm; that you want to learn not only about them, but from them. I believe it works. Whether they warmed to it or not, I don’t know, but on two separate occasions I had a hyena, at less than 100 feet, respond to the strumming with its characteristic contact call. On each occasion the hyena then moved on. The elephant bulls, on the other hand, would often stand quite still, listening, the base of their trunks expanding and contracting in what I believe is an infra-sound response to the musical strings. I was subsequently delighted to read, in Douglas Chadwick’s book The Fate of the Elephants, a report by longtime elephant researcher Joyce Poole about elephants “drawn to the strains of guitar music issuing from camp some evenings.” She observed how, compared with other elephant incursions into the camp-site, no one bothered to chase these elephants away.

  In a poignant and humbling record of a piece of research in which the importance of the seeking of permission is powerfully evident, University of Michigan primatologist Barbara Smuts describes what she has learned about herself from her encounters with baboons.

  I was lucky to be accepted by the animals as a mildly interesting, harmless companion, permitted to travel amongst them. Under the guise of scientific research, I was in the company of expert guides—baboons who could spot a predator a mile away and who seemed to possess a sixth sense for the proximity of snakes. Abandoning myself to their far superior knowledge, I moved as a humble disciple, learning from masters about being an African anthropoid. Thus I became (or, rather, regained my ancestral right to be) an animal, moving instinctively through a world that felt (because it was) like my ancient home. The baboons stubbornly resisted my feeble but sincere attempts to convince them that I was nothing more than a detached observer, a neutral object they could ignore. Right from the start, they knew better, insisting that I was, like them, a social subject vulnerable to the demands and rewards of relationship. The deepest lessons came when I found myself sharing the being of a baboon, because other baboons were treating me like one.

  What I see as a creative or critical distance between one’s self and the other, Smuts sees as an invisible line that defines the personal space between each troop member, a space that expands and contracts, depending on the circumstances. Anyone involved in the dynamics of one-on-one psychotherapy will know about that invisible line.

  Do we still need reminding that we have within us millions of years of life as corresponding, reflecting beings? We must not forget this. This, in essence, was Smuts’s secret. She stopped thinking about what to do and instead “surrendered to instinct, not as mindless, reflexive action, but rather as action rooted in an ancient primate legacy of embodied knowledge.” She learned how to ask permission to be with the baboons. And it was granted.

  One of the most sobering experiences I have ever had in the wild occurred on an open plain in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. I was guiding a group of tourists when a herd of elephants just over a mile away began to run away from us. Having picked up the scent and sight of humans, the reaction was one of obvious mistrust. The reason for this was clear. The area I was in had been a hunting concession less than a year previously. Who could blame the elephants? Our timing was wrong, and so was our sensing of the critical distance between us. As it is with humans, experiential memory runs deep in the animal kingdom. It did not matter that our intentions were benign. Human beings had lost the elephants’ trust and our group had unwittingly crossed the invisible line. It would take a long time for other humans to reestablish the trust. We would need to get to know that place all over again.

  Thomas, the Saint, has urged us to follow the birds and the beasts, for they will show us the way. Is this really applicable? I believe it is and what follows confirms this belief. It concerns the recreating of ancient migration routes of large animals like elephants. The question is where, exactly, should these corridors be established? Iain Douglas-Hamilton of the Save the Elephant Foundation and, more recently, Michael Chase of the Elephants Without Boundaries project in Botswana have come up with a brilliant answer—let the elephants decide. Let the animals show us the way. Absurd? Not at all. As a result of his outstanding radio-tracking studies on the seasonal paths and patterns of migrating elephants, Douglas-Hamilton has been able to tell us more than we previously understood about elephant migrations, the directions they wish to take, as well as the land areas in which they are comfortable or uncomfortable—they move at high speed through these uncomfortable areas. Not surprisingly, these very areas are the ones that are in close proximity to human habitation and to hunters. Who could argue that these elephants were not telling us something? Should we not listen to them? And could we take this work further? How about a north-south and an east-west elephant corridor through central and southern Africa, with the elephants showing us the way? And remember, where elephants go, many other animals follow. I can see the heads shaking and I can understand why. Veterinary fences and civil conflict will make it impractical. It will be too expensive, too political, too risky, and it is going to take a long time to implement. Political and economic logisti
cs aside, I believe it is an idea and a dream that we must not give up on. After all, are we not trying to open the corridors in the human psyche?

  In conclusion, what, if anything, does the correspondence between humans and animals mean to us? Lopez answers this question, albeit cryptically: “If you are trying to fathom wolves,” he says, “ I think it can mean almost everything.” He could have been referring equally to elephants, leopards, or hyenas. To understand this correspondence will be a huge step toward rediscovering ourselves in Nature and to seeing the world, at last, as a mirror. We will come face-to-face with ourselves. It will certainly bring us face-to-face with one of the most emotive issues of the new millennium—the ethics of recreational and trophy hunting of wild animals.

  And only then, when I have learned enough

  I will go to watch the animals, and let

  something of their composure slowly guide

  into my limbs; will see my own existence

  deep in their eyes.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  9

  THE KEEPING OF THE ZOO

  AS A YOUNG BOY GROWING UP IN PRESENT-DAY ZAMBIA, I LIVED IN A neighborhood where it was not uncommon for people to display kudu horns or elephant tusks in their homes. My uncle kept a lion skin, with its snarling head attached, spread out on the floor of his veranda. He didn’t shoot the animal, but he was nevertheless honored to accept the trophy as a gift from a professional hunter. No one thought anything of it, except that my uncle, years later, removed it from its position of display. Somehow, it was no longer appropriate, he said. It was about this time, prior to entering medical school, that I spent a short period as a farm manager in Zimbabwe. The owner of the farm was a man who loved hunting. Suspended on the walls of the family room in his home were the heads of at least three of the Big Five. Other heads included that of a spotted hyena as well as a variety of antelope. Today, that same farm is a wild animal sanctuary where tourists can walk among elephants, rhino, and the kin of those antelope that adorned the walls of the family room. Today, that man is no longer a hunter.

  What makes a professional or recreational hunter suddenly lower his gun, no longer able to pull the trigger on the animal in his sights? What causes the sudden wave of tiredness that makes him say, “That’s enough,” turning his attention instead to taking photographs of the animals and to protecting them? Has the hunter gone soft, or has he become strong? Perhaps hunters simply get tired of their way of life, the novelty wears off, the animal-human contest becomes hollow, or they ultimately prefer to see the animal alive. Wild animals know when they are being hunted and the hunters know it. On the other hand, could there be a more complex reason for why some hunters put away their guns. Was it something about the creature in their sights? Was it the sheer elegance of the animal or perhaps the look in its eye? Was there a deep, unarticulated realization that it is not the way of Nature to kill anything for amusement?

  These are debatable reasons for laying down a weapon, but there is one more, a less obvious reason, that I would like to propose. My proposal is in defense of what I would like to call the “authentic” hunters of the world. From the bushmen to the likes of early-twentieth-century hunter Frederick Courtney Selous, after whom the Selous National Park in Tanzania is named, these are the hunters who know and understand the behavior of every animal they hunt—from lizards to lions. The arrows or bullets they use are associated with the self-preserving hormone adrenaline. These hunters are not dependent on trackers, trucks, or geographical positioning systems. They know the tracks of the animals, their terrain, which ones to kill, which ones to leave alone, and, more importantly, they know that crucial invisible line, which once crossed is to betray an unwritten pact between the hunter and the hunted: that the contest be fair and necessary. Grounded in experience and a deep sense of respect for the animal, this awareness is the defining characteristic separating the authentic from the unauthentic hunter. These hunters are among the finest guides, naturalists, and wilderness educators I know, and they have good reason to regard themselves as genuine conservationists. Few of them remain, and as Map Ives, a former professional hunter turned professional environmentalist, ruefully observes, “they are a dying breed.” Could it be that these hunters have put down their guns because of an ethical imperative—they have become increasingly ill at ease, repelled by their association with, or worse still, their financial dependence on, unauthentic hunters, especially modern trophy hunters and the industry that supports them?

  To me, the trophy hunter is the opposite of the hunter I have just described. Because they own guns, know how to shoot, and love being in the wild, they would like to be seen as authentic, but a love of the wild, and of guns, is not enough. With rare exceptions, even among professional hunters, they have little more than a superficial knowledge of how the animals, the birds, and the landscape are intertwined. Instead, their mission is clear—they have come to kill the animal of their choice, and they have paid good money to do so. What is more, there must be as little physical risk to themselves as possible. Supported by an industry that practically guarantees their safety and their kill, they know little, if anything, about that invisible line. When their bullets are fired, they are associated not so much with adrenaline as with testosterone, as I will show. Governed by time constraints and heavily reliant on trackers and sophisticated weaponry, for the unauthentic hunter the trophy, rather than the human-animal interaction, is paramount.

  There is presently an unprecedented groundswell of public antipathy toward recreational and trophy hunting and it is coming from all corners—from animal rights movements and those who simply espouse animal welfare and protection to conservation biologists and those same hunters who have downed their guns. Hunting—and particularly trophy hunting—has become more of a moral and ethical issue than ever before. In spite of rebound protest from so-called ethical hunters, one of the reasons for the growing mistrust, in addition to certain highly questionable present-day hunting activities, is that Nature’s backlashes are inevitable and usually slow. In other words, much of the antipathy is inherited from the past. From Gordon Cumming in the nineteenth century to the well-documented escapades of Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and many others, the image and ethics of the archetypal trophy hunter is not as admirable as we were sometimes led to imagine. What these men may have been admired for or been proud of in their time, we would be ashamed of today. Some would call it carnage. In their defense, and it is a poor one, it could be argued that they were less informed about the science of ecology and evolution than we are today. However, I believe, in the words of Oedipus: “They should have known.”

  As we are witnessing now, it could be as much as the sixth or seventh generation later who are left to repair the damage of the fore-fathers. It is no wonder, therefore, that the nonhunting public today is mistrusting and critical of modern hunters. As for the hunters, it is not enough to change their vocabulary. For example, what was once the Botswana Professional Hunters Association is now skeptically known as the Botswana Wildlife Management Association. It is going to take time to believe in the new hunting terminology of ethical versus unethical hunting. Nobody can convincingly describe himself as authentic or ethical—he has to be known to be so, consistently. In other words, you cannot be your own judge. It may be to their credit that they are reconsidering the impact of their choice of lifestyle, but it is not going to help their cause when they refer to their critics as “vociferous minorities…sensationalists…self-styled, pseudo-environmentalists…bent on imposing their intolerant views on society,” as was written by Gerard R. Damm (Africa Geographic, February 2003). Whether it be the voice or pen of the hunter or that of their critics, contempt usually says more about the one who has it than the ones toward whom it is directed.

  What follows, then, is not a demand but rather an appeal to those who continue to justify any form of hunting outside of food and food production to reconsider its history, its validity, and its ethic. It is an appeal to
read the message of the thorns of the ziziphus—to remember where we have come from.

  The roots of hunting have a remote origin in the psyche of the human animal, and as psychologist William James wrote in 1896, “it is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.” But is the hunting of a wild animal in our blood? Is it an instinct? In defense of their sport, recreational and trophy hunters often urge us to believe that it is so; that it is linked to deep-seated predatory drives; that it confirms that human beings are the evolutionary champions of the animal food chain and that for a man to be a man, he must hunt.

  I will argue that the roots of trophy hunting are in the evolution of culture rather than biology; that the hunting of wild animals is learned behavior and that as the context changes, what we have learned can not only become inappropriate, but maladaptive.

  First of all, we must not confuse hunting with the instinct to protect and to provide. Secondly, we must learn the difference between an instinct and a habit. If the hunting of wild animals were an instinct, then surely it would have to be shared by everyone. Instead, because recreational and trophy hunting is largely a first-world practice, we would do well to reflect on the The Fund for Animals report of 2000, which records that in America, 14 million people hunt compared with 62 million who practice “less consumptive activities such as bird watching, hiking, and photography”—to say nothing of the growing number of people who oppose hunting altogether. If anything, it is the aesthetic, “less consumptive” activities that appear to be “instinctive.” To me, the latter group are evidence of what it means to unlearn or to redirect old attitudes. The gun has been replaced by a camera; telescopic sites by long-range lenses; the bullet by a film or memory chip, and the trophy remains alive.