The death of an elephant

The neighborhood dogs were already fighting by the time we returned a second time to the dead elephant. The young bull, perhaps 30 years old, had been shot the night before and by the time we arrived at 9am flies were beginning to gather. The villagers, having already alerted the authorities who would supposedly return later for the tusks, were hacking away with axes at the thick leathery skin. They made precise incisions, ones they are used to making on their cattle, in order to pull away skin and sinew. Blood began to drip. A 12-year-old boy was learning how to butcher an elephant carcass, hacking away with an axe at the limp trunk as he imitated the older men divvying up the haunch. Children and women stood around, holding empty rice sacks waiting for their choice cut of meat. A bull this size could feed many people for many days, though not everyone likes the flavor of the meat. Some prefer it fresh, those who dislike the odor prefer it sundried like traditional biltong, and others refuse to eat it for their religious beliefs.

The bull was shot by a young man no older than the bull himself. I had met him a few weeks earlier during a trip to the village. He was working on finishing a cement house and in the meantime lived in a traditional rondvaal with his wife and young child. He seemed like a real go-getter, an educated, well-dressed young man who’s remained in the village trying to begin his family life. Last night was the second night in a row that the same bull entered into his compound. The tightly-strung wire fence had done nothing to prevent the bull from ravaging his fruit-bearing trees the night prior. Elephants remember where there is food and often return, and by the time the bull returned, the young man had a borrowed rifle.

The first night, the bull entered his yard pulling large branches off the trees that surround his house until they snapped like toothpicks. His traditional house, made of reeds and grass and covered in a layer of mud, could not withstand an elephant attack let alone the weight of a falling tree branch. It apparently took long hours for the life to drain from the bull after the first shot between his eyes proved to be ineffective. It was a second shot to the temple that apparently did the trick. Saliva frothed from his mouth and he had died in his own feces. His was not a noble death.

By the following day most of the meat had been cut away. The stomach and intestines were pulled to the side, and one man was hacking away at the spinal column in order to free the body from the head. This would allow them to turn the body over to the other side and free the rest of the meat that had been trapped underneath the enormous weight of the elephant. I looked around the neighboring houses and saw strips of red hanging from lines within household concessions: elephant biltong hung out to dry.

I can’t help but think that our understanding of human-elephant relations is limited by our vocabulary. Scientists often use the word ‘conflict’ in describing relations between these two sentient, long-lived mammals with rich social lives (as I have done with my blog until I can find a better word). The science has for a long time focused on livelihood opportunity costs, that is the costs borne to active economic production, the costs that disrupt participation in the greater economy; these are most often agriculture and other livelihood tasks that leave people rerouting their paths, staying at home rather than collecting firewood to cook, fearing for their lives. But ‘conflict’ is a loaded term that doesn’t capture the inherent nuance.

Botswana seems to be a sacred gem for elephants, a place where, even though elephants maraud fields and homesteads, a rural homeowner still pulls out wet clay from the Delta to sculpt an elephant statue outside of his home. Elephants in this density wreck limitless havoc on life. They prune their most travelled pathways until the landscape resembles more orchard than woodland. They kill people and harass cattle, and they raid an entire year’s food supply in one night. But elephants are also gardeners, assisting with tree regeneration through seed dispersal. They create and maintain pathways through the bush. They help support cattle feed during the dry season by ripping down hard-to-reach tree branches with green leaves. They shake bush fruits off of tall trees that provide important dietary supplements to people. These are complex relationships that require a new language in order to see, define, and describe the interactions more justly. For now, the dead elephant in village is a source of food for many and what was a tense moment of conflict has turned into a moment of social reproduction for a group of people who have been forbidden to hunt.