Collaring an Elephant

There are a few times a year where I get to stand somewhere and think: WTF is happening. Occasionally in a good way.

I used to be obsessed with going on every single game drive, convinced that the one I didn’t go on, something so remarkable would happen that I’d be internet-shamed for millennia for not having witnessed it.

But these days I read the additional activities list first. My kids have shadowed an anti-poaching unit, visited local schools, swum in rivers, learnt to fish, stargazed with people who (apparently) know what they’re talking about, and hiked up hills to stare at bushman paintings. “Hiked” is doing a lot of work there – they were carried.

But, without a doubt, the coolest thing is when the conservation team come calling. As in, I call them and beg to go along.  Sometimes they need to sedate an animal to tag it as part of their efforts to reduce human/animal conflict and track where the animals are. I’ve been lucky enough to do this twice with rhinos, once as part of a relocation project in Zimbabwe, where the area had simply ended up with too many of them. There are worse problems.

Last week, we were present for an elephant collaring. Essentially, the conservation teams need donations for these things, cos helicopters are as expensive as you may imagine helicopters are, so they rely on guests. I guess this counts as my good deed of the year and I’ll take the other eleven months off.

The helicopter goes up first, trying to find the elephant they want to tag. A vet is hanging on, and out of the helicopter, holding a dart rifle, just to somehow make him look even cooler. Let’s just assume he’s shirtless and looks like Henry Cavill.  From the ground, you follow in a convoy of vehicles. Then the dart goes in, and everything becomes extremely serious for a few minutes. And all I can ever think is: I should not be here.

Then, an army of people descends on it like a Formula One pit crew, and you — the paying idiot, the tourist, the man who three hours earlier was complaining about the brownies not quite being as good as last year’s — are on hand, for unknown reasons. It’s like being there by mistake when they landed on the moon in 1969.

At this point, there’s thirty to sixty minutes to do what they came to do. And you to pretend you’re not in the way at all, and by god, you’ve earned this cos every skill you’ve accumulated in life by watching David Attenborough means you’re prepared. In our case, it was about 30 minutes before it woke up and reconsidered its relationship with everyone standing nearby. We were there for the whole thing.  Yep, even my children, who did nothing useful for those thirty minutes, and neither did I, but they were in awe for all of them, and mostly well behaved, which has never once happened at home.

There is a stick placed in the end of the trunk to keep the airway open, which is truly Occam’s Razor in practice. Somebody else was measuring tusks. Somebody was taking a DNA sample. Somebody was collecting dung, and looked pleased about it.  You do not appreciate the size of an elephant from a vehicle. You appreciate it standing beside one that is lying down, and it is still taller than your children.

The collar itself is unglamorous. It looks like a belt for the sort of people so fat they need to be helicoptered out of their homes. It weighs about as much as a car tyre, which sounds cruel until you are standing next to the animal, at which point it is roughly equivalent to you wearing a wristwatch.

It reports position. Which means rangers know where the herd is, which means anti-poaching units are not searching a wilderness at random, which means when the collar stops moving somebody comes to find out why. It also maps the corridors these animals actually use, as opposed to the ones we assumed they used, which is how you stop building a fence through the middle of a migration route.

Conclusion

I got to spend one morning doing thirty minutes of pretend work, and I have not shut up about it since. I will endlessly bring it up, like a “oh, you’ve never touched a wild elephant? Pass the caviar and piss off”. I have a photograph of my daughter’s hand on an elephant’s foot as my phone background. I am, in every measurable respect, better than you insufferable.

If Jeff Bezos came out and said “I just love my employees”, I’d have way less respect for the fella. But “I just love money”, well, fair play. At least I can get behind the honesty. So yeah, these can go down as conservation activities, and if that’s all you’re interested in, good for you. But it does genuinely help, and it is also cool as fuck.  And that’s a fine reason for being there too.

There are dozens of conservation experiences now — rhino notching, wild dog collaring, pangolin releases, vulture tagging — and a great many more. I intend to do all of them.

Lions next, I guess…