Pachyderms and Manners

I blush to think of the arrogance and sheer philistinism with which we greeted the arrival of the elephants. We had been operating for about 5 years without seeing a single elephant, and then suddenly they were everywhere. We were happy to see them but not in 'our' camp, pushing over 'our' trees, scaring our guests and ourselves witless with their insouciance. There began a banging of pots and pans, a cacophony of explosive flares and fire-crackers, a spurting of high-powered pump-action water pistols filled with ammonia, vast expenditure on electric fencing, a tooting of air-horns...followed by the deep, echoing thump of falling palms, and the occasional trumpet-blast and desperate, heart-failing and headlong flight as their patience finally snapped. But it was all in good fun, on their part anyway, and I was only once charged with intent, and I like to imagine that that elephant is still amused when he thinks of the alacrity with which I abandoned my dignity and took to my heals. Because if there is one thing of which I am convinced it is that elephants have a sense of humour, and what greater bond can there be between two beings than to find the same thing funny? How else does one explain the behavior of one bull who, seeing the late elephant researcher Alistair Torr squatting on his haunches, diligently recording every mouthful consumed by a small group of his comrades, walked silently - as only an elephant can - up behind him, and placing the tip of his trunk under Alistair's bottom, gently but firmly flipped him over?

An angry elephant is without doubt one of the most dangerous and terrifying things one can come across, but ours are luckily used to us and in the main totally comfortable in our presence. Bygones are bygones and now, 20 years later, we have been living happily together in mutual respect. Every year, amongst the new elephants we see, are some we have known for a long time, and I believe that they know us as we know them; I greet the ones I know with genuine warmth and I like to think that the way they come up to me, swaying their bodies, sniffing the surrounding air and waving their ears, constitutes a form of greeting on their part too. It has, after all, been the better part of a year, and we are all of an age now at which we no longer buy green bananas.

Coming back to my house after an absence recently, an absence during which the annual influx of elephants had taken place, I found what I like to think is a calling card etched onto the tree trunk at my front entrance. If this betrays an unseemly sentimentality on my part, I nevertheless believe it betrays a shameful lack of sensibility in some humans that they will travel vast distances, at great expense, and achieve an abiding sense of satisfaction because they have succeeded, with the assistance of a professional hunter and a modern, high powered firearm, to reduce one of these magnificent creatures to a hulk of rotting, uneaten meat. Shame on them.