I learned to look at the world through
the eyes and ears of elephants.
Some people, other elephant people,
have told me
that I think I am an elephant.
In some ways, perhaps they are right.
Like Africa, the elephants
take hold of your spirits.
They can possess you and persuades you
to look at the world
in a different light.
There is something so grand about
the life of an elephant,
its great size, strength, and age.
Elephants have so many of the
qualities we like best about ourselves,
dignity, loyalty
to families and friends,
compassion, and a sense of humor.
Biologist Joyce Poole has taken
a journey,
without maps, into the heart of
the African elephant.
She came to know elephant like family.
She discovered biological forces
no one had ever suspected,
and elephant voices
no human had ever heard.
For years, Joyce fought for
their survival,
never imagining that one day
she would face a terrible choice.
Joyce Poole would have to give
the order to kill elephants.
This is the story of a woman
who loved elephants in a world
that had no room for them.
Looking back at how it all began,
it seems as if Africa has always been
my home.
Joyce Poole's family came to Kenya
in the 1960s
when her father worked for
the Peace Corps.
She grew up in Africa.
The family loved wild places
and often camped in
Kenya's Amboseli National Park.
I saw my first elephant as a child
of seven,
a huge bull in Amboseli.
And I remember asking my father
what would happen
if he charged the car.
And as my father said,
"He'll squash the car down to
the size of a pea pod," he came.
I remember a lot from Amboseli.
It was one of our favorite places,
but I remember most the elephants.
The swamps were home
to a huge number of animals.
But it was always the elephants
that captured my imagination.
At the age of 11,
Joyce knew what she was going to be
when she grew up,
a wildlife biologist.
When the time came to leave home, she
went out to live among the elephants.
Her journey would soon
change the way
the rest of the world thought about
elephants.
But in time,
it would change Joyce, too,
and turn all her dreams
for the elephants into dust.
It began in the shadow of Kilimanjaro
on the Kenya border.
Her new home was
Amboseli National Park,
where she had first encountered
elephants.
Her mentor was Cynthia Moss,
who had already embarked on the most
comprehensive study
of elephant society ever attempted.
Using a photo book with pictures of
the elephants in Amboseli,
Cynthia taught Joyce
how to identify individuals.
Just keep your eye on Tuskless.
Now look, here in this picture,
you would say M-57 was older than M-22
because of the angle of his head.
Yes, Yes.
He's much younger.
The elephants also got to know
the researchers.
Babies played on camp as if under the
watchful eye of their own aunts.
At first, all the elephants looked alike
to me,
large and gray with big ears.
But Cynthia taught me how different
each elephant really was.
Elvira.
Esmeraldo was born in 1948.
Joyce gradually learned to recognize
individuals by their familiar features.
Vee was named
for the V-notches in her ears.
Tuskless had no ivory.
Joyce was particularly fond of
jezebel, a noble old matriarch
with one tusk pointing skyward
and the other straight ahead.
Each new arrival was given a name
that identified it as part of
a specific family group.
Cynthia Moss's work was
already revealing
that elephant families formed
an unusually complex society
dominated by females.
But the lives of the males were
still uncharted territory.
Males leave their families
as teenagers
and never again live in stable groups.
Alone in her car,
Joyce followed them.
She was 19 years old and had no idea
what she was getting into.
To study the males Joyce needed
to get as close as possible.
But the shadow of a bull elephant
was perilous place to be.
A male that seemed placid
could easily turn around
and impale her car on his tusks.
When I first started studying
the males,
there were many times when I had
elephants corner me,
tower over the car,
and I thought it was all over.
Showing who's boss is something
male elephants do
from the time they're youngsters.
Most fights aren't dangerous.
Size normally dictates rank
and every male already knows
where he fits in the social hierarchy.
But every once in a while,
fights turn deadly serious.
What was it that changed
all the rules?
Joyce noticed several older males
dribbling gallons of urine.
Glandular secretions darkened the skin
behind their eyes as if with tears.
She saw one elephant
who also seemed to be suffering
from a fungal infection
she'd never seen it before,
so she named him Green Penis.
But then other makes turned up
in the same curious condition.
Joyce soon realized there was
a pattern.
Each male had his own time of year
when the symptoms appeared.
And it appeared at the same time
every year.
In Asian elephants,
these symptoms were already recognized
as part of a male sexual cycle.
African elephants are
a different species,
and the experts all said they did not
have such a cycle.
It took long months of tracking
and recording the behavior
of individual males,
but Joyce proved the experts wrong.
At the age of 23, she had discovered
a driving biological force
that every other researcher
had overlooked: it's called musth.
Musth is a heightened sexual
and aggressive period or rut.
And the word musth actually comes
from the Urdu meaning intoxicated.
Males start coming into musth on
average around 28, 29 years old
and their first musth periods
only last a day or two.
With time,
they last longer and longer,
and by the time they're in their mid
to late forties,
they stay in musth
for three or four months at a time.
How do you study six tons of
intoxicated male?
It takes art as well as science.
They're predictably aggressive
when they're in musth,
and even though you feel you know
an animal a 100 percent,
when they're towering over the car
and starting to put their tusk
on the bonnet,
you don't feel quite so sure
of yourself.
But over time,
the musth males accepted her,
and Joyce came to feel
at ease with them.
His name is Beach Ball
because everything about him is round,
his ears are round, his head is round,
his tusks are round,
his body is round
and his penis is round.
Beach ball, you be nice, you be nice.
I hear you've been misbehaving out
at headquarters,
knocking down fences and gates.
You be careful with my car.
I've just fixed it.
Each of the males used to have a sort
of a ritualized way of greeting me.
Um, Agamemnon used to come and put
his tusks up against the windshield,
and then throw his head back and forth
over the top of the car
with his front legs up
against the bumper.
And Alfred always, you know,
put his trunk on the bonnet.
And this one, I mean, he just,
you know,
he likes to sort of press up against
the side of the car.
He's very sensual.
The old stories of aggressive behavior
by "rogue" elephants
suddenly made sense.
Males in musth can be hostile,
but mainly to each other.
These fights captured by Joyce
in videotape
could end injury or even death.
Who wins? Size is no longer decisive.
The male who is closer to the pea
of musth has the advantage.
What they are fighting for
is the right to mate with a female
at the height of her cycle.
The dominant male stays close
to the female.
Hormones in her urine tell him
whether she's ready.
When the time is right,
they mate frequently,
while her family surrounds them.
Joyce was intrigued
not just by what she saw,
but by what she heard.
She dubbed it
"the mating pandemonium,"
a sound heard at no other time.
Joyce's discoveries about musth
made it possible,
for the first time, to understand
the complexities
of elephant mating behavior.
But now the focus of her research
was shifting.
Joyce was about to unlock the secret
language of the elephants.
The language of elephants was
a complete enigma.
Sometimes elephants are
incredibly vocal.
Other times they seem to communicate
in silence-freezing
as if on command
or suddenly racing off together
with no apparent cue.
Even a charging musth male
barely made a sound.
I kept hearing a sound like, you know,
if you take a thick piece of cardboard
and you go
"whop, whop, whop" with it;
and they were flapping their ears
in a certain way,
so I thought the sound was the ear
flapping and it was a threat to me.
And then I realized afterwards that,
in fact,
it was vocalization
that was being made
and the ear flapping was just
in association with it.
In the mid1980s,
Joyce collaborated with
Katherine Payne,
and expert on whale songs.
Together they were determined
to uncover the secrets of
elephant communication.
We began making take recordings of
the elephants.
It turned out that we were only
hearing part of what they said.
The rest was at a frequency
too low for us to hear.
Sonograms revealed that humans miss
two-thirds of elephant conversation
like whales, elephants were using
a language
that was mostly below the range
of human hearing.
Joyce slowly learned to decipher
the sounds she could hear.
She came to understand 33 different
vocalizations,
calls that meant,
"lets go," or "attack"
or baby saying,
"help, I'm scared."
Females comforted their young
with rumbles
that were as specific as saying,
"It's okay, we're here."
It was a radically new way
to think about elephants.
What people used to believe was
just stomach rumbling
was actually a complex language.
These were intelligent creatures.
Now that she knew
what the elephants were saying,
Joyce knew when to be afraid,
and when it was just play,
even when to talk back.
Anyone who's watched elephants
would say,
you know, what is it that makes
elephants so much?"
Why do you like elephants so much?"
They're so funny.
Why are they funny?
Well, they're not just funny to look at,
they're funny acting,
they're clowns; not all of them,
I mean, they've got different
personalities,
but some are real clowns.
Joyce believed that elephants
had emotions,
a whole range of feelings,
from joy to grief.
She was moved to witness one family
come across the bones of
their own matriarch.
And it was very different from the way
elephants usually approach bones.
They gathered around her bones
in a defensive circle facing outwards
and gave a very loud rumble
that went on and on,
and they really were standing
over them
as if it was a member of their family.
And this whole, just turning the bones
over, ever so slowly and gently
and, you know,
feeling every little crevice,
paying particular attention
to the jaw and the skull,
and then, you know, backing around
and touching with the hind feet.
Joyce witnessed the death of
many elephants,
but the loss of one of her favorites
was especially painful.
It was the elderly matriarch Jezebel.
By the time Joyce arrived,
Jezebel's tusks had been stolen
and the corpse had been mutilated.
Feet have been taken!
She had been ill for a number of weeks
and I think when she fell,
she was tracked and her tusks
were taken.
The 1980s were ominous times
for elephants.
Amboseli had always been a sanctuary
for them
but throughout the rest of Africa,
elephants were being slaughtered
for their ivory.
I just found it devastating that
the more I was learning about
these incredible animals,
the faster they were being
slaughtered.
I just found that I had to
try and get out there
and do something about it.
The world was at war with elephants.
For Joyce Poole, it was time
to join the battle to save them.
In the late 1980s,
poachers were killing
thousands of elephants
to meet the demand for
ivory trinkets.
They targeted the males
for heavier tusks
and hacked the ivories
from their faces with machetes.
When the Amboseli elephants project
started,
there were 167,000 elephants
in Kenya,
now there were just 25,000.
In the vast area where the elephants
once roamed,
all that remained were
gleaming white skulls of the dead.
The social structure of the elephants
was on the brink of collapse.
Almost all the breeding males
were gone,
and many families unit
consisted entirely of orphans.
If the killing continued,
experts predicted,
Kenya's elephants would go instinct.
To save the country's wild life, the
government turned to Richard Leakey,
a third-generation Kenyan who
was already famous as paleontologist.
I am going to do my level best to
eliminate the elephant poachers...
In 1989, Leakey took over
Kenya's Wildlife Service
and immediately declare war
on the poachers.
He got off to a bold and
controversial start.
...and it would be my hope that
in the coming weeks
the press will not ask for permission
to film dead elephants,
but will have an opportunities
to film dead poachers.
Leakey turned Kenya's
Wildlife rangers
into a crack antipoachering army.
Now when poachers fire on them,
they have orders to shoot back.
The first year the rangers killed
...they unearthed huge caches of ivory
from butchered elephants.
Then Kenya did something
that shocked the world.
At Leakey's urging
President Daniel Arap Moi
burned three million dollars worth
of ivory.
It was Leakey's way to wake up
the world to the horror of poaching.
It was a very emotional moment
watching the tusks of 1800 elephants
to go up in flames and smoke.
But at the same time,
I felt a great sense of relief
because I believed that the elephants
were going to have a reprieve.
A few months later,
the nations of the world
banned all trade in Ivory
with dramatic results.
The next year, instead of losing
Kenya lost fewer than 50.
But like any war ravaged society, the
elephants would need decades to recover.
They weren't going to get that time.
In the very years that elephant
population was being decimated,
Kenya's human population had doubled.
People and elephants were both hungry
for the same land.
The deal with the inevitably conflict,
Richard Leakey needed someone
who understood elephants.
He asked Joyce Poole to run
the National elephant program.
It would mean leaving
the idyllic world of Amboseli.
It was difficult to leave Amboseli
behind, but at the same time,
I was being given the opportunity
of a lifetime.
I had been so privileged to spend
so many years with elephants,
to have learned so much I felt a sense
of, almost of obligation,
of giving them something in return
and I felt that
with the knowledge I had
that perhaps I could make
a difference.
Joyce was convinced she could help the
elephants find a place in modern Kenya.
She didn't realize how difficult
it was going to be.
Joyce Poole had now entered the very
heart of the conflict over elephants.
At Kenya's wildlife service,
she recruited a team of
committed young Kenyans.
They were eager to develop
new programs
that would help people
and elephants live together.
One of the first tasks that I had
at Kenya wildlife service
was to survey the country and find out
how many elephants we had left.
I would have loved for them
to have been able to return
to their old haunts,
but there just wasn't
the space anymore.
I began to have this horrible vision
of a future world
where almost all of the land would be
taken up by people
and the only space left for elephants
would be inside a few national parks.
Other African nations had already
confined their elephants
to national parks.
Joyce hoped that would never happen
in Kenya.
She knew it would ultimately mean
controlling the elephant population.
Elephants need space.
An adult eats 300 pounds of
vegetation a day.
As the population grows,
elephants can have a devastating
effect on park habitat.
For other African nations,
the solution is to compute how many
elephants the land can sustain,
and kill the rest.
It's called culling.
I think culling is totally unethical.
I think it's barbaric.
I suppose I imagine it like taking a
group of humans and just deciding
we're going to take out this family
or we're going to take out that family.
Joyce believed she could avoid culling
in Kenya.
But now there was a new problem.
Elephants were beginning
to move out of the parks.
And when they did,
tragedy was waiting.
The elephants could no longer go back
to their old migratory routes.
Settlers had planted crops everywhere.
Families had staked their entire lives
on what had once been
prime elephant habitat.
The elephants were just going back
to their old haunts,
but from the settlers' viewpoint,
they were out of control.
The radio messages came in from
the stations, almost every day.
Elephants were on the rampage.
They were eating their way
through cornfields,
they were knocking down houses, and
they were trampling people to death.
Joyce knew she had to keep people
and elephants apart,
and it was a matter of life and death
on both sides.
She tried to protect vulnerable farms
with electric fences.
But the elephants learned
to short circuit the fences.
Elephants broke through here
last night,
and they went out into the shambas
out here.
Probably, one of the bulls
was in charge of this
and he must've broke in
and they went out.
Every day we have to keep repairing
after every breakage
and this is taking up resources.
The elephants were always
one step ahead.
Under cover of dark,
they constantly found new ways
to get through to the farms.
In one night,
an elephant could destroy a family's
entire food supply for the year.
If you can imagine having to
defend your entire livelihood
from some enormous beast
that came in the middle of the night
and weighed close to a hundred times
what you weigh.
You can't see it.
All you have is a small torch
and this,
this beast,
this monster can track you down,
can smell exactly where you are
and you can't see it.
It can crush you
in a matter of seconds.
That's what so many people
across Africa are up against.
When the elephants come, the farmers
have only rocks, sticks,
and the sound of their own voices
to defend their crops.
In the morning,
at least one family faces famine.
As you can see for yourself,
I have nothing left for my family.
All the crops were destroyed
by the elephants;
the beans, the corn, the tomatoes,
everything's gone.
The children will sit and keep quite.
They have nothing to eat.
They'll just sit quietly.
The close contact between people and
elephants sometimes ended horribly.
Many people are killed in Kenya
every year by elephants.
It's somewhere, probably between
Some areas are worse than others.
I don't think that in most cases.
I think that the elephant didn't
intend to kill the person.
But in some cases,
they've definitely gone out,
tracked down the person
and kneeled on them,
which is usually the way an elephant
would kill someone.
The most effective way to control
problem elephants was to shoot them,
but local wildlife wardens lacked
the equipment
and training to do it properly.
Many of the elephants that were
being shot were the wrong ones,
that it wasn't the elephant that
had killed Mrs. So-and-so,
that it wasn't the elephant that had
gone into the shamba and destroyed it.
The elephants that were being shot
were taking hours to die,
it just wasn't right.
Joyce had to face a painful reality.
She'd come of age learning
how elephants live,
and she accepted the need
for some to die.
But now she was going to
have to give the order.
I realized that elephants were
going to have to be shot,
that we couldn't allow elephants
to go rampaging through people's
farms and killing people.
But if we had to kill elephants,
I wanted to make sure that we at least,
we killed the right elephants,
the ones that were doing the damage.
In 1992, Joyce established
a special team
and sent them into military training
to become marksman.
Their job was to kill problem
elephants, but to do it humanely.
I think the question isn't how we can
justify shooting elephants.
I think the question is how can we
justify not shooting them.
I mean, when you've spent the night
out in a maize field with people
who are just having their whole
livelihood destroyed right there
and then,
there is no other alternative.
Now when villages suffered repeated
attacks, Joyce sent her control team.
They watched by night
till the elephants came.
We're going to wait for the elephants.
They'll be coming in,
probably, in an hour or two.
We'll wait for them here.
As soon as we hear them
cutting into the maize,
we'll cut into the maize above them
and come around,
and try and get in front of them.
So if we can get them
coming towards us,
we can then pick out the ringleader
and we'll shoot him.
We've got to shoot one out of the
herd to stop them from doing this.
There's no other way we can stop them.
I'm so happy now that
this animal is dead.
I've been up every night,
waiting and looking after my crops.
The elephants have been bothering us
for the last five years
and destroying our crops.
Some of the farmers actually have not
harvested anything from their fields.
For now, this village's cornfields
were safe.
The killing of one elephant should
keep the other away.
Tonight the crops would not
have to be guarded
but what about all the other villages.
In 1993 alone I gave the order
to shot 57 problem elephants
and each decision was difficult, but
I knew it was the right thing to do.
For these villagers, the monster
that once terrorized them
was now just thousands of pounds
of meat in the morning sun.
Today, it would fed their families.
All over Kenya, deadly encounters
between people and elephants
were on the rise.
Joyce Poole and Richard Leakey
were under constant pressure
to kill more elephants.
I realized my worst fears were
probably going to come true someday.
Kenya was going to have to eliminate
most of the elephants outside the parks.
We would have to confine the rest
behind fences
as other African nations had done.
If elephants had to be
confined to parks,
Joyce wanted to find a humane way
to control their numbers.
She had her team had
a daring new idea.
They were going to test a form
of elephant birth control.
Make sure you don't let them go back
across the river.
Critics ridiculed the whole pain.
But Leakey gave her the go ahead.
For the test, Joyce relies on exactly
the sort of detailed knowledge
of individual elephants
that has always been her specialty.
Just bring 'em over here.
They are looking for a female
who already has a baby,
so they can be certain
she is not pregnant.
The marksman brings her down
with a tranquilizer dart.
Once again, Joyce is defying
the experts.
But this might be a way for elephants
to survive in the crowded world
of modern Africa.
Once the elephant is down,
Joyce and her team have only
They inject the elephant with an
experimental contraceptive vaccine
which should sterilize her.
Then they strap on a radio collar
to track her progress.
Joyce believes birth control for
elephants may mean hope for the future.
But it will take years to prove that
the contraceptive works.
Then just when they begin to get the
first positive results, it's all over.
Political infighting puts an end
to their plans.
I have given the best years of my life
to public service.
In march, 1994 his enemies forced
Richard Leakey out of office.
...and the stress and the pain of
being vilified
by senior politicians and others
is more than I think
is good for my health.
Under these circumstances I have
today sent a letter to His Excellency
the president offering my resignation.
Joyce and several of her colleagues
resigned the same day in support.
What was so devastating about it
was that KWS had had such successes,
and my own program... we had built up
such an extraordinary team
and we had really done so much
and I feel that people knew that,
people were on our side;
yes, they wanted us to do more,
but they realized we were
doing the best we could
and all of a sudden,
Richard is force to resign...
and everything is just left in limbo.
Joyce didn't know yet where her life
was going to take her.
But elephants still had a hold
on her spirit.
She went back to visit Amboseli.
She now had a daughter
named Selengei.
Joyce wanted to introduce her child
to her old friends.
We'd gone out one evening
to watch elephants.
And I saw Vee approaching us
with her family.
And then an extraordinary thing
happened.
It wasn't just any rumble,
it was greeting rumble.
And who knows what was going on
in the elephants heads?
I could only guess that
they had remembered me
and they were welcoming us
back to Amboseli.
For a few days, Joyce blended in
with the familiar camp routine.
Her old colleagues were still
pursuing their research.
Elephants would always be
part of Joyce's life.
But back in Nairobi,
someone else was going to have to make
the hard choice about their future.
I think in the long term,
let's say looking 50 years ahead,
that elephants and people will not
be able to coexist,
that elephants will be confined to
national parks,
many of them with
barriers around them.
And I think between here and now,
it's going to be a very painful
process to get where we're going...
and that there'll be a lot of
suffering on both sides.
To save what she loved most
in the wild, she had fenced it in,
controlled it, even killed it,
and it hadn't been enough.
I think that the dreams I had or
even have for elephants can never be.
There's not enough space anymore.
And what space there
is put aside for people.
I think all we can do is
look at each situation
and do our best to protect
what can be protected,
look for solutions for the conflict.
And where we can't do anything,
we just let it go.
It can't all be saved.
It can't.