The Last Giants. Levison Wood
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been found for elephants throughout the ages. Elephants were used as bloody entertainers in gladiatorial tournaments, where they were baited and pitted against other wild beasts. They’ve even been used as a gruesome method of torture, where the convicted prisoner is either gored or squashed to death by a tethered beast.
There have been many attempts to domesticate African elephants, too. Whilst African elephants should in theory not be any different to Asian elephants in terms of trainability, the culture has not been as deeply ingrained in Africa, so most efforts have generally ended in failure. That said, there was a moderately successful elephant riding school set up in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, where tourists could pay to ride, and local mahoots were trained up in the Asian style. However, these trials inevitably met with disaster, after one of the guides was killed in front of horrified guests.
The other major ‘use’ of elephants has, of course, been as curiosities in zoos and circuses – a trend that sadly continues around the world to this day – and it is estimated that there are up to 20,000 elephants still held in captivity.
A vast range of proboscidean species have walked the earth since their earliest ancestors emerged from the swamps of Africa over 60 million years ago. They have been a remarkably successful group, which dominated the grasslands, forests and tundra of almost every corner of the earth. But only three species survived the dramatic extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene. Humans have been central in the downfall of so many species.
Does the same fate await the last three types of elephants, or can we learn from our history? Before we answer that question, let’s have a look at what makes African elephants so special.
A Giant’s World
There are three species of elephant alive today: the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), and the African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana), which is the primary subject of this book. Although some debate rumbles on about whether forest and savannah elephants really are two separate species, evidence points to the fact that they are. They look different, their behaviour is somewhat different, and recent research shows that their DNA is distinct, too. These genetics-based studies more or less confirm their separation as two individual species. They likely diverged from a common ancestor as much as 5.5 million years ago, at a time when the climate got cooler and forest habitats became smaller.
The Asian elephant is a more distant relative to the two African species – it’s estimated that they split between around 7 million years ago, with the first migration of Elephas from Africa into Asia happening some 3 million years ago, although as I mentioned in the last chapter, the two types continued to live alongside each other on the plains of Africa until only a few thousand years ago. Interestingly, genetic analysis has revealed that the closest relative of the Asian elephant is not its African cousin, but in fact the extinct woolly mammoth, from whom they diverged at a similar time to their divergence from the forest and savannah elephant. Visually, these groupings make sense, given the smaller ears, lumpy-looking heads and sloping backs shared by the two species.
Forest elephants, which inhabit the tropical jungles of central Africa, are smaller in height and weight than African savannah elephants, with thinner, straighter tusks that tend to point downwards. They consume much less grass – but more woody plant material and fruit – than savannah elephants, as you’d expect of a species that lives in dense forests, and from what we understand they probably live in smaller social groups, and are much better at climbing steep slopes. The two species overlap only rarely in the fringe areas of Africa’s tropical forest belt in places like the Congo.
Yet across these three surviving species, there are clear similarities that mark them out as elephants: the overall large size, including long limbs and broad, cushioned feet with distinct, flat toenails; the very large head and skull; the trunk; the excess growth of the incisor teeth to form tusks (in many but not all); and the phenomenon of horizontal teeth displacement.
This is a unique process whereby the molars gradually move forward from the back of the mouth to replace worn teeth at the front. There are an amazing six progressions – imagine having six sets of teeth come through! – and the final set of molars, which erupt at about thirty or forty years of age, are enormous, weighing over 3 kg, and measuring 20 cm long and 7 cm wide. The shape of African elephant teeth is how they got their Latin name: Loxodonta means sloping teeth.
But the teeth that elephants are most famous for are, of course, their second upper incisors – known universally as tusks. In Asian elephants, the females never have tusks and many males don’t either. Some female Asian elephants have what are known as ‘tushes’. They resemble very short tusks, but do not have the same tooth pulp inside, and so they never grow further. However, in the two African elephant species, both males and females generally have tusks.
The tusks of males tend to be larger – thicker and longer – than those of females. Mature male elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park have an average tusk weight of around 50 kg, whilst the average female tusk of the same age weighs only 7 kg. Tusks grow for the whole of the elephant’s lifetime in both sexes, meaning that older elephants tend to have the longest tusks.
Elephants use their tusks in a variety of ways: to help forage for food by breaking or pushing branches and to strip bark from trees. They use them to dig in the ground as they forage for roots or search for water. They are a convenient lever, and are even used to carry things; elephants can often be seen using their tusks to move logs or carry grass in the same way as a forklift truck. I’ve seen elephants use their tusks as lethal weapons in fights with other elephants and indeed with plenty of other animals that make the mistake of crossing them. With the full strength of a charge, an elephant can easily pick up a fully grown buffalo using its tusks as a spear and whip it into the air.
A fellow officer in my battalion of the Parachute Regiment was once on a military exercise in Kenya. Captain Jay Courtney was leading a patrol through the bush in an area of the country where British troops often went to train before being sent on deployments to Afghanistan or Iraq. It was a warm evening in the autumn of 2018, and Jay led his four-man team on a reconnaissance mission to scout out an imaginary enemy on the far side of a dry riverbed. At around 6 p.m., as the sun was setting over the distant escarpment, the soldiers were in the process of climbing up a sandy ridge onto an open plain dotted with acacia trees and thorny scrub.
Jay was point man, focused on navigating the soldiers towards the position, his mind running through all possible scenarios – would the enemy be laying an ambush, or would they be able to sneak up on them? Did his men have enough water to last in case the patrol was extended? He thought about where he would be sleeping that night, under a thin poncho beneath a star-filled African sky, and wondered whether or not he might get a faint cell phone signal so that he could message home. All sorts of things run through a soldier’s mind, especially when he’s been immersed in the wilderness for so long, and this exercise had already dragged on for six weeks.
Jay felt comfortable in the bush, and had become accustomed to the ferocious heat, the irritating flies and the daily chore of cleaning his rifle of dust and sand. This was a training exercise, and even though the soldiers carried only blank ammunition, which simply made a loud bang, it had to be treated like a real combat mission and he took his job seriously.
Like all the other paratroopers, Jay was a hardened warrior, used to the rigours of living in the wild. He’d been warned of the dangers of the wildlife and briefed on how to avoid getting on the wrong side of a lion, buffalo or elephant, but so far, he’d only seen the animals at a distance, and generally they ran away from soldiers. Most wildlife has no desire to hang around strange-looking (and smelling) men who like to blow things up and make loud noises. As Jay put it, the elephants were simply ‘part of the furniture’.
That is perhaps why, as he strode forward under the weight