Edible Elephants

I have blogged about elephants in the past and am going to take a moment blog about them again.  For those of you who haven’t read those posts or don’t want to (stop being lazy) but here’s the background info again.

I live a few kilometers away from the edge of Nkhotakota game reserve which like most of the reserves/national parks here are unfenced.  Also, the villages here go right up to the edges of these places opening the door to massive human/wildlife conflict.  Right outside the reserve grows maize, peanuts, bananas, pigeon peas, etc which is better than the stuff in the reserve. So quite literally the grass is greener on the other side (get it? cause maize is in the grass family Hahaha!). 

As you have probably guessed the elephants come out to eat these goodies but also to get away from poachers.  Nkhotakota game reserve is pretty heavily poached and when the poachers are in the park the elephants are out.  Understandable, better food and no one is trying to kill you.  What do you do when an elephant has decided to make a snack of your field? Well not much but there are a few things that the villagers do. For starters they will beat drums or buckets to scare them away, during the dry season they light fires near where they are and the smoke and fire scares them away.  As a last resort, if they have been coming out a lot lately, the chief will call the Parks & Wildlife office and they will come out. Once they get there the standard procedure is to fire off some rounds, that will really scare them off. And it works,the last time Parks & Wildlife killed an elephant was back in the 70’s.

Until last Friday night.

I was supposed to have a meeting with the bee keeping club on Saturday morning and no one was there.  And I don’t mean a couple people popped in and said hi, I mean most of the village was gone.  I’d never seen the village this quiet. I was waiting with my neighbor Agnes and mentioned that I was waiting for the meeting to start but no one had come.  Then she casually mentioned, oh, maybe they have gone to see the elephant.  I thought maybe the elephants were out of the reserve, no, that wasn’t it, this one was dead.

Well that did it, and a few seconds later I found someone to take me there.  Finally we got to a place to leave the bikes and walk.  My first clue was the number of bikes at this place.  My next clue was how many people we passed while walking to this cassava field. Coming around a clump of grass I saw a massive group of people all standing together. My first thought was “crap, this is a small elephant.” And she was, not very big at all, not over 5 years I’d guess.

After asking around I found out that the night before the elephants came out.  Not that unusual but they had been out every night for the past few weeks which is really high.  The chief had called the Parks & Wildlife office to have them come scare the elephants away.  Apparently after firing off the rounds this one charged them so they fired on her. Which brings us to Saturday morning in the cassava field.

Once I got closer I could see everything a little clearer. Everyone was standing around the carcass talking loudly, poking the bloated belly and standing on it.

Then I found my neighbor Benson, with his camera making bank! He has one of the only cameras for 12 kilometers and at 120 kwacha per shot people were lining up for pictures with the dead elephant. 

Try to think about this from a non-western stand point.  I know a lot of you would have been shocked and stunned to see someone posing in outlandish and rude ways on a dead animal. Think about it this way, you have seen elephants more than the vast majority of Malawians.  Elephants are confined to the reserve and unless you live near a reserve you will not see one, even then most people don’t see them.  Once news got out that one was dead people flocked to see it.  Explaining how the trunk works, that tusks are used for leverage to break branches, and their babies drink milk are all mind blowing to them. 

As far as pictures go Malawians pose weird for pictures.  The best way I can explain it is an attempt at imitating American images that are commonly seen in movies or magazines.  For them it isn’t weird.  They made poses that we would find very strange but here it is normal.  Even after living here for a year and seeing this I wasn’t ready to see it on a dead animal. I left after a few minutes.

Over the course of the day more and more people showed up.  In the evening Parks & Wildlife showed up to cut up the carcass.  Part of the meat was sold in the villages and the rest was taken to the boma to sell there.  The ivory was confiscated, don’t worry about that.

 The next day Benson and Agnes asked me over for lunch and yup, wouldn’t you know it, we had elephant.  And so help me it was good.  Elephant is tasty.  I know coming from a western point of view the words I have just typed are sacrilegious.  How dare you eat an elephant and like it! You should be ashamed of yourself! You know what? I was hungry, I hadn’t eaten yet  that day and I hadn’t seen animal protein in a long time.  Actually, you could have told me it was beef and I wouldn’t have believed you, it was too good to be beef.

For a lot of the villagers it was the first time they had eaten any serious protein in months.  Read that again and think about what it means; months.  The best American equivalent I could give you is eating pasta, forever.  Your diet is pasta, and mustard greens and that’s about it.  Every now and then you’ll have eggs, or maybe some fish that, I’m not kidding are the same size as goldfish. You jump at the chance for something else.  Now imagine something is taking away that pasta, you have greens to eat now.  That’s basically what the elephants do. Don’t you dare go blaming them or condemning them until you have lived like they do. 

Does it suck? Yes it sucks, human/wildlife conflict is a problem in America too, if you think it isn’t then you need to come out of your bubble.  Wolves, bears, mountain lions, bison and coyotes just to name a few.  How do we make it work? I don’t have the answers, I don’t know that anyone does.  But I will say this, don’t judge them for it.  I wish everything could be pink fluffy bunnies and strawberry fields forever.  Unfortunately pink fluffy bunnies eat the strawberry fields.  Wildlife and people will continue to create problems for each other until there are either no more people or no more animals.  All we ask is that you have patience and listen to all sides of the story before you step in and tell us you have a solution.