Kenyan scientist Joyce Poole, an expert on elephant behaviour, comments on the recent kidnapping of baby elephants from Botswana
As a scientist who has spent two decades studying the social behaviour and vocal communication of elephants, I have been asked to comment on the capture of 50 baby elephants in the Tuli Block, Botswana.
It is my understanding that the Botswana Wildlife Department and the local landowners’ association granted permission to animal dealer Riccardo Ghiazza, director of African Game Services in South Africa, to capture the elephants and to sell them to foreign buyers.
The elephants are destined to go to zoos and circuses in Germany and Switzerland, a “safari park” in China, as well as to elephant-back safari ventures.
In the Tuli Block recently, 30 elephants between the ages of four and 10 years were forcibly taken from their mothers and families. The youngsters were immobilised and the adults were chased away with helicopters.
The captured babies were then transferred by road to South Africa, where some are being held in a converted warehouse near Hartebeespoort Dam. Another 20 baby elephants are to be captured in the near future.
Under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), the international trade in live elephants is legal. But the capture of free- ranging baby elephants, taken forcibly from their mothers, does raise ethical questions.
Elephants are complex, highly intelligent social mammals. The more I learn about them, the more I am persuaded they have minds. They may not have minds like ours, but minds nonetheless.
And this is where I believe the capture of baby elephants is on slippery moral ground. For most people would agree that something which has a mind has interests that matter – and that to disregard the suffering and pain, or to deny the experiences of a mind-having animal, is morally wrong.
Many people might ask, but how do we know elephants have minds? We don’t.
We do, however, have mountains of data, notebooks full of incredible anecdotes and enough scientific knowledge to make us distinctly uncomfortable about assuming elephants don’t have minds. And until we know more, the ethical course is to err on the side of over-attribution.
The landowners say they are selling the elephants to help raise money for a game fence to be erected on their western boundary, stopping elephants from breaking into farmlands for food.
Given what we do know about the intelligence and close social bonds of elephants, we should ask whether the sale of these baby elephants to raise money for electric fences is really justifiable in a wealthy country like Botswana.
Ethics change with the times and, by voicing opinions, people collectively decide what is acceptable and unacceptable, gradually adjusting the boundaries. In this century alone we have made significant changes among our own species in the treatment of women and people of colour.
In the past few years, scientists and philosophers are beginning to think seriously about the rights of our closest relatives, the great apes. As we approach the new millennium, I believe the time has come to begin asking ourselves some more difficult questions. One of them might be: what is the right way to treat beings such as elephants?