Barbara Ludman
A Second Look
A disturbing new twist in the Tuli elephant saga surfaced last week on a radio talk show where callers were invited to debate the importance of brutalised elephant calves versus raped and murdered teenagers. Astonishingly, plenty of callers bought into that spurious equation. “Let’s get our priorities straight,” they said. “How can you worry about elephants when people are suffering?”
We can expect a backlash on any issue, even animal cruelty; even rape. An inherent contrariness is one of the more attractive features of the human species. What’s appalling is what this particular backlash says about human beings.
Is the human capacity for compassion so limited that if we care about one issue we can’t also care about another?
Why is it assumed that if you object to the torture of young elephants you’re incapable of distress over the terrible deaths suffered by young women gang-raped, then killed by packs of teenage boys? Does anger at animal suffering prevent concern for children who die of diseases fast-tracked by malnutrition? Where is it written that if you care about the welfare of abandoned babies born with Aids you’re not allowed also to be horrified by cruelty to animals?
Surely it’s all part of the same issue: a concern for the helpless and a desire to put an end to suffering.
Life can be extremely difficult, particularly in Southern Africa. Some degree of tunnel vision is a survival strategy for many people. So we concentrate on the issues we can do something about.
We can’t do much about the country’s terrifying rape statistics, but what we can do, we do: weep for the victims, mourn the dead and petition government to take rape seriously. Those who are any good at it volunteer to serve as rape crisis counsellors. And we can do more: we can call the police when we hear screams, not after it’s gone quiet, the perpetrators have disappeared and somebody has stumbled across a dying child.
By the same token, there’s little the ordinary person can do about Africa’s vanishing wildlife, but there’s something we can do about a few baby elephants who were forcibly taken from their herds, transported to a facility far away and beaten into submission by people hired to “train” them. We can express outrage, call for laws to prevent this sort of outrage and support animal welfare agencies trying to relieve the suffering of these victims of greed.
Let’s take tunnel vision to its logical conclusion. Shall we poison the birds because they eat seeds and berries and grains intended for humans? Shall we continue the destruction of Africa’s wildlife begun by the colonialists and wipe out the last of the elephants, the big cats and the rhinos? Do we want a world where everybody’s out for himself alone and to hell with his neighbour, never mind the animals?
Ask any South African if he or she thinks animal torture is a good idea and the answer presumably will be no. Possibly the callers to last week’s radio debate simply hadn’t thought the subject through.
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the debate is actually about money. There’s clearly resentment at the fact that foreign money is coming in but it’s going towards saving baby elephants, not paying off car loans or putting food on the table of ordinary hard-working South Africans. Moreover, charitable organisations of all kinds, relying on the goodwill of volunteers, are always in need of donations – what organisation actually has enough money? – and could use those dollars and marks and pounds.
We’d get a lot further in this and other debates if we looked at the causes of the outrage and stopped resenting the victims. The baby elephants were sold by Tuli landowners for money which they said they needed – despite the high rates tourists pay to stay at their lodges – to erect a game fence to keep out elephants fleeing poachers in Zimbabwe. The unsavoury game merchant who arranged for the animal capture has sold some of them to European zoos. He’s likely to continue to profit from these young elephants: there’s talk of the World Wide Fund for Nature having to pay him – with foreign donations, hopefully – in order to rescue the rest.