Four young elephants are plucked from their families and their homes in the African bush. They are drugged and shunted to various institutions before being dumped unceremoniously on the tarmac at Johannesburg International airport.
Their destination? A park near Mexico City that pulls in the crowds by staging bullfights and that wants to use the elephants as an extra drawcard for gawkers.
Before they leave for Mexico, their journey takes them from a provincial game reserve in North West province to a hunting outfit hundreds of kilometres away, and then to the quarantine facilities of a wildlife dealer near Pretoria. When they arrive at Johannesburg International in the middle of the night, the private aeroplane chartered to take them overseas has developed technical problems and they have to hang around the noisy airfield for almost 20 hours.
Finally they leave for Mexico, standing in tight-fitting crates that only allow them to move one metre forwards or backwards. After a flight of more than 12 hours, they arrive in North America — to be confiscated by Mexican officials who say their papers are not in order.
These are young elephants, estimated by those who have seen them to be no older than five or six years. They are babies really, when you consider that elephants can live to 70 years.
Their sorry saga reminds me of Rabbit-Proof Fence, the movie on circuit about colonists in Australia who used to snatch Aboriginal children from their families and send them to colonial families so that they could get a ”better” upbringing.
Like people, elephants have a strong sense of family and place. Take them away from the herd and they have no idea how to behave; put them in captivity and they soon wither away; give them a gap and they will head in the direction of home.
The Tuli elephant debacle showed it is virtually impossible to domesticate or train African elephants without some degree of brutality. Images of mahouts beating young elephants taken from the Tuli bushlands to wildlife dealer Riccardo Ghiazza’s premises near Brits in 1998 drew an unprecedented public outcry.
How is it possible that, five years later, South Africa still allows juvenile elephants to be separated from their families and shipped out to zoos? Why is Ghiazza, who has been convicted and is awaiting sentence for cruelty to the Tuli elephants, still involved?
There is a convenient little set-up in North West where it all starts. Madikwe, a provincial game reserve under the North West Parks & Tourism Board, sells and donates elephants from time to time — but it says this only applies to family herds.
In 2001 Madikwe sold 12 elephants, some of them heavily pregnant females, to a private hunting outfit called Sandhurst Safaris. Sandhurst is also a wildlife trading centre that does business with Ghiazza. It took four of the Tuli youngsters off his hands at the height of the debacle.
Sandhurst has become the mid-way station for Ghiazza’s ongoing trade in elephants. In April he moved three juveniles from Sandhurst to Lesna Zoo in the Czech Republic. A baby, believed to have been born to the pregnant females from Madikwe, is presently being kept on Ghiazza’s property, its destination also likely to be a zoo.
Down the road from Ghiazza’s African Game Services is a rival trading outfit called Mafunyane International. It denies links to the unpopular Italian, but the two outfits have been known to do business.
Mafunyane bought the four youngsters sent to the Mexico City park last week from Sandhurst Safaris.
Whether these eight juvenile elephants that have been sent overseas from North West in the past month originally came from the Tuli bushlands or the Madikwe provincial reserve is unclear — but they certainly originated from wild herds and they certainly were ripped out of family units.
The point is important, whether you are concerned about the welfare of these eight individuals or not. Concern groups argue that the trade contravenes South Africa’s international undertakings and that the government is turning a blind eye to this.
At the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) meeting in 2000, South Africa was given permission to trade 30 tonnes of ivory stockpiled by the Kruger National Park. In order to accommodate the sale, South Africa’s elephant population was down-listed from Cites Appendix I to Appendix II, with the proviso that stringent conditions applied by the convention are properly implemented.
These conditions include that live elephants may only be exported to in situ conservation destinations — free-ranging environments within the natural range of the species. The only elephants that can be exported to zoos are those who have been born and raised in captivity.
At least 25 local and international organisations have banded together to tackle the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (Deat). They argue the North West trade in elephants is a contravention of Cites obligations, and the only beneficiaries are a handful of individuals who are making a lot of money out of manipulating the system.
Mexico’s authorities happen to agree with them. When the four youngsters sent to Mexico City finally arrived in that country last Thursday, enforcement authorities took over ownership of the elephants pending a thorough investigation of the Cites permits.
Similar objections to two United States zoos importing 11 juvenile elephants from Swaziland put an end to the sale at the end of April. San Diego Wild Animal Park and
the Lowry Park Zoo in Florida had to cancel the deal after authorities discovered the Cites applications contained false information.
Had environmental affairs department officials listened to objections to the North West trade months ago, it would have saved South Africa the embarrassment of the Mexican officials seizing the four youngsters.
Environmental watchdog NGOs suspected the Cites permits for Ghiazza’s and Mafunyane’s deals may contain incorrect information. But their requests to see the permits were refused and they applied for a High Court injunction, which was thrown out of court on a technicality.
The Mexican authorities, meanwhile, queried whether the permits were in order. They were assured by North West’s Cites officials that the deal was kosher, and the environmental affairs department endorsed this.
South African officials are loath to reveal information about wildlife trade and Cites permits, on the basis that this will ”prejudice the commercial interests” of the traders. It can be an extremely lucrative business — Ghiazza apparently earned â,¬30 000 for each of the three elephants he sold to Lesna Zoo — and the dealers are enthusiastic about using commercial confidentiality as a big stick.
Access to information is a cornerstone of good environmental governance, as is recognised in the Rio Declaration and South Africa’s National Environmental Management Act. Allowing parties who want to flout environmental laws to seek refuge behind commercial interests is dangerous.
Society eventually forced the Australian colonists depicted in Rabbit-Proof Fence to stop their kidnapping and social engineering in the 1970s. The new-millennium society is signalling to the eco-colonists of North West province that elephant-napping and torturing is also on the way out.