Day's Diary

April 13, 2007 ~ Baby Elephant Walk

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The John Wayne movie Hatari has a scene in which one of the female leads adopts three baby elephants and they walk with her to the river so they can bathe. The background music is delightful, a tune called “Baby Elephant Walk.” I was reminded of that as I sat atop a “baby” elephant and we walked through the bush of Zimbabwe. Elephants are a fascination of mine. They have been for years. So to have the opportunity to ride one was the experience of a lifetime. I gave some of the generalities of the ride in an earlier entry, but I’d like to fill in some of the details, if you don’t mind and if you do, you can just skip this entry!

Elephants in the wild are dangerous animals. They don’t always mean to be, but if you weighed between five and six tons and were hungry most of your waking hours, you could be dangerous, too. These lumbering creatures can walk where they please. They have no predator in the wilds of Africa. They, more than the lion, are king of the jungle. Their powerful trunks can fell large trees, to say nothing of small cars or minibuses if they get in the way. They can only see clearly a few feet in front of them, so when something large moves suddenly out of their clear range of sight, they move toward it or can be frightened by it. At a run, they can move at about 30 miles an hour – that’s six tons moving at 30 miles an hour! Things in their path topple because they can’t stop easily. You might begin to understand why for years people thought that the African elephant was not only dangerous, but impossible to tame.

About 20 years ago, a few baby elephants were orphaned and left on their own. Without help, they would have died. Elephants live in families and move with the family, one male and as many as ten females. Elephants do not function alone. They also don’t adopt outsiders easily. A fellow who handled horses came across one of the orphans and fed it. It responded to him and he began to work with the elephant. Elephants are very intelligent animals and learn voices and can easily learn commands. The lore that an elephant never forgets is not lore, but truth. They remember everything, which makes them much easier to work with than horses and most other animals. This trainer decided to use the same technique of reward and positive reinforcement that he used with his horses, and the elephant responded. Over time, he gathered other orphans and he trained other trainers. That became the beginning of “Elephant Encounter,” the walk I went on. The handlers do not use whip or force to get the elephants to respond, but voice commands and treats, much like a well trained dog (only much larger). The elephants know the handlers’ voices just as dogs know their owners’.

Elephants, like any animal (or person for that matter), have personalities, preferences and personal quirks. Emma, for instance, a 15 year old, is a bit strong-willed and likes to wander off the path. She has an adventurous spirit, so anyone who rides her must be ready to take detours, as the rest of the riders wait for her to rejoin the group. She doesn’t like to take the lead, but she doesn’t like to be last either, or so her handler says. So the name we heard called the most often was Emma, calling her back to the trail, and out of the rough bush. “Emma, come Emma. Go Emma, go. Move Emma” were the strong, firm commands we heard the entire hour of the ride. It reminded me of having a willful two year old in the group. There is a limit to her independence, though. The handler said that a few weeks ago in the evening she roamed off with the wild elephants that sometimes graze near the elephants’ enclosure. The handlers didn’t go after her, but about thee days later, early in the morning, she came trotting back to the encampment, alone and hungry. She knew where home was. She hasn’t wandered too far a field since.

Elephants eat about 20 hours a day and only sleep about four. They have to eat that much to support their large bodies, and the young elephants eat more as they grow, just like human teenagers. The elephants we were riding ranged in age from 15 to 21 years and were not yet fully grown, weighing about 3 ½ ton each. At maturity, the female will weigh about five ton and the male about six ton. These young ones have a lot of eating to do to get to maturity. They eat almost any tree or bush in sight, wrapping their trunks around the desired greenery and pulling. Then they munch as they walk. When that mouthful is gone, they look for another available branch. There are a few trees and shrubs they will not eat but for the most part, most plants in their path are fair food, in many instances thorns and all. During their lifetime, they will get six sets of teeth. The elephants we were riding were working with their first set, but soon they would begin to lose some of those and new ones would grow in. They lose their last set when they are about 65 years old, or so and then they die soon after because they can not eat. They gather food in with their trunks and push the branch or whatnot into their mouths, chomping as they go. But they can also suck things up through their trunks. At the end of the ride, we were given the opportunity to hold peanuts in our hands and have our elephant nuzzle her trunk in our hand and suck the nuts out. It was quite an experience to have an elephant eat from my hand. She was really rather gentle and the end of her trunk tickled as she nosed around to be certain that she hadn’t missed anything. During the ride, when the elephant responded to a command, the handler would dig in his pouch and gather a handful of nuts and the obedient elephant would put her trunk back flat against her head to receive a reward. She knew she had been good.

I keep saying “she” in referring to the elephants, but there was one male elephant on the walk. He was at the back of the line, a very typical pattern for elephant movement through the bush. If there is more than one male in the group, there are jealousy problems and the dominant one drives the other males out, to find and form their own “family.” The male in our group was the gentlest of the group, but also the largest. He watched the rest and followed willingly.

African elephants have larger ears than Asian elephants and many appear to be more brownish or reddish than the gray of the Asian elephant, but that is only because of the mud of the region. Elephants love to roll in the mud, using the mud as an air conditioner because it cools them in the heat, but it is also a sort of insulation, protecting their hides from flies and other insects. Even when the handlers bath them, which they do regularly, some of the mud remains and gives them their brownish-red coloring. So the baby elephant walk from Hatari is really part of the lives of my new mammoth friends. I could hear the music playing in my mind as we walked.