I learned to look at the world through the eyes and ears of elephants.
Some people, other elephant people, have told me
that I think I am an elephant.
In some ways, perhaps they are right.
Like Africa, the elephants take hold of your spirits.
They can possess you and persuades you
to look at the world in a different light.
There is something so grand about the life of an elephant
its great size, strength, and age.
Elephants have so many of the qualities we like best about ourselves
dignity, loyalty to families and friends,
compassion, and a sense of humor.
Biologist Joyce Poole has taken a journey,
without maps, into the heart of the African elephant.
She came to know elephant like family.
She discovered biological forces no one had ever suspected,
and elephant voices no human had ever heard.
For years, Joyce fought for their survival,
never imagining that one day she would face a terrible choice.
Joyce Poole would have to give the order to kill elephants.
This is the story of a woman
who loved elephants in a world that had no room for them.
Looking back at how it all began,
it seems as if Africa has always been my home.
Joyce Poole's family came to Kenya in the 1960s
when her father worked for the Peace Corps.
She grew up in Africa.
The family loved wild places
and often camped in Kenya's Amboseli National Park
I saw my first elephant as a child of seven,
a huge bull in Amboseli.
And I remember asking my father
what would happen if he charged the car.
And as my father said,
"He'll squash the car down to the size of a pea pod," he came.
I remember a lot from Amboseli.
It was one of our favorite places, but I remember most the elephants.
The swamps were home to a huge number of animals.
But it was always the elephants that captured my imagination.
At the age of 11,
Joyce knew what she was going to be when she grew up,
a wildlife biologist.
When the time came to leave home, she went out to live among the elephants.
Her journey would soon change the way
the rest of the world thought about elephants.
But in time, it would change Joyce, too,
and turn all her dreams for the elephants into dust.
It began in the shadow of Kilimanjaro on the Kenya border.
Her new home was Amboseli National Park
where she had first encountered elephants.
Her mentor was Cynthia Moss,
who had already embarked on the most comprehensive study
of elephant society ever attempted.
Using a photo book with pictures of the elephants in Amboseli,
Cynthia taught Joyce how to identify individuals.
Just keep your eye on Tuskless.
Now look here in this picture,
you would say M57 was older than M22 because of the angle of his head.
Yes, Yes.
He's much younger.
The elephants also got to know the researchers.
Babies played on camp as if under the watchful eye of their own aunts.
At first, all the elephants looked alike to me
large and gray with big ears.
But Cynthia taught me how different each elephant really was.
Elvira.
Esmeraldo was born in 1948.
Joyce gradually learned to recognize individuals by their familiar features.
Vee was named for the Vnotches in her ears.
Tuskless had no ivory.
Joyce was particularly fond of jezebel a noble old matriarch
with one tusk pointing skyward and the other straight ahead.
Each new arrival was given a name
that identified it as part of a specific family group.
Cynthia Moss's work was already revealing
that elephant families formed an unusually complex society
dominated by females.
But the lives of the males were still uncharted territory.
Males leave their families as teenagers
and never again live in stable groups.
Alone in her car, Joyce followed them.
She was 19 years old and had no idea what she was getting into.
To study the males Joyce needed to get as close as possible.
But the shadow of a bull elephant was perilous place to be.
A male that seemed placid
could easily turn around and impale her car on his tusks.
When I first started studying the males,
there were many times when I had elephants corner me,
tower over the car,
and I thought it was all over.
Showing who's boss is something male elephants do
from the time they're youngsters.
Most fights aren't dangerous.
Size normally dictates rank
and every male already knows where he fits in the social hierarchy.
But every once in a while, fights turn deadly serious.
What was it that changed all the rules?
Joyce noticed several older males dribbling gallons of urine.
Glandular secretions darkened the skin behind their eyes as if with tears.
She saw one elephant who also seemed to be suffering
from a fungal infection she'd never seen it before,
so she named him Green Penis.
But then other makes turned up in the same curious condition.
Joyce soon realized there was a pattern.
Each male had his own time of year when the symptoms appeared.
And it appeared at the same time every year.
In Asian elephants,
these symptoms were already recognized as part of a male sexual cycle.
African elephants are a different species,
and the experts all said they did not have such a cycle.
It took long months of tracking
and recording the behavior of individual males,
but Joyce proved the experts wrong.
At the age of 23, she had discovered a driving biological force
that every other researcher had overlooked: It's called musth.
Musth is a heightened sexual and aggressive period or rut.
And the word musth actually comes from the Urdu meaning intoxicated.
Males start coming into musth on average around 28, 29 years old
and their first musth periods only last a day or two.
With time, they last longer and longer,
and by the time they're in their mid to late forties,
they stay in musth for three or four months at a time.
How do you study six tons of intoxicated male?
It takes art as well as science.
They're predictably aggressive when they're in musth,
and even though you feel you know an animal a 100 percent-
when they're towering over the car
and starting to put their tusk on thebonnet,
you don't feel quite so sure of yourself.
But over time, the musth males accepted her,
and Joyce came to feel at ease with them.
His name is Beach Ball because everything about him is round,
his ears are round, his head is round, his tusks are round,
his body is round
and his penis is round.
Beach ball, you be nice, you be nice.
I hear you've been misbehaving out at headquarters
knocking down fences and gates.
You be careful with my car.
I've just fiixed it.
Each of the males used to have a sort of a ritualized way of greeting me.
Um, Agamemon used to come and put his tusks up against the windshield,
and then throw his head back and forth over the top of the car
with his front legs up against the bumper.
And Alfred always, you know, put his trunk on the bonnet.
And this one, I mean, he just, you know,
he likes to sort of press up against the side of the car.
He's very sensual.
The old stories of aggressive behavior by "rouge" elephants
suddenly made sense.
Males in musth can be hostile, but mainly to each other.
These fights captured by Joyce in videotape
could end injury or even death.
Who wins? Size is no longer decisive.
The male who is closer to the pea of musth has the advantage.
What they are fighting for
is the right to mate with a female at the height of her cycle.
The dominant male stays close to the female.
Hormones in her urine tell him whether she's ready.
When the time is right, they mate frequently,
while her family surrounds them.
Joyce was intrigued not just by what she saw,
but by what she heard.
She dubbed it "the mating pandemonium,"
a sound heard at no other time.
Joyce's discoveries about musth made it possible,
for the first time, to understand the complexities
of elephant mating behavior.
But now the focus of her research was shifting.
Joyce was about to unlock the secret language of the elephants.
The language of elephants was a complete enigma.
Sometimes elephants are incredibly vocal.
Other times they seem to communicate in silence freezing
as if on command
or suddenly racing off together with no apparent cue.
Even a charging musth male barely made a sound.
I kept hearing a sound like, you know,
if you take a thick piece of cardboard and you go
"whop, whop, whop" with it;
and they were flapping their ears in a certain way,
so I thought the sound was the ear flapping and it was a threat to me.
And then I realized afterwards that, in fact,
it was vocalization that was being made
and the ear flapping was just in association with it.
In the mid1980s,
Joyce collaborated with Katherine Payne,
and expert on whale songs.
Together they were determined
to uncover the secrets of elephant communication.
We began making take recordings of the elephants.
It turned out that we were only hearing part of what they said.
The rest was at a frequency too low for us to hear.
Sonograms revealed that humans miss twothirds of elephant conversation
like whales, elephants were using a language
that was mostly below the range of human hearing.
Joyce slowly learned to decipher the sounds she could hear.
She came to understand 33 different vocalizations
calls that meant, "lets go," or "attack"
or baby saying, "help, I'm scared."
Females comforted their young with rumbles
that were as specific as saying, "It's okay, we're here."
It was a radically new way to think about elephants.
What people used to believe was just stomach rumbling
was actually a complex language.
These were intelligent creatures.
Now that she knew what the elephants were saying,
Joyce knew when to be afraid,
and when it was just play even when to talk back
Anyone who's watched elephants would say,
you know, what is it that makes elephants so much?"
Why do you like elephants so much?"
They're so funny.
Why are they funny?
Well, they're not just funny to look at, they're funny acting,
they're clowns; not all of them,
I mean, they've got different personalities,
but some are real clowns.
Joyce believed that elephants had emotions
a whole range of feelings from joy to grief.
She was moved to witness one family
come across the bones of their own matriarch.
And it was very different from the way elephants usually approach bones.
They gathered around her bones in a defensive circle facing outwards
and gave a very loud rumble that went on and on,
and they really were standing over them
as if it was a member of their family.
And this whole just turning the bones over, ever so slowly and gently
and, you know, feeling every little crevice,
paying particular attention to the jaw and the skull,
and then, you know, backing around and touching with the hind feet.
Joyce witnessed the death of many elephants,
but the loss of one of her favorites was especially painful.
It was the elderly matriarch Jezebel.
By the time Joyce arrived,
Jezebel's tusks had been stolen and the corpse had been mutilated.
Feet have been taken!
She had been ill for a number of weeks and I think when she fell,
she was tracked and her tusks were taken.
The 1980s were ominous times for elephants.
Amboseli had always been a sanctuary for them
but throughout the rest of Africa,
elephants were being slaughtered for their ivory.
I just found it devastating that
the more I was learning about these incredible animals,
the faster they were being slaughtered.
I just found that I had to try and get out there
and do something about it.
The world was at war with elephants.
For Joyce Poole, it was time to join the battle to save them.
In the late 1980s,
poachers were killing thousands of elephants
to meet the demand for ivory trinkets.
They targeted the males for heavier tusks
and hacked the ivories from their faces with machetes.
When the Amboseli elephants project started,
there were 167,000 elephants in Kenya,
now there were just 25,000.
In the vast area where the elephants once roamed,
all that remained were gleaming white skulls of the dead.
The social structure of the elephants was on the brink of collapse.
Almost all the breeding males were gone,
and many families unit consisted entirely of orphans.
If the killing continued, experts predicted,
Kenya's elephants would go instinct.
To save the country's wild life, the government turned to Richard Leakey,
a thirdgeneration Kenyan who was already famous as paleontologist.
I am going to do my level best to eliminate the elephant poachers...
In 1989, Leakey took over Kenya's Wildlife Service
and immediately declare war on the poachers.
He got off to a bold and controversial start.
...and it would be my hope that in the coming weeks
the press will not ask for permission to fiilm dead elephants,
but will have an opportunities to fiilm dead poachers.
Leakey turned Kenya's Wildlife rangers
into a crack antipoachering army.
Now when poachers fire on them, they have orders to shoot back
The first year the rangers killed 50 poachers...
...they unearthed huge caches of ivory from butchered elephants.
Then Kenya did something that shocked the world.
At Leakey's urging President Daniel Arap Moi
burned three million dollars worth of ivory.
It was Leakey's way to wake up the world to the horror of poaching.
It was a very emotional moment
watching the tusks of 1800 elephants to go up in flames and smoke.
But at the same time, I felt a great sense of relief
because I believed that the elephants were going to have a reprieve.
A few months later, the nations of the world
banned all trade in Ivory with dramatic results.
The next year, instead of losing 3,000 elephants to poachers,
Kenya lost fewer than 50.
But like any war ravaged society, the elephants would need decades to recover.
They weren't going to get that time.
In the very years that elephant population was being decimated,
Kenya's human population had doubled.
People and elephants were both hungry for the same land.
The deal with the inevitably conflict,
Richard Leakey needed someone who understood elephants.
He asked Joyce Poole to run the National elephant program.
It would mean leaving the idyllic world of Amboseli.
It was difficult to leave Amboseli behind, but at the same time,
I was being given the opportunity of a lifetime.
I had been so privileged to spend so many years with elephants,
to have learned so much I felt a sense of, almost of obligation,
of giving them something in return
and I felt that with the knowledge I had
that perhaps I could make a difference.
Joyce was convinced she could help the elephants fiind a place in modern Kenya.
She didn't realize how difficult it was going to be.
Joyce Poole had now entered the very heart of the conflict over elephants.
At Kenya's wildlife service,
she recruited a team of committed young Kenyans.
They were eager to develop new programs
that would help people and elephants live together.
One of the first tasks that I had at Kenya wildlife service
was to survey the country and fiind out how many elephants we had left.
I would have loved for them
to have been able to return to their old haunts,
but there just wasn't the space anymore.
I began to have this horrible vision of a future world
where almost all of the land would be taken up by people
and the only space left for elephants would be inside a few national parks.
Other African nations had already
confiined their elephants to national parks.
Joyce hoped that would never happen in Kenya.
She knew it would ultimately mean controlling the elephant population.
Elephants need space.
An adult eats 300 pounds of vegetation a day.
As the population grows,
elephants can have a devastating effect on park habitat.
For other African nations,
the solution is to compute how many elephants the land can sustain,
and kill the rest.
It's called cculling.
I think cculling is totally unethical.
I think it's barbaric.
I suppose I imagine it like taking a group of humans and just deciding
we're going to take out this family or we're going to take out that family.
Joyce believed she could avoid cculling in Kenya.
But now there was a new problem.
Elephants were beginning to move out of the parks.
And when they did, tragedy was waiting.
The elephants could no longer go back to their old migratory routes.
Settlers had planted crops everywhere.
Families had staked their entire lives
on what had once been prime elephant habitat.
The elephants were just going back to their old haunts,
but from the settlers' viewpoint, they were out of control.
The radio messages came in from the stations, almost every day.
Elephants were on the rampage.
They were eating their way through cornfields,
they were knocking down houses, and they were trampling people to death.
Joyce knew she had to keep people and elephants apart,
and it was a matter of life and death on both sides.
She tried to protect vulnerable farms with electric fences.
But the elephants learned to short circuit the fences.
Elephants broke through here last night,
and they went out into the shambas out here.
Probably, one of the bulls was in charge of this
and he must've broke in and they went out.
Every day we have to keep repairing after every breakage
and this is taking up resources.
The elephants were always one step ahead.
Under cover of dark
they constantly found new ways to get through to the farms.
In one night,
an elephant could destroy a family's entire food supply for the year.
If you can imagine having to defend your entire livelihood
from some enormous beast that came in the middle of the night
and weighed close to a hundred times what you weigh.
You can't see it.
All you have is a small torch and this
this beast this monster can track you down,
can smell exactly where you are
and you can't see it.
It can crush you in a matter of seconds.
That's what so many people across Africa are up against.
When the elephants come, the farmers have only rocks, sticks,
and the sound of their own voices to defend their crops.
In the morning, at least one family faces famine.
As you can see for yourself, I have nothing left for my family.
All the crops were destroyed by the elephants;
the beans, the corn, the tomatoes, everything's gone.
The children will sit and keep quite.
They have nothing to eat. They'll just sit quietly.
The close contact between people and elephants sometimes ended horribly.
Many people are killed in Kenya every year by elephants.
It's somewhere, probably between 40 and 50 people a year.
Some areas are worse than others.
I don't think that in most cases.
I think that the elephant didn't intend to kill the person.
But in some cases, they've defimitely gone out,
tracked down the person and kneeled on them,
which is usually the way an elephant would kill someone.
The most effective way to control problem elephants was to shoot them,
but local wildlife wardens lacked the equipment
and training to do it properly.
Many of the elephants that were being shot were the wrong ones,
that it wasn't the elephant that had killed Mrs. Soandso,
that it wasn't the elephant that had gone into the shamba and destroyed it.
The elephants that were being shot were taking hours to die
it just wasn't right.
Joyce had to face a painful reality.
She'd come of age learning how elephants live,
and she accepted the need for some to die.
But now she was going to have to give the order.
I realized that elephants were going to have to be shot,
that we couldn't allow elephants
to go rampaging through people's farms and killing people.
But if we had to kill elephants,
I wanted to make sure that we at least we killed the right elephants
the ones that were doing the damage.
In 1992, Joyce established a special team
and sent them into military training to become marksman.
Their job was to kill problem elephantsbut to do it humanely.
I think the question isn't how we can justify shooting elephants.
I think the question is how can we justify not shooting them.
I mean, when you've spent the night out in a maize field with people
who are just having their whole livelihood destroyed right there
and then, there is no other alternative.
Now when villages suffered repeated attacks, Joyce sent her control team.
They watched by night till the elephants came.
We're going to wait for the elephants.
They'll be coming in, probably, in an hour or two.
We'll wait for them here.
As soon as we hear them cutting into the maize,
we'll cut into the maize above them and come around,
and try and get in front of them.
So if we can get them coming towards us,
we can then pick out the ringleader and we'll shoot him.
We've got to shoot one out of the herd to stop them from doing this.
There's no other way we can stop them.
I'm so happy now that this animal is dead.
I've been up every night, waiting and looking after my crops.
The elephants have been bothering us for the last five years
and destroying our crops.
Some of the farmers actually have not harvested anything from their fields.
For now, this village's cornfields were safe.
The killing of one elephant should keep the other away.
Tonight the crops would not have to be guarded
but what about all the other villages.
In 1993 alone I gave the order to shot 57 problem elephants
and each decision was difficult, but I knew it was the right thing to do.
For these villagers, the monster that once terrorized them
was now just thousands of pounds of meat in the morning sun.
Today, it would fed their families.
All over Kenya, deadly encounters
between people and elephants were on the rise.
Joyce Poole and Richard Leakey were under constant pressure
to kill more elephants.
I realized my worst fears were probably going to come true someday.
Kenya was going to have to eliminate most of the elephants outside the parks.
We would have to confiine the rest behind fences
as other African nations had done.
If elephants had to be confiined to parks,
Joyce wanted to fiind a humane way to control their numbers.
She had her team had a daring new idea.
They were going to test a form of elephant birth control.
Make sure you don't let them go back across the river.
Critics ridiculed the whole pain.
But Leakey gave her the go ahead.
For the test, Joyce relies on exactly the sort of detailed knowledge
of individual elephants that has always been her specialty.
Just bring 'em over here.
They are looking for a female who already has a baby,
so they can be certain she is not pregnant.
The marksman brings her down with a tranquilizer dart.
Once again, Joyce is defying the experts.
But this might be a way for elephants
to survive in the crowded world of modern Africa.
Once the elephant is down,
Joyce and her team have only 20 minutes to do their work
They inject the elephant with an experimental contraceptive vaccine
which should sterilize her.
Then they strap on a radio collar to track her progress.
Joyce believes birth control for elephants may mean hope for the future.
But it will take years to prove that the contraceptive works.
Then just when they begin to get the first positive results, it's all over.
Political infighting puts an end to their plans.
I have given the best years of my life to public service.
In march, 1994 his enemies forced Richard Leakey out of office.
...and the stress and the pain of being vilified
by senior politicians and others
is more than I think is good for my health.
Under these circumstances I have today sent a letter to his excellency
the president offering my resignation.
Joyce and several of her colleagues resigned the same day in support.
What was so devastating about it was that KWS had had such successes,
and my own program... we had built up such an extraordinary team
and we had really done so much and I feel that people knew that,
people were on our side; yes, they wanted us to do more,
but they realized we were doing the best we could
and all of a sudden, Richard is force to resign...
and everything is just left in limbo.
Joyce didn't know yet where her life was going to take her.
But elephants still had a hold on her spirit.
She went back to visit Amboseli.
She now had a daughter named Selengei.
Joyce wanted to introduce her child to her old friends.
We'd gone out one evening to watch elephants.
And I saw Vee approaching us with her family.
And then an extraordinary thing happened.
It wasn't just any rumble, it was greeting rumble.
And who knows what was going on in the elephants heads?
I could only guess that they had remembered me
and they were welcoming us back to Amboseli.
For a few days, Joyce blended in with the familiar camp routine.
Her old colleagues were still pursuing their research.
Elephants would always be part of Joyce's life.
But back in Nairobi,
someone else was going to have to make the hard choice about their future.
I think in the long term, let's say looking 50 years ahead,
that elephants and people will not be able to coexist,
that elephants will be confiined to national parks,
many of them with barriers around them.
And I think between here and now,
it's going to be a very painful process to get where we're going...
and that there'll be a lot of suffering on both sides.
To save what she loved most in the wild, she had fenced it in,
controlled it, even killed it and it hadn't been enough.
I think that the dreams I had or even have for elephants can never be.
There's not enough space anymore.
And what space there is put aside for people.
I think all we can do is look at each situation
and do our best to protect what can be protected,
look for solutions for the conflict.
And where we can't do anything, we just let it go.
It can't all be saved.
It can't.