This past week was…. Intense. Last week, as we were coming back from our weekly shopping trip to town, we got a call from wildlife vet Dr. Amanda Salb. (By the way, the “we” I usually refer to is me and Daniel Grove. Dan is the camp manager of the research camp here in Kasungu. He’s an Englishman that used to work in South Africa at the Vervet Monkey Foundation (VMF), only a couple hours from CARE. We actually have a number of friends in common that we’ve met along our various travels and journeys. He is in charge of my budget, and shopping for food and supplies, organizing scouts for me, and acts as my field assistant when I need him. Basically, he’s the only other person I live with way out here.)
Anyways, Amanda works for WERU, the Wildlife Emergency
Response Unit, the only wildlife veterinary service available in the whole of
Malawi. She basically redefines “badass”. For example, she worked with the
Centre and the carnivore research team to dart and collar urban hyenas in
Lilongwe a few months ago to be translocated. She had one in the back of her
Land Rover on the way to the Centre when it woke up slightly from its sedation.
She basically had the hyena in a headlock as it bit her arm, as her
boyfriend/colleague pulled the car up onto the curb and jumped in the back with
more sedation. Pretty badass. She also helped with darting our male baboon, Big
Foot, for the release.
So, we got a call from Amanda that she was on her way to
Kasungu. There was an elephant that was shot through the ear and into her
shoulder a few weeks ago by a poacher. This happened not too far from the lodge
and the camp where I live. We all know about the problem of poaching and we’ve
all seen pictures or news articles or blurbs on Facebook about the dwindling
elephant and rhino populations, but to have it be a reality in my backyard was
a new thing.
They had been following this elephant almost every day since
then to track her progress. At times she seemed fine, slightly limping, but then
gradually got worse, becoming more and more lame. I’d often come across her on
or near the road up to my release site. Amanda had come out a couple of times
to assess her situation, but there was ultimately nothing she could do,
especially without an x-ray of the damage to her shoulder.
Unfortunately, on Saturday, the ellie, named Kalimba, which
is a Chichewa word for strength or bravery or something similar, couldn’t get
up. We joined Amanda at the ellie while she administered antibiotics and
fluids. We even tried to push her up onto her feet, or at least onto her chest
so she wasn’t just lying on her side on the ground. I was literally kneeling in
a pile of elephant poop while shoving with all my might to try and get her to
budge. Unfortunately, elephants are heavy and she refused to get up. We all
soon realized that she was too far-gone and there was nothing that we could do
for her. We left her for the night, with a couple of scouts to keep the hyenas
away, knowing that she would probably die soon.
And she did. We arrived early the next morning to find that
she had died sometime around 4:30 in the morning. Amanda performed a localized
necropsy on her leg and shoulder to assess the damage and what had caused her
to decline so quickly and ultimately die. It turned out that she was shot in
the shoulder, which had basically shattered it. Pieces of bone had come off and
were dying and rotting away. It’s no wonder she could hardly put weight on that
leg. It was incredibly interesting to watch the whole process of investigating
and digging out the bullet. But it was also incredibly gruesome. I’ve seen a
fair amount of necropsies and injuries, mostly baboon, but this was an
elephant. Amanda dug the bullet out and the scouts said it was homemade from
some melted old batteries. Pretty fucked up. She was also just shot so
unnecessarily, so sloppily. These poachers just shoot without thinking or
without knowledge. They don’t know how to properly kill animals, and instead
just wound them and inflict nothing but suffering.
The worst part came at the end when the Department of
National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) staff had to take her tusks. They have to
take them and log them as evidence of the poaching and to make sure they don’t
end up in the wrong hands anyways. To save you from hearing about too much
gruesome-ness, just trust me when I say it was one of the most surreal and
upsetting things I’ve ever seen first-hand.
The whole ordeal was pretty surreal and at the time I
thought it was just a really interesting experience. I mean, how many people
get to see that? After I spent the rest of the day in the bush looking for my
baboons, it really started to hit me about how fucked up and upsetting it
really all ways. Sorry for the language, but there’s really no other way to put
it when talking about a dead elephant due to poaching. This week has been
intense, upsetting, tiring, and taxing. Dan and I were talking just yesterday
about how absolutely crazy that whole experience was, and about how upsetting
it both made us later on, how it was a weird couple of days. Definitely
something we will never forget and will always share between the small group of
us.
I’ve added just a few photos. The rest I think are more than
everyone really wants to see.
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