Elephants – Why Bother?

A few months ago, at a dinner in New York, an aquaintance got into a conversation where a guest asked, “Why all the fuss about elephants – they mean nothing to me personally. Why should I bother whether or not they go extinct?”

The comment, and the attitude it reflected, has concerned me ever since. I don’t know if it was made out ignorance, arrogance, an attempt to provoke, or the desire for genuine knowledge. I prefer to think it is the latter.

So I asked myself, why should they bother? What should elephants mean to someone who has never had the good fortune to meet them?

The scientist in me was the first to answer, for diversity in ecosystems reflects a more vibrant, interesting, and robust life-support system for the planet. Elephants play an important role. They are key-stone species, terrestrial-ecosystem architects, and gardeners without parallel.

In tropical rain forests elephants spread seeds up to fifty kilometers from where they ate them. The seeds of a particular species of Balanites tree are dispersed only by elephants. It is simple – no elephants, no trees. We still don’t know how important that tree is, but we do know that similar trees, whose seeds are spread by elephants, support hundreds of different species of animals and plants.

We spent two years making a film about an extraordinary African tree called a sycomore fig (The Queen of Trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM ). It is an ecosystem of a tree. There are animals whose lives so depend on the tree that they cannot exist without it, and vice versa. In the two years we spent filming, we barely scratched the surface of the web of interconnectivity that the tree was central to. The sycomore fig is vital to animals ranging from ants to elephants. It is important in ways that, when we started the journey of making the film, we could barely imagine. I think that if we looked closely at most living things, we’d find much the same.

Once you start to look at elephants in a wide-eyed and curious way, even their simple act of sheltering from the midday sun in the shade of a tree becomes an act of gardening – for that is where their dung ends up.

Compost delivered straight to the tree.  Compared to their forest-dwelling cousins, savannah elephants are more akin to tree surgeons and landscape gardeners. It makes what they do even more obvious. Overall, their effect is the same – to increase biodiversity, from mites up to mammals. It is the ‘utility’ argument – the concept of ‘usefulness’ – first to the ecosystem, but eventually to us all.

A philosopher might add that there is a strong moral argument that we simply don’t have the right to push another species into the abyss of extinction. We are the most powerful species on the planet. In my view, it is incumbent on us not to abuse that power. I’d go further, and suggest it be used, not just for our good, but for common good. A common and equal ‘right to exist’ for all species sounds quite straight forward, but we find it easier to apply it to elephants than bacteria – partly, I think, because we are fundamentally anthropocentric. We tend to admire qualities in other species that we recognize in ourselves. We home-in on shared attributes. It makes it easier for us to relate to them. As a result, we empathize more with gorillas than guppies.

Sometimes just a simple, shared attribute is enough – I suspect many of us think more kindly of owls than other raptors – probably because their eyes, like ours, face forwards. A bottle-nosed dolphin has prodigious intelligence, but, despite this, I think we’d be less kindly disposed towards it, if the genetic lottery hadn’t set its jaw in a permanent ‘smile’. When most of us think of a penguin, we are more likely to visualize a shuffling, portly, maitre’d, than a highly-adapted, counter-shaded, marine predator.

Elephants are lucky – for they share more attributes with us than most animals. We can ignore their un-human appearance in favour of their consciousness, their extraordinary communication, good memory,  similar lifespan, strong sense of family, their ability to plan into the future, and their uncanny awareness of death.

A cultural historian might think that our anonymous diner in New York would be more impressed by the elephant’s contribution to human culture – from Hindu deity Ganesh, via Salvador Dali’s surreal stork-legged elephants, to Disney’s ‘Dumbo’. It is the sort of theme that might inspire an exhibition at the Guggenheim, and appeal more to an urban mind. Artists, spanning the millennia, from cave painters to Banksy have felt the need to represent elephants, and they have ranged from being the inspiration for Warhol to war machine.

However we rationalize the importance of elephants, I think it provides only part of the answer. To really appreciate elephants you have to experience them.

I would invite our anonymous diner to sit with me in a land-rover next to a waterhole at dusk, as families of elephants came to drink, and play, and greet each other. Only then would would our dinner guest start to get to ‘know’ them.

They would feel the rumbles, smile at the squeals of delight as calves jostled in the shallows, and laugh out loud at a baby elephant’s loss of control of its trunk. I’d point out the subtle shifts in body language as herds came and went – those that waited, those that greeted or waded straight in. We’d notice family traits – how some prefer to coil their trunks and rest them on their tusks. We’d watch their differing reactions to our presence. Some would ignore us. Some, if the wind changed and blew our scent towards them, would form a nervous protective circle round their calves – trunks held high like snorkels. Ears out, heads up, eyes wide and fearful. We’d share the horror of witnessing fresh arrow wounds on the flanks of those with the largest tusks. We’d also share the delight of witnessing how other animals benefitted from the elephants’ presence: the low-flying dung-beetles skimming the grass, and egrets that darted between their legs, plucking flies from the air.


More than anything, I would like to take our guest out walking – armed only with our wits – in a wilderness that is still the kingdom of the elephants. There, they could feel, perhaps for the first time in their lives, just how insignificant humans can be. It might show them, that to be anthropocentric, is not the only way to view the world – and how to step outside the protective bubble we surround ourselves with, can make us feel so much more alive. They’d feel part of the natural world, not apart from it.

Above all else, I hope they would see that elephants are the rightful and dominant force in their ecosystem, and conclude that we have no right to take that away.

I’ll probably never get the chance to meet that dinner guest, or sit with them at a waterhole – our outlooks and our lives are thousands of miles apart. Very few of us will ever have the privilege of experiencing elephants in the wild, and that’s why we are making a film about them – to attempt to convey the wonder we feel, when in their presence. It can never be the same as experiencing them first hand, but, by making the film and telling their story, we hope to share our passion, convey the wonder, and perhaps inspire people enough to make them care – and answer for themselves, the question, “Elephants – why bother?”