Elephant babies and slavery

When Zimbabwe sold elephants to China and bragged about 2 million dollars, we all retched. Then CITES declared the export of baby elephants stolen from their wild families was illegal. No wild elephants can be exported from anywhere for zoos and circuses because of the cruelty and suffering - and we celebrated.

It was a victory that had taken decades of work, depositions, research by people like Joyce Poole who did her seminal research in Kenya, who revealed the intelligence, emotions, social structures. and human emotions like happiness, humor, love, compassion, excitement, sadness, grief..

Now we know that elephants are like us, they have intense and life long family relations, celebrate births and reunions, are tool making, solutions creating, family oriented, clever and wise. They live til their seventies. raise one another’s children, become amazing great grand parents, while youngsters are naughty and playful. They take decades to grow up and learn how to be elephant - and families, moms, sisters, aunts, grand parents and great grand parents are their teachers. Young males learn from older makes after they leave homes. Good role models are the difference between life or death.

We can relate to almost everything, especially the effects of poor upbringing, suffering, trauma. Elephant suffer post traumatic syndrome, anger, fear and aggression.

When undisturbed and natural, elephants are exquisite animals to spend time with. They think, feel emotions and care for one another. They regard us, study us, and show a mutual curiosity. We smile just thinking about our close encounters, No, it's not about the adrenalin rush of a near death experience, it's the awe and wonder that we feel when face to face with such intelligent beings. We do not even have the words to describe what it is like to feel them. Is it vibrations? Aura? Magic?

We will never fully comprehend elephants. They communicate in language that our puny brains can never fathom. But unlike us, their massive brains process information from different sensors in a way that gives them incredible powers of deduction. They can reliably assess their environments and read it, and us, in a way that resembles magic. And while they may forgive, they never forget,

Despite the hard fought decision by CITES earlier this year, China defied everyone, and went ahead and broke that pact. They took their purchase of 38 innocent abducted elephants and flee with them to to the torture chambers where they now reside.

What did the world do? Nothing!

Now these babies are living in concrete cells, separated from one another, awaiting a life that will only get much worse, in fact they will endure unimaginable pain and devastating torture - some people even say that China wanted them for the harvesting of skin from live screaming elephants to produce “blood beads”, a bizarre form of jewelry crafted from suffering animals, give vitality to the wearer. I am struggling to comprehend such unimaginably cruel minds. Is the cruelty to animals an addiction to flaunting power over the worlds great animals (blood beads are also made from bones taken from live tigers)? Kenyan based Karl Amman showed me the Chinese brochures advertising these insane gifts that you can buy for a hefty fee through online shops. I interviewed him last June about this.

We ended slavery and we can listen to the stories of those incarcerated to know how dehumanizing the experience was for them. But we can never imagine the kind of torture that awaits these intelligent huge brained animals. Bur we can try ... Like the millions of slaves taken from Africa before them, they will be chained, and beaten so that their spirits will be broken, to make them compliant. These majestic beings will be reduced to cowering, whimpering pathetic giants kneeling to their new masters. It will take years to get them “softened up” to the point that they will do anything. Like slaves they will suffer unimaginable horrors, the will be starved, beaten, and forced to do unnatural things, for the entertainment of their masters.

Elephants that end up in zoos and circuses are often so broken that they become mentally unstable and very dangerous. Many end up killing their trainers. Jumbo (After whom the film Dumbo was made) committed suicide by standing on a railway track.

When China stopped the domestic ivory trade we all cheered, congratulated them and believed that something fundamental was changing - that we finally understood one another. Jack Ma, one of China’s richest men, founder of the world biggest online shop (Ali baba) that was implicated in online sales of ivory and rhino horn, initiated a foundation to reward African rangers. Our Governments thanked him and we thought things were changing.

Now I’m not so sure. It seems China will cause the suffering of elephants through the mass slaughter for ivory or mass incarceration and torture of their babies. I have to wonder if this show of strength. that they can crush our hearts, find ways of hurting our psyche by causing such suffering to the animals that we hold so dear isn’t just a sinister message. A warning. ”We don’t care what you value, what you think, or what you feel. We control you”.

I cannot describe my sense of feeling cheated, defeated, exhausted. As if it wasn’t bad enough that so many elephants still live in zoos and circuses around the world. China gets away with this because so many other western nations are guilty of taking baby elephants for zoos and circuses fir centuries. While it is stopping, it has taken decades to persuade even caring zoos. Why? Because they make so much money!!! Dumbo, though emotionally broken, was a super star.

The most disturbing thing is that China as a government could stop this. They could have simply said No! It's not worth the damnation. It's not worth the suffering .Its not worth anything! The fate of baby elephants makes no difference to their economy. A few individual people however, will profit. Why would an entire government back a few retarded individuals?

When will this end? How?

Does any member state of CITES have the moral authority to hold China to account? Who?

I want to thank the brave people in Kenya, Zimbabwe and China who have been exposing this story, getting photos and footage at great risk to themselves, to tel a story that neither Zimbabwe nor China are proud of. These images have power.

I know that there are some who will argue that elephants are not special. Please go and watch The Elephant Queen by Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone. It is probably the most important documentary of this decade about elephants. A powerful journey into the role that elephants play in nature, and a reminder of what great creatures they are.