Eleven elephants. One plane. Hurtling together across the sky.
The scene sounds like a dream conjured by Dalí. And yet there it was, playing out high above the Atlantic. Inside the belly of a Boeing 747, eleven young elephants were several hours into a marathon flight from South Africa to the United States. Nothing could have prepared them for what they were experiencing. These were not circus animals, accustomed to captivity. All of these elephants were wild, extracted at great expense and through staggering logistics from their herds inside game reserves in Swaziland. All were headed for zoos in San Diego and Tampa.
The date was August 21, 2003, a Thursday morning that stretched on and on. The elephants were confined in eleven metal crates inside the semidarkness of the freighter jet’s cavernous hold. Before they were loaded into the plane, they had been sedated. Now they were woozy and not particularly hungry. Some lay on their sides, slumbering. A few stood and snaked their trunks toward a human who moved up and down the line of crates, replenishing their water, murmuring reassurance.
“Calm down,” Mick Reilly told them. “It’s not so bad.”
Mick was thirty-two, with light brown hair and the permanent tan of someone who has grown up in the African bush. As usual, he was clad in his safari khakis and an air of quiet self-assurance. His arms and legs bore the faint scratches of acacia thorns. His weathered boots were powdered with the red dust of the veldt. Everything about him testified to a lifetime of wading through waist-high turpentine grass and thickets of aloe and leadwood trees, of tracking lions and buffalos and rhinos and carefully counting their young, of hunting poachers armed with AK-47s.
Mick and his father ran the two game reserves where the elephants had lived in Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom nestled in the southern tip of Africa. Mick and these eleven elephants had come of age together in the parks. They recognized his scent and voice, the rhythms of his speech. He knew their names and histories and temperaments—which of them was excitable and which more serene, where each of them ranked in the hierarchies of their herds. Watching them in their crates, he could not help but wonder what they were thinking. Surely they could hear the thrum of the jet engines and feel the changes in altitude and air pressure. Through the pads of their feet, equipped with nerve endings highly attuned to seismic information, they would have had no trouble detecting the vibrations from the fuselage. But what could they decipher from this multitude of sensations? Did they have any notion that they were flying?
“It’s OK,” Mick told them. “You’ll be fine.”
Not everyone, he realized, agreed with his assessment. He was tired of the long and bitter debate that had raged on both sides of the Atlantic in the months before this flight. Tired of the petitions and the lawsuits and the denunciations from people who had never set foot in Swaziland, never seen for themselves what was happening inside the game reserves. There simply was not enough room for all of the elephants anymore, not without having the trees destroyed, the parks devastated, and other species threatened. Either some of the elephants had to be killed, or they could be sent to new homes in these two zoos. Mick saw no other way to save them. He had heard the protests from the animal-rights groups, insisting that for the elephants any fate would be preferable to a zoo, that it would be better for them to die free than live as captives.
Such logic made him shake his head. The righteous declarations. All this talk of freedom as if it were some pure and limitless river flowing through the wild, providing for every creature and allowing them all to live in harmony. On an overcrowded planet, where open land is disappearing and more species slip toward extinction every day, freedom is not so easily defined. Should one species—any species—have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others toward oblivion?
As far as Mick could tell, nature cared about survival, not ideology. And on this plane, the elephants had been given a chance. Before his family had agreed to send them to the two zoos, he had visited the facilities where they would be housed and had talked with the keepers who would care for them. He was confident the elephants would be treated humanely and be given as much space to move as possible. Still, there was no telling how they would adjust to being taken from everything they knew. Wild elephants are accustomed to ranging through the bush for miles a day. They are intelligent, self-aware, emotional animals. They bond. They rage and grieve. True to their reputation, they remember.
How would the exiles react when they realized their days and nights were encircled as never before? When they understood, as much as they could, that they would not see Africa again? Either they had been rescued or enslaved. Or both.
The 747 raced westward, carrying its living cargo toward the new world.
The savanna, alive just after sunset. Anvil bats search for fruit in the falling light. A bush baby wails somewhere in the trees. Far off to the east, along the Mozambique border, the Lebombo Mountains stand shrouded in black velvet.
A fat moon, nearly full, shines down on a throng of elephants chewing their way through what’s left of the umbrella acacias inside Mkhaya Game Reserve. A small patch of green in the center of Swaziland, Mkhaya is one of the parks the elephants on the 747 were taken from. This was their home. Before deciding what to think about the fate of the eleven headed for the zoos, it helps to see the wild place they came from. To know what their lives were like before they ended up on the plane and to understand the realities that pushed them toward that surreal journey.
An evening tour through Mkhaya is especially dramatic—climbing into a Land Rover at the end of a golden afternoon, then lurching along the park’s winding dirt roads, searching for the elephants who remain. Mkhaya’s herd is a good-sized group—sixteen in all, counting the calves—and even though they are the largest land mammals on earth, they are not always easy to find. Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy.
As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.
A couple of hours into the tour, the visitors begin to wonder if they will glimpse any of the hulking creatures tonight. Then suddenly the entire group seems to materialize from nowhere. The driver has unwittingly turned a corner into the center of the herd. On both sides of the road, elephants loom like great gray ghosts. They’re in the middle of their evening feeding, knocking down trees, snapping branches and chewing on leaves and peeling bark with their tusks. As the Land Rover sputters to a stop in their midst, the elephants turn their massive heads toward the intruders. Two calves hurry toward their mothers and aunts. A towering bull, his tusks faintly glowing in the moonlight, moves from the shadows into a patch of red leopard grass only twenty feet away.
“Here’s my big boy,” says a woman in the back row of the vehicle. “Come over and say hello.”
As if on cue, the bull steps into the road and lumbers toward the Land Rover. He doesn’t appear angry. Just insistent. Behind the wheel, the tour guide quickly restarts the engine, then shifts into reverse. He’s hurrying backward down the road when, in his mirror, he spies one of the females waiting beside a bushwillow. As the vehicle approaches, the cow bends the tree across the road and holds it there, directly in the humans’ path. She makes it look easy.
Without slowing down, the guide spins the wheel, taking the Rover off the road—still in reverse—and maneuvering around both the elephant and her roadblock. He keeps his foot on the gas, tearing and bumping backward down a little hillside and across a dry riverbed until he’s sure none of the herd is following.
The guests inside the Land Rover try to process what they’ve just witnessed. What was that elephant doing?
The guide smiles, shrugs. “She was just being naughty. They’ve got a sense of humor—more than people realize.”
Naughty?
Another shrug. “She was definitely trying to block our way,” says the guide. “It’s just not good to drive through an elephant herd. They don’t like you to drive through. They want you to listen to them.”
Driving back to camp, he explains that elephants get irritated when they’re not in control. He talks about how helicopter pilots, flying over herds, have seen elephants grab small trees and shake them, as if trying to swat the helicopters from the sky.
Here in Mkhaya, encounters between elephants and humans tend to be more relaxed. Every day, the herd indulges the curiosity of the tourists who approach in Land Rovers with their camcorders. Usually the elephants seem curious as well, walking within a few feet of the humans, calmly reaching forward with their trunks. Still, whenever the two species meet, anything can happen. Once, a park employee was bicycling to work when he accidentally pedaled into the middle of a herd. The rattling of his bike spooked a mother with her calf, and the cow attacked, chasing down the man and then picking him up and throwing him several times. He survived—barely.
In Swaziland, as in other parts of Africa, elephants have struggled to hold their own against humans. Americans tend to think of Africa as a continent of vast, unclaimed spaces, where species can roam to the horizon and beyond. In reality, humans have occupied so much of the continent that many animals are confined inside game parks. Although these parks are often huge—sometimes stretching across hundreds of miles—the animals increasingly find their movement restricted by human boundaries, human considerations, human priorities.
As our species paves over the planet, squeezing other species out of existence, we seek solace in the myth of unlimited freedom. Inside our subdivisions, we sit with our kids and watch The Lion King, singing along as Simba and Pumbaa and Timon parade across the endless veldt and majestically celebrate the circle of life. But the truth is, the circle of life is constantly shrinking. If you’re going to see a lion, even in Africa, it will almost certainly be on a tour inside a fenced park.
The conflict unfolds in miniature inside Swaziland, a country smaller than New Jersey. Although elephants once thrived here, the only two places where they can be found today are inside Mkhaya and at another fenced reserve, Hlane Royal National Park. Compared with the mammoth game parks in South Africa and other neighboring countries, Mkhaya and Hlane are tiny. Only a few dozen elephants live inside the two parks.
Fifty years ago, not a single member of their species could be found in Swaziland. They had all long since died off or been killed by hunters. Then Ted Reilly, Mick’s father, stepped in. Ted was born and raised in Swaziland and spent his childhood in the bush, watching antelope graze in the distance, studying how kingfishers bore holes into the dirt to make their nests. As a young man he left home to study conservation, working as a ranger in game reserves in nearby South Africa and Zimbabwe. When he returned to Swaziland in 1960 to help run his family’s farm, he discovered that during his years away almost all of the country’s wildlife had been wiped out. Traveling through regions that had once teemed with dozens of species, he found them all gone.
Reilly decided to bring the animals back. First he turned the family farm in Mlilwane into a wildlife sanctuary. He planted trees and savanna grasses, built dams to create wetlands, then stocked the new habitat with species he had imported from other countries or had captured himself. His adventures bestowed him with a larger-than-life reputation. He tore through the bush in an old jeep named Jezebel, pursuing impala and warthogs and any poachers foolish enough to venture inside the sanctuary. He scoured the Swazi countryside, gathering scorpions and frogs and lizards. He had a female hippo from a London zoo flown in, then ferried a male from the same zoo across the English Channel and had it flown in from Paris. His rangers captured a nine-foot crocodile on the banks of the Nkomati River, then drove the thrashing reptile to Mlilwane in a pickup truck.
One harrowing day, Reilly and a crew of thirty were transporting a white rhino that they’d tranquilized and then hoisted onto a flatbed truck. The men, seated around the sleeping prize, were startled when the rhino awoke enough to snap through his ropes and stand up beside them on the back of the moving vehicle. Their armored captive was groggy, but no less fearsome. Some of the men jumped off. Others yelled until the driver stopped and the rhino could be restrained again.
The campaign to restore the country’s wildlife inevitably drew the attention of King Sobhuza II. The Swazi monarch, one of the last kings to reign over an African country, was famous for having fifty wives, some of whom he chose at the annual Reed Dance, a great tribal celebration where thousands of bare-breasted virgins undulated in public and paid homage to his majesty and the queen mother. As a national symbol of fertility, the king was expected to have many wives and produce many children. In nearby South Africa, where Swaziland was often viewed as a backwater, mention of the dance and the king’s topless maidens prompted eye-rolling. The jibes of outsiders were of little consequence to Reilly. A royalist through and through, he dismissed these naysayers as ignorant of his country’s ancient traditions. Besides, his battles against hunters and poachers had earned him more than a few foes in the Swazi parliament. If he was to prevail, he needed the king’s support.
Sobhuza, who longed for the return of wild creatures, proved a dedicated ally. The sanctuary at Mlilwane was only the beginning. Working closely with the king and his successor, his son Mswati III, Reilly went on to create the country’s first national park at Hlane and then opened Mkhaya, a reserve designated for the protection of endangered species such as black rhinos and Nguni cattle. A nonprofit trust was formed to operate the three parks. Reilly trained more rangers, including his son Mick, and stocked the land with more species—lions, sable antelopes, buffalos, cheetahs.
The elephants began to arrive in 1987, when Mick was still a teenager. From the start, they were controversial. There were a dozen of them, all trucked in from South Africa, all of them calves only a few years old. They were survivors of the annual culls carried out to control the country’s elephant population. Though the calves had been spared, they had witnessed the slaughter of their families. Not everyone was sure it made sense to bring them into Swaziland. How would they survive without their mothers? Even if they did make it, would they be haunted by memories from the culls?
Ted Reilly brushed away the questions. He agreed that the calves would be happier roaming the bush beside their mothers. But their mothers were dead. Weren’t they better off, Reilly said, starting new lives in Mkhaya and Hlane?
The elephants survived. They did so well, in fact, that within a few years of their arrival, they exceeded the parks’ resources. Elephants are among the most beloved animals on the planet. But they are also voracious eaters that feed for up to eighteen hours a day. They have a remarkable ability, unrivalled by any species except for Homo sapiens, to alter their surrounding ecosystems. The elephants inside Mkhaya and Hlane were tearing the bark off so many trees and knocking down so many other trees that they were systematically deforesting entire sections. The destruction threatened the future of the eagles and owls and vultures that nested in those trees. It also posed a serious challenge for the black rhinos, one of Africa’s most endangered species, which depended on similar vegetation for their diet.
In the months before the eleven elephants were loaded onto the plane, some animal-rights groups argued that there was plenty of room inside Mkhaya and Hlane, that the overcrowding had been exaggerated, that the Reillys had invented a crisis so they could justify selling the elephants to the zoos.
But the magnitude of the problem is obvious to anyone who tours the parks, even today. The devastation inside Mkhaya is striking. And in Hlane, it is catastrophic. Standing at one of the interior fences, looking toward a section of the park where there are no elephants, visitors see a lush expanse of green trees and bushes. If they turn their heads a few inches and look on the other side of the fence, toward the area where Hlane’s elephants live, all that meets the eye are miles of dead trees. Many have been pushed to the ground. Hundreds of others stand like twisted silhouettes, their branches black and broken and bare.
Gazing across this moonscape, it seems impossible that the elephants have managed to survive, much less any other species.
Above the waves and the clouds, the 747 soared on. Sunlight burned along the wings. A thin trail of exhaust tapered behind, etched across a canvas of perfect blue.
Inside the hold, some of the elephants drifted in and out of sleep. Others were more alert, the effects of their Azaperone and Acuphase injections slowly wearing off. Mick, beyond exhaustion by now, was still patrolling back and forth between them, talking softly in the human language they were most likely to recognize.
“Kahle mfana,” said Mick, speaking in siSwati, the native tongue of Swaziland. “Kutwulunga.”
Steady, boy. It will be OK.
A South African veterinarian named Chris Kingsley worked nearby, assessing the elephants. The vet watched their respiration patterns, checked to see if they responded to sounds, made sure that none were shivering or showing other signs of trauma.
Chris and Mick had been working for more than forty hours straight. They began their labors before dawn early that Wednesday morning, where the crew tranquilized the elephants inside the boma—a fenced corral where the animals had been kept in preparation for the journey—then lifted the animals via a conveyor belt and a crane onto flatbed trucks to be driven to Manzini, the nearest city with an airport. Loading them onto the trucks took all day, and then the drive to Manzini took most of the night. The airport didn’t have a runway big enough for a 747, so the elephants were shifted onto a pair of Ilyushin IL-16s, and then when they flew into Johannesburg, they had to be unloaded from those two planes, with forklifts moving the crates, and reloaded into the hold of the 747. It was winter in that part of the world, and cold enough that night that Mick could see ice glinting on the tarmac. Despite the chill, there were formalities to be observed. They had to wait for customs officials to sign a stack of release forms. By the time the freighter jet accelerated down the runway, the sun was up, and it was Thursday morning.
Chartered for $700,000, the plane had more than enough thrust and weight capacity for the task at hand. A few more tons would have been no problem. Still, the pilots were not eager to cause their passengers any distress, so they eased their ascent, taking off at a gentle angle before heading across the tip of the continent toward the Atlantic.
As the 747 carried them across the equator and backward through eight time zones, the divide between morning and afternoon began to blur. Mick and Chris were enveloped in the hum of the engines and the breathing of the animals. Watering cans in hand, they checked on the elephants’ progress, making sure that they had enough to drink and that the trays underneath their crates were not overflowing with urine. Elephant urine is so corrosive it can eat through metal.
All of the elephants were juveniles, between ten and fourteen years old. Four were headed for Tampa, and the other seven would travel on to San Diego. So far they seemed to be doing well. Early into the flight, Chris had been concerned about Mbali. Named after one of Mick’s two daughters, she was the youngest and smallest of the group. After takeoff, Mbali wasn’t eating or drinking. She simply lay in her crate. The vet had the impression she was depressed. A few hours later, the young elephant seemed to have recovered. She was back on her feet, drinking water with her trunk, responding to the humans’ voices. The other elephants were vocalizing too, sending out waves of rumblings that Mick and Chris could feel in their chests. The two of them were startled when one of the males trumpeted. The bulls were more restless than the cows. Already, some strained at their confinement. Mick could see them leaning against the interior of their crates, pushing with their feet, testing the strength of the walls. A sickening thought occurred to him: What if one broke out?
His mind fixed on the image. He visualized the male elephant charging toward the front of the plane. He saw it bulldozing into the cockpit, trampling over the pilots, then finally bursting through the nose.
The bull would plummet toward the waves far below. The shattered 747—no more pilots, no controls—would tumble close behind.
At first, when the Reilly family was trying to find an answer to the elephant problem, they did not even consider zoos. After decades of fighting to create open spaces for wildlife, the notion of constraining animals inside a zoo seemed appalling. Anne Reilly, Mick’s sister, admits that when she originally heard that her father and brother were considering sending some of the parks’ elephants to San Diego and Tampa, she was aghast.
“I thought, Isn’t that why we have them here—to keep them out of zoos?”
Both Ted and Mick acknowledge that they, too, had difficulty contemplating the possibility. In his head, Mick pictured animals pacing in reeking cages.
“We would have personally preferred the animals to go into a wild situation,” he says. “I never visited zoos much in my life, and my idea of zoos was the traditional sort of zoo that was around fifty years ago.”
Neither contraception nor surgical neutering was an option. Trials were being conducted on elephants in the field, but no viable methods had been fully tested. An assortment of difficulties—the nature of the females’ cycles, the length of time required to perform vasectomies on the males, the threat of violence from other elephants watching on—made it impossible to seriously consider such procedures. Besides, there were already too many elephants inside the parks.
The Reilly family searched neighboring South Africa for other parks that could take the elephants. But every time they thought they might have found a new home, the permits were denied. South Africa already had more than enough of its own elephants to contend with. The government, the Reillys say, would not allow any more to be brought in.
They considered other places in Africa. But almost everywhere they looked, the threat of poaching seemed too great. Some countries even sanctioned organized elephant hunts. In Botswana, where the elephant surplus is even greater than in South Africa, a wealthy American tourist can pay $50,000 to join a safari and shoot down an elephant bull, then climb atop his fallen corpse for a victory photo. The Reillys did not want Mkhaya’s and Hlane’s elephants to end up dead, their meat and tusks sold on the black market, their bodies treated as trophies. But if they could not find an alternative, Mick and his father concluded they would have no choice but to destroy some of the herd themselves. They already controlled the populations of warthogs and impala and other animals inside the parks with culls. They were prepared to do the same with the elephants, even though they recognized that no other species triggered quite the same depth of emotion among humans.
With their size and intelligence and emotional complexity, elephants were irresistible. People admired the tender attention with which they reared their young, the way the calves were raised not just by their mothers but by their aunts. Their extraordinary memory was cited as evidence of self-knowledge and an awareness of both the past and future; ethicists pondered whether these qualities proved that elephants achieved personhood and should be accorded a moral status and rights equivalent to those of humans. The social hierarchy of the herd—a matriarch directing their lives with almost no interference from adult bulls, who usually roamed the bush on their own or in smaller bachelor groups—appealed to feminist sensibilities. To many, elephants embodied modern notions of progress and benevolence. They were seen not just as awe-inspiring animals, but as nature’s great vessels of enlightenment. For all of these reasons, the public identified with the species more intensely than with almost any other.
Even so, elephant culls had long been a reality in other African countries, especially after the ivory trade was banned in the second half of the twentieth century and elephant populations surged in the southern regions of the continent. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, culls were used to thin herds inside Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. One early method, pioneered in Uganda, required a team of hunters to quietly take position near a family of the animals, then deliberately signal their presence by coughing or breaking a stick. The startled elephants would circle around their young and bunch together, making it easier for the hunters to shoot them down. In Zimbabwe, where close to fifty thousand elephants were culled over the years, the techniques were more efficient. Low-flying planes drove the elephants toward a team waiting in the bush with automatic weapons. Bulls in breeding herds were usually shot first, and then the matriarch and other older females. Killing the matriarch early was standard protocol in many countries, since she anchored the rest of the herd. Without their leader’s guidance, they would become confused and not know what to do or where to go. Sometimes, a gunman would scale the matriarch’s body, wait for other elephants to venture close, then pick them off too.
The brutal choreography evolved inside South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a massive reserve where more than fourteen thousand elephants were culled over the decades. Every year a quota was designated to keep the park’s population within manageable limits. Helicopters buzzed over the targeted animals, pushing them toward a preselected kill zone. Sometimes the elephants would be forced to run for miles. The preferred sites were away from the eyes of tourists but close to patrol or firebreak roads so that cranes and trucks could clear away the massive carcasses. The helicopters would spook the elephants toward the killing ground, then circle overhead to keep them close together. Calves, struggling to stay with their mothers, would fall. The adults would roar and raise their tusks as the shadow of the helicopter swept across them.
For a time, the rangers darted the animals from the air with Scoline, a neuromuscular anesthetic used in human heart surgery. An armed ground crew—sometimes as many as sixty men—would then finish off the immobilized giants. But the practice was deemed inhumane after it was discovered that the darted elephants were paralyzed but fully conscious for several minutes and sometimes suffocated to death before the ground crews could shoot them. Eventually the use of Scoline was prohibited. Instead the marksmen leaned out of the helicopters with large-caliber rifles, waiting until they were positioned just above and behind the elephants, and would then fire through the backs of the elephants’ necks and into their lower skulls. The elephants did not make for especially difficult targets. Usually they ran in a straight line, with a smooth gait and relatively little bobbing of their heads. When hit by a clean brain shot, the elephants would collapse in midstride, dropping so fast and hard that their tusks would plow into the ground.
The men aiming the rifles understood the logic behind the slaughter, the cold necessity of reducing the herds to save other animals and protect some of the park’s most irreplaceable plant life. Kruger’s elephants had grown so numerous that they were wiping out entire groves of baobab trees, some of which had towered over the savanna for four thousand years. Knowing these things did not make it easy to squeeze the trigger and watch a young calf tumble to the dirt beside his mother’s carcass.
“Don’t ask me if I enjoyed it,” a game ranger warned a British reporter who witnessed a cull inside Kruger in the early ’90s. That day, the ranger and his team had killed three hundred elephants.
“Elephants are beautiful creatures. Of all the animals in the Kruger Park, I respect the elephant most,” he said. “We play God, but we are not God. Every time you cull, it takes something away from you. This is not a nice job, but it has to be done.”
The aftermath was just as unsettling. Calves old enough to have been weaned and survive on their own were often spared to be sent to other game parks or sold to zoos in the United States or Europe. Sometimes, to prevent the calves from running away, they were tied to their mothers’ bodies until they could be pushed or dragged toward transport crates. Around them, disposal teams dressed in overalls and white boots moved between the dead elephants, slitting their throats with pangas to bleed them and then preparing the carcasses for removal. Vultures flapped their wings in nearby trees. In the distance, hyenas waited.
The disposal teams cleaned the killing ground as thoroughly as possible. They didn’t want other herds that had not been targeted to enter the area in days to come and stumble onto evidence of the massacre. After years of observing the species inside the park, the staff knew that elephants—unlike most animals—were aware of death and were drawn to the remains of their kin, sometimes burying them in branches and grass. Some researchers even believed that elephants could identify the fallen body of a cow or bull they had known in life. Once, after a cull in Uganda, park rangers had stored severed feet and other body parts of the fallen inside a shed. That night, other elephants pushed their way into the shed and then buried the body parts.
Kruger officials had no desire to instill lingering fear or hostility in surviving herds. They didn’t want emotionally scarred elephants seeking revenge against the thousands of humans who tour the park every year. So the culling crews were instructed to remove every trace of the carnage. The cranes and trucks rolled forward onto the blood-soaked ground, and the bodies of the dead were lifted and then hauled away to Kruger’s abattoirs. The ivory tusks were collected and stored in warehouses, away from poachers. The meat and hides were sold.
The dead were erased.
Despite these efforts, in Kruger and elsewhere, the other herds somehow seemed to realize that something terrible had occurred. After some culls, elephants would come from every direction, gravitating toward the kill zone. They would stay for a while—lingering at the scene as though they were investigating. Even more remarkably, the behavior of these surviving elephants suggested that they were aware of the threat even before the shooting stopped. In the middle of some culls, herds far from the site were observed to begin moving away from the helicopters and the gunfire. In Zimbabwe, elephants ninety miles from a cull apparently became so alarmed that they fled and hid. Later they were found in the far end of their game park, huddled together.
How did they know to be afraid? In some cases the wind could have carried the scent of blood to their extraordinarily sensitive nostrils. Or they might have heard the pulsing chop of the helicopter blades. Elephants are believed to be capable of hearing storms more than a hundred miles away. As researchers discovered more about the physiology and habits of the species, another answer emerged. The rattled herds, it turned out, were almost certainly responding to long-distance distress calls from the elephants under attack.
Elephants routinely communicate with one another through snorts, shrieks, roars, bellows, and trumpets. They also exchange information through low-frequency rumbles, most of which humans can’t hear. Sometimes people in the vicinity of elephants can feel these rumbles; the vibrations have been described as “a throbbing in the air” similar to thunder. One researcher in Kenya, listening to the infrasonic calls on a specialized recorder that picked up low frequencies, reported that they sounded like soft purring. Elephants tune in to these rumbles not just with their ears, but also their feet. Through motion-sensitive cells in the soft pads of their feet, they can detect low-frequency sounds as they ripple in seismic vibrations along the ground. Elephants use these infrasonic signals to attract mates, to assert dominance, and to find and rescue calves who have fallen into watering holes or gotten into other trouble and are calling for help.
The trauma of the culls, then, could not be completely contained. As the targeted animals ran in vain from the helicopters, they would have been capable of sending out terrified warnings to other elephants beyond the horizon. It’s easy to picture the distant herds freezing as the messages reached them. The elephants would have held completely still for a second or two, then turned their heads back and forth, ears stiffened and spread wide as they waited for more information.
Who knows how long the distress calls would have lasted. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe half an hour. The cries would cut off, one by one.
Swaziland’s elephants had been born into this bloody history. They were among the hundreds of calves who had survived the Kruger culls. They had all run from the helicopters, heard the rifle shots, then watched as their families were butchered.
In the years since, this generation of orphans had wreaked havoc. In different parks around southern Africa, some of these elephants were displaying classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They were easily startled and showed elevated levels of aggression. With no older bulls or cows to guide them as they matured, the young males became notorious for their rampages. They knocked down fences, pulled up pipes, trampled farmers’ crops. They seemed to be attacking humans and other species with increasing frequency. In a startling display of aberrant behavior, some bulls sexually assaulted rhinos and then killed them.
The Reilly family had encountered these problems with their orphans too. Over the years, several of the males inside Mkhaya and Hlane had exhibited aggression toward the white rhinos. Four bulls had killed rhinos. One bull had fatally attacked three rhinos within twenty-four hours. Mick had shot and killed the aggressors himself. Luckily, these incidents were fairly rare. Most of the three dozen elephants living in the parks were females and seemed to have adjusted well to their new surroundings—too well, given their appetites and the destruction of the trees. By 2001, just seven years after some of the elephants arrived from Kruger, the devastation in Mkhaya and Hlane had reached the point where the Reillys felt they had no choice but to consider a cull of their own.
“We had run out of time,” Mick says.
It was right about then that the two American zoos—first San Diego, then Tampa—suggested another possibility. Officials from both zoos flew to Swaziland to describe the new homes they could offer the elephants. San Diego already had a three-acre elephant exhibit. Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo was willing to build one of similar size. The zoos invited the Reillys to see the facilities for themselves. Mick flew to the United States, toured both zoos, and was impressed—not just with the exhibits but with the expertise of the staffs and the care they offered. The animal clinic at San Diego, Mick said, was more sophisticated than any hospital inside Swaziland. At Lowry Park, he was struck by the zoo’s manatee hospital, where over the years dozens of injured or ailing manatees had been rehabilitated and then released back into the wild.
That was it. If there was no more room in the game parks, then San Diego and Lowry Park made sense.
“There are zoos,” says Ted, “and there are zoos.”
With the blessing of King Mswati III, the Reillys and the zoos began the long process of applying for the necessary permits. The zoos agreed to pay the game parks $12,000 for each elephant. The money, the Reillys said, would go to management of Mkhaya and Hlane, protection of the animals within, and the purchase of more park land. In their permit applications, Lowry Park and San Diego pointed out that the arrival of eleven wild elephants would benefit zoos around the United States. It had been more than fifteen years since any African elephants had been brought into the United States, and now the captive elephant population was aging and having trouble reproducing. Bringing in the wild elephants—all designated for breeding—would rejuvenate the genetic pool.
Mountains of paperwork awaited the lawyers and the bureaucrats. But even more was required of the zoos and the game parks. They had to figure out how to transport eleven elephants across an ocean and prepare for their care once they arrived. San Diego already had an African elephant exhibit, but still needed to ship some of its current occupants to other institutions to make room for the new arrivals. Lowry Park had not exhibited elephants in ten years, ever since 1993, when an Asian elephant killed one of the zoo’s keepers. After the young woman’s death, the zoo closed the exhibit and sent its two elephants to new homes. Now Lowry Park had to build new facilities, hire new elephant keepers, and adopt updated protocols to protect the staff.
In Swaziland, the Reillys had to figure out which elephants would be chosen, then move them temporarily into the boma and ready them for their journey. Working with the zoos, the Reillys designated thirteen elephants from two herds at Mkhaya and Hlane—the eleven elephants intended for the trip, plus two more in case any became unfit for the flight or died during the stress of the preparations. They didn’t want any females with young calves or any that were in the third trimester of a pregnancy and at risk for a miscarriage from the stress of the long journey ahead. Elephant pregnancies, however, are difficult to judge without an internal exam. To be certain they weren’t choosing any cows late in a pregnancy, the parks decided to bring in two veterinary specialists from Berlin, widely considered among the world’s authorities on elephant reproduction.
There was another challenge. The Reillys worried that the elephants who were not chosen might be traumatized if they saw members of their group being tranquilized and taken away by ground crews. To their eyes, the mass removal to the boma could easily look like another cull. To avoid that shock and any resulting hostility toward the park’s rangers and visitors, the Reillys decided on a different plan. In March 2003, when the thirteen were to be gathered, a helicopter crew darted every elephant in the two parks, knocking them all out so none would be awake to see the removal. The two German vets, flown in to assist, moved among the unconscious elephants and performed field sonograms on the selected females. Two of the females were pregnant, but neither had entered her third trimester. The elephants were loaded onto trucks and taken to the boma in Mkhaya. The Reilly family assumed the elephants would only have to stay there for a few weeks. But by then, a coalition of animal-rights groups, including Born Free and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), was protesting and organizing letter-writing campaigns and filing a lawsuit in federal court to block the importation of the elephants. “The Swazi Eleven,” the activists were now calling them.
“If the elephants are euthanized,” Katherine Meyer, a lawyer for the animal-rights groups, told a judge, “that would be a better outcome than to have these elephants put in crates, put on an airplane, brought over here, trained with bull hooks, put in cages, and live the rest of their lives in captivity.”
In Swaziland, the Reilly family was denounced by members of parliament, the local newspapers, even other elephant experts. Nine researchers studying wild elephants in Kenya, including Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole, renowned for their studies on elephant behavior and communication, released an open letter protesting the move, citing the intricacy of the emotional lives of the species and the damage to those lives in captivity. The researchers wrote:
(W)e believe the time has come to consider them as sentient beings and not as so much money on the hoof to be captured and sold and displayed for our own use. We should be beyond the exploitation of animals as complex and magnificent as elephants.
PETA offered to pay for moving them to other parks in Africa. One politician accused the Reillys of attempting to smuggle the elephants out of Swaziland. Others suggested that the Reillys’ talk of a cull was an empty threat, designed to pressure officials in the United States to approve the permits.
Mick and Ted were unprepared for the vitriol. They knew the reputation of Dr. Moss and the other researchers who had signed the letter of protest. But Kenya was not Swaziland. As for PETA’s offer to bankroll another alternative to the culling, the Reillys were skeptical. They were sure the offer would come with too many strings. Besides, just because another park was willing to take their elephants didn’t mean that the permits would be granted. The Reillys noted that there was no international outcry when they culled impalas or warthogs. Why didn’t PETA or Born Free issue press releases and launch petition drives for them? In court and in the media, the coalition hammered away at how San Diego and Lowry Park were angling to buy the elephants because they were a so-called “flagship species,” an animal so beloved that their presence in a zoo’s collection was sure to increase profits. But the Reillys argued that it was the animal-rights groups who were guilty of exploitation, whipping up the outrage for their own gain, capitalizing on elephants as their own flagship species guaranteed to draw a flood of donations from horrified animal lovers around the world. If the coalition truly believed the crisis in Mkhaya and Hlane was a convenient fiction, why didn’t they send someone to see the parks and all their dead trees? The smuggling charge made the Reillys laugh. How exactly, they asked, did one smuggle eleven elephants past customs?
By now it was August 2003, and the elephants had been in the boma for five months. The staff did what it could to keep them comfortable; sometimes their caretakers hand-fed them marula fruit, one of their favorites. Even so, the animals chafed at having their movements restricted. One day, several tried to break through the electrified fence, using another elephant as a battering ram. They chose Mbali—the small female named after Mick’s daughter—and thronged together to push her through the fence, apparently so they wouldn’t have to touch it themselves. When the current traveled through Mbali and shocked them, too, it put a quick end to their plan.
In Washington, the legal arguments went back and forth in federal court. The government permits had been approved, but now memoranda were being filed, injunctions requested, motions granted and denied and appealed. Finally, on August 15, two circuit judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington denied one last emergency motion from the animal-rights groups.
The Reillys heard the news and began the final preparations in the boma. It was time to get the elephants into the air.
The 747’s engines droned on and on. Mick, still standing, had lost track of time. All he knew was that the sun had finally left the sky and that they were flying in darkness again. A little while ago, they had stopped in Barbados for refueling. Now they were headed for Florida.
The elephants appeared to be holding up well in their crates. Extra doses of Azaperone had calmed the bulls and soothed Mick’s fears of disaster. Still, he knew the trip could not be easy for them. After all this time in the air, they had to be hungry.
“Kunekudla lukunengi,” he told them. There’s lots of food where you’re going.
Mbali, the little one, was quiet again. She had been sleeping, off and on. Was she dreaming? Did she still feel the jolt in the boma, when the other elephants pushed her into the electric fence? Did she see herself back in the park, wandering through the leopard grass and umbrella thorns?
Inside the hold, among the crates, there was a shift in equilibrium. The plane was descending through the clouds, toward a grid of shimmering light.
Tampa.