Information Related to "The Luangwa Elephants: A Lesson for All"
| Audio/Video |
Depredations of the elephant herds of northern Zambia by poaching led to a breakdown of the social structure of these magnificent creatures. Their experience holds sad and sobering lessons for people as well.
Gift was an orphan. She was about five years old when she wandered into the camp of Mark and Delia Owens. She had no parents, no aunts or uncles, probably no siblings.
She had no family to teach her about life, how to survive or how to behave. By some miracle she had survived the slaughter that had taken her immediate and extended family from her.
From the late 1970s through the 1980s commercial poachers shot nearly 100,000-about 93 percent-of the elephants in North Luangwa National Park in northern Zambia. The majestic elephants were killed and sold for meat, skin and ivory. The government was powerless to stop the organized poachers.
In 1986 Mark and Delia Owens arrived and established the North Luangwa Conservation Project (NLCP) with the goal of rehabilitating and conserving the 2,400-square-mile national park. The Owens had met and married as graduate students at the University of Georgia. They sold all they could, packed their backpacks and spent seven years living in tents in Botswana's Central Kalahari Desert studying black-maned lions and elusive brown hyenas in an area so remote that most animals had never seen a human being.
In Zambia, Mark and Delia received assistance from their own foundation and the Frankfurt Zoological Society. They helped curb poaching by assisting the local scouts with equipment, vehicles, communications, a school and cash incentives. As a result of working with the couple, the North Luangwa game guards became the best in Zambia.
The NLCP identified 14 villages that were notorious for harboring commercial poachers. Mark and Delia worked in these villages to establish small sustainable businesses and other alternatives to poaching, which had been the primary source of income in the area.
There were no handouts. Rather, micro-loans provided business startup money, which had to be paid back. Villagers were also encouraged to grow cash crops and learn commercial farming. More than 2,000 families in the NLCP target area benefited from the community development and agricultural assistance programs.
The ultimate goal of the NLCP was to develop low-impact tourism in the park. This industry would protect the elephants and provide revenues for villagers who in earlier times had depended on poaching for their livelihood. When Mark and Delia arrived in North Luangwa in 1986, 1,000 elephants and many black rhinos were being poached every year. By 1994 the poaching had stopped and the herd could begin to rebuild.
The heavy poaching over nearly 15 years had taken its toll, as Mark and Delia learned in a study of the elephants that was to last 10 years.
African elephants normally live in tight social groups or family units. Females are a part of the group for their entire lives. The unit is led by an older female, known as the matriarch, who may live to be above 60 years old.
Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and cousins normally feed together and play in the rivers. The older female elephants constantly teach the younger ones about maternal behavior. They express and reinforce bonding through touching and rubbing of body parts.
The animals show little aggression towards each other. Young males stay in the group until they are between 9 and 14 years of age, when they leave in search of a mate. Adult males are pretty much loners or spend time with only a few other males.
The older females, especially the matriarch, hold the family together and teach the younger animals where to find water, food and protection, as well as how to thrive in the jungle and savanna. Elephants are among the most social and cooperative animals anywhere on earth.
The study of the Luangwa elephants quickly revealed that 38 percent of them were tuskless. Normally, barely 2 percent of African elephants are tuskless, but the poachers had altered the gene pool by targeting animals with tusks to sell for ivory.
Worse than missing tusks, the social structure of the animals had been transformed. Family units were smaller and younger. Before poaching, more than half of the elephants were over 20 years old; now only 6 percent were. Very few females in the best reproductive age group-20-45 -remained alive.
The Owenses realized that there were no wise old matriarchs leading the family units. Instead, they were led by females about age 15, and some groups were entirely made up of orphans. Young males with no family structure to guide them formed groups like city gangs-chasing non-receptive females and fighting among themselves. The park's elephants had been reduced to bands of roving teenagers.
Now back to "Gift"-the name given to the orphaned female elephant that walked into the Owens' camp during the study. She had no one to train her, protect her or teach her how to behave. She had taken up moving around with one of the adolescent male groups.
Normally she would not have been near male elephants until later-ovulation begins in African elephants between ages 11 and 14, and they normally don't have their first offspring until at least age 16. Gift was only five.
Three years later, the Owenses were astounded to discover that Gift, now only 8, had a baby! She was only half the age she should have been to give birth. She had become a single mom, something unheard of in normal elephant herds.
Gift was part of a much larger problem. As a result of the poaching, a quarter of the elephant "groups" were now made up of only two-a young mother and a baby. These babies were to grow up without the love, protection, training and examples of older and wiser tutors.
Being young and an orphan, Gift was not a good mother. She rarely engaged in the touching and trunk reaching with her baby that bonds elephants. But Gift and her little one were not the only struggling mother and baby, as Gift was not alone in growing up without a family. Nearly half of the births during that time were to mothers younger than 14-well below the standard of an earlier time.
By the time Gift was 16, the normal age for first giving birth, she already had three offspring and was also a grandmother. How different her life would have been if she had been raised, nurtured, trained and loved by a normal family.
Only time will tell if the Luangwa elephants will ever rebuild and regain the family structure that provided stability for them for millennia. As a result of the work of Owenses and the NLCP, the majestic animals are increasing in number and there is hope for the future.
The story of Mark and Delia Owens and their work with the Luangwa elephants, and their findings regarding them, may be found at their own websites, in the books Cry of the Kalahari and The Eye of the Elephant, and in The Boiling Pot, news-letter of the Wildlife and Environmental Conservation Society of Zambia.
When Africans read of the incredible social changes brought about by the upheaval of the normal family life of these elephants, they often compare the symptoms to what is taking place today in Africa as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
I ran across a copy of The Boiling Pot while staying in a hostel in Livingstone, Zambia, several years ago. We had traveled to Botswana and Zambia to see our oldest daughter Hollie, a medical student then working in the largest hospital in Gaborone.
She related to us that there are very few people in that area between ages 25 and 60 who are still alive. All across Southern Africa, HIV/AIDS has taken a grim toll of the adult population and left entire villages empty and thousands of orphans to fend for themselves or be raised by relatives or orphanages.
Those of us in the United States can also identify, in a different way, with the fallout from destroyed family structure. Radical social changes have taken place in Western society since the 1960s. Our epidemic of unwed mothers and gangs of young men who engage in violent activity seem eerily similar to the experience of the Luangwa elephants.
Our Creator intended that family structure would provide the elephants with stability, safety, lifelong relationship bonds and the means to pass on to youngsters how to behave and act as adults. The same is true of the family structure God designed for mankind.
Jesus Christ directly affirmed that our Creator designed the family unit, being the author of marriage: "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?" (Matthew 19:4-5).
He then went on to add, "So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate" (verse 6). Sadly, there have been unrelenting assaults against the institution of marriage from many fronts over the past generation, in many cases tearing apart what God had instituted and joined together. Perhaps in some ways it's not that much different than poaching.
A few decades after Christ's affirmation of marriage, the apostle Paul added that the Fifth Commandment-"Honor your father and your mother"-is "the first commandment with promise" (Ephesians 6:2-3). And what is that promise? "That your days may be long, and that it may be well with you" (Deuteronomy 5:16). Is it well with you?
A positive, loving family is the greatest of blessings for adults and youngsters alike. It's true for elephants, and it's true for people. When that family environment is missing, what we experience is not unlike the sad story of the elephants of North Luangwa.
©1995-2022 United Church of God, an International AssociationRelated Information:
Table of Contents that includes "The Luangwa Elephants: A Lesson for All"
Other Articles by Rex Sexton
Origin of article "The Luangwa Elephants: A Lesson for All"
Keywords: elephants Zambia family structure social structure Luangwa
Zambia: