This is one of the best essay I have read this year - The Hunted: Did American conservationists in Africa go too far? by Jeffery Goldbery. The question: Is it ok to kill the Elephant poachers? There is no right or wrong answer and it's a very polarizing question. That's exactly the reason why I didn't post this for a long time. Now that I have changed my mind but yet I don't have an answer. I kept vacillating about my position on this issue but the only word I can come up with was "it depends". This essay is 17 pages long but yet our cognitive fluency will polarize it. I would suggest read it without getting carried away by passions. This is a story of Mark Owens, his wife Delia, Elephants, poachers and morality in the jungles of Zambia.
When they finally did see a small family of elephants, by a river, they noticed their skittishness. “The elephants are so frightened by humans that they will not drink,” Mark wrote. “At this moment, in August of 1986, we pledge to each other: no matter what it takes, or how long, we will stay in North Luangwa until the elephants come to drink at the river in peace.
The confrontation with poachers brought troubles. Delia Owens tells Vieira that “there were several assassination teams that were sent down by poachers with the intent to kill us. I mean, lions don’t frighten me nearly as much as humans.” Vieira’s voice-over suggests that the threats created trouble in the marriage, and Delia says of her husband, “He was just out there. I couldn’t reach him anymore. He had become—he doesn’t like for me to say it, but I think he had become truly obsessed.”
Their cause, to protect elephants, has justice behind it, and only ivory collectors might disagree. Adrian Carr, who has lived in the Luangwa Valley most of his life, wrote to me, “I have worked in wildlife for the past 40 years and I am fully aware and endorse the fact that in Conservation Law Enforcement, the threat of lethal force is ever present. The rules of engagement must be clear and the use of that force responsibly applied.”
Chief Chifunda, one of the chiefs whose ancestral territory was taken by the British to create the North Luangwa Park, put it differently. “He scared my people,” he said of Mark Owens. “The man has an illness. He loves animals more than he loves people.”
During my last visit to the park, I witnessed something extraordinary: a male black rhino at close quarters. The rhino was enormous—the scout I was travelling with put his weight at more than twenty-five hundred pounds—but he seemed unbothered by the presence of humans. A pair of well-armed and attentive scouts were standing by, essentially as personal bodyguards. Poachers had killed all of the park’s rhinos by the nineteen-eighties, but the Frankfurt Zoological Society, working with the Zambian Wildlife Authority, has reintroduced them to North Luangwa, and today their population has grown to twenty-three. The elephants, too, have recovered their numbers in recent years. “We’ve reintroduced the black rhino here, and we do this without telling the entire world how brave we are, without publicity stunts,” van der Westhuizen said. He and his wife stayed in the park from 1997 to 2006. “In my time, there were very few cases of elephants being shot only for their ivory—I would say about fourteen in total,” he said. “Elephant poaching in North Luangwa is under control.” And though Zambia and Tanzania recently petitioned to loosen the strictures on selling elephant parts, with the price of ivory rising again, the U.N. decided last week to keep the ban intact.
Even the Owenses’ most severe critics acknowledge that Mark’s approach to conservation saved the lives of elephants. But the price, Markus Borner suggested, was too steep. He said that when he visited North Luangwa he learned “quite a lot about what had been going on, from the expatriate and local staff.” He said, “These were very dark times for us, and I would like to keep it history.” Today, he noted, North Luangwa is “the safest and best maintained park in Zambia.”
Africa is continent, not a country (duh!!) and we often tend to forget this fact. John Kasaona from Namibia has a different story to tell:
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