Bwana Go Home

You big game hunters out there (all thirteen of you), take heart. The Trump administration, the Guardians of the Gigarich, have not forgotten you and your contributions to his campaign fund. On Thursday, November 16, to the surprise of many (not me), it was announced that trophies from African safaris - like elephant tusks - can now be imported freely into the U.S. As usual, Trump issues edicts that benefit his wealthy cronies - golfing partners, yacht club members, tax evaders, and fellow slum lords - who alone can afford to traipse off to African game reserves and, like the Bwanas and Pukka Sahibs of old, pull the trigger and blow away some of the very few elephants, lions, and mountain gorillas remaining in the wild. 

The day the news broke, CNN's Michael Holmes asked a representative of safari hunters the ultimate question, "Why would you want to kill an elephant?" Nonplussed, the man stammered out something to do with, "Unless you've experienced it, the thrill is impossible to describe." 

The announcement on Thursday provoked such a crescendo of outrage, even from conservatives, that on Friday Trump put the decision on hold pending further review of "conservation facts" - or, of course, until everyone is distracted by another one of his antics.

Shooting an elephant - a bull elephant, a "big tusker" - gives a certain number of people (a number that is dwindling) some kind of pleasure that the vast majority of us will never know. I wonder if poachers get a comparable thrill from the experience of bringing down an elephant. There are currently 400,000 wild elephants, and an average number of 96 fall to poachers every day. Do the wealthy big game hunters feel at all upstaged by a poor African poacher who is merely filling the demand for elephant ivory? The poachers are there for the money - not for the thrill of the kill.

But what the big game hunting representative probably meant to say is that, unless you are in possession of such disposable wealth as to make it easy for you to pay for an exclusive safari the ultimate goal of which is to place you so close to a herd of wild elephants that you can pick one off with a high caliber rifle without any of the discomfort and the risk that such hunting used to have, in the days when Hemingway risked more than just his ego in the old days when men were men and there was no one questioning the rectitude of slaughtering big game or the taking of trophies to decorate one's home - unless you have the wherewithal to make all of it possible, you will never know what it's like to shoot and kill an elephant. 

One man who knew what it was like to shoot an elephant was George Orwell who, when he was Eric Blair enlisted in the British Constabulary in Burma in the late 1920s, had to destroy an elephant not for sport but in the line of duty. It was a messy, harrowing job that affected him so deeply it later inspired him to write one of his most brilliant essays about it.

After informing the reader that, "As for the job I was doing, I hated it  more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear," Orwell describes how he responded to a report of an elephant gone berserk, killing a cow and destroying property. On his way, he finds the body of a native crushed to death by the elephant. "He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony."

The young elephant was on "must" - the condition in which his body and mind are flooded with testosterone and he becomes uncontrollably aggressive. He had been chained up by his mahout but had managed to break his chain. When he finally arrives on the scene, Orwell sends a native to fetch him an elephant gun belonging to a nearby friend. He did not even intend to shoot the elephant: "As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant - it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery - and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided." But when he notices what a large crowd of something like two thousand natives has gathered, who have only come to see the sahib kill the elephant, Orwell realizes that he must do it or lose the respect of the Burmans. "To come all that  way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing - no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at."

"But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems  worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly."

(Currently, the value of elephant ivory is estimated to be $730 per kilogram.)

When the elephant gun arrives, Orwell laid down in a prone position and, without knowing exactly where to aim, fired three shots into the elephant's head. He brings him down, but he has to fire his last two shots "into the spot where I thought his heart must be." But even this doesn't finish him. Orwell retrieves his smaller rifle and "poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat."

Orwell finally decided he could take no more. He was informed that the elephant took a half hour more to die and by the afternoon the natives had stripped the carcass almost to the bone of its meat and organs. There was some debate over whether or not he was justified in killing the elephant. But Orwell could only conclude: "I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."

Killing elephants for sport is a far different matter than having to destroy one out of duty. Poaching is appalling but is a problem only because of a persisting demand for contraband ivory. That leaves what must be a tiny minority of safari enthusiasts who want to experience what an ever decreasing number of human beings will ever have the money to know: the thrill of seeing a magnificent bull elephant fall at the pulling of a trigger. 

As Lionel Trilling wrote: 

Everyone knows the famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest  Hemingway (Hemingway refers to it in his story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and Fitzgerald records it in his notebook) in which, to Fitzgerald’s remark, “The very rich are different from us,” Hemingway replied,  “Yes, they have more money.” It is usually supposed that Hemingway had the better of the exchange and quite settled the matter. But we ought not to be too sure.(1)

By now it isn't the "rich," but the Super Rich that Fitzgerald would have been referring to. People so voraciously acquisitive that they have 30-car garages, even though they have only one body to be transported by car at any given time. People who can afford to spend $450 million at an auction for a painting with a dubious pedigree. Does simply owning an art masterpiece somehow bestow cultivation - taste - on the owner? People so obscenely rich that they can live in a world all their own with little or no contact with the world in which all the rest of us have to live should try to be less ostentatious with their buying power.

The half-forgotten English poet Macaulay once wrote that puritans wanted to put an end to bear-baiting not because of the pain it brought to the animals but because of the pleasure it brought to the people. His point probably made more sense in 1850s England, but by now it is transparently clear that the puritans were right to try and deny people the objectionable pleasure of watching a captive bear defend itself against the attacks of vicious dogs. If objecting to the pleasure that a tiny club of people find in the destruction of elephants makes me a puritan (and H. L. Mencken would probably insist that it does), then save me a seat on the Mayflower.


(1) Lionel Trilling, "F. Scott Fitzgerald," The Nation, August 25, 1945.