Elephants by Hannah Mumby

Author:Hannah Mumby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-02-28T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Listen

Some people talk to animals. Not many listen, though. That’s the problem.

A. A. Milne

I talked to elephants a lot. In Myanmar, I learned how oozies tell them to stop, to turn, to lie down, to push, to pick up. Things you might want a huge machine for manoeuvring logs to do on command. And the elephants even listened to me: when I said ‘stop’, they responded, pausing for me to take a photograph. Their oozie held down their ear so I could capture any tears, holes or jagged ends, the physical manifestations of their lives in the forest that would help me to identify them. Just as we all have our own tears and scars, but they’re always different. One hot and dry day in Myanmar, we kicked up the dust driving to a remote camp from Katha. We bumped along the sandy roads for over an hour and I laughed that we’d only travelled a few kilometres when I looked at the GPS. Hannah, I thought to myself, you have to measure distance in time, not kilometres. We’d set off fairly early, after our sweet tea, coffee that comes in a sachet with milk powder, chickpeas, paratha, and all the fried things I love for breakfast. The sun was high and hot by the time we arrived at the camp. I shielded my eyes with my folder of documents. The oozies were dressed in bright yellow tracksuits that stood out like neon highlighters in the sun. We organised our workstations: space for blood samples, digging a hole to embed the elephant weighing scale, a production line to weigh out dung samples, some of which we’d dry out to extract hormone metabolites. I wanted to know how glucocorticoids, ones linked to ‘stress’ response, varied across seasons, between individuals, in the different sexes and age groups. They are part of that fight or flight response that can be healthy or can break down, become chronic and weigh heavily on these huge animals, just as it can for us. A drop of sweat dripped from my brow and I turned away to avoided getting it into the dung I was working with. If I were really an elephant, I’d only sweat between my toenails. But here I was, a human, and I did not want to contaminate the sample. I didn’t want to know how stressed I was, and I certainly didn’t want that getting in the way of my studies.

You see, that’s how I thought the elephants spoke to me. I could do it directly to them, and in return, I did these things, procedures, sampling, statistics, to try to hear back from them. And it’s funny because in terms of my experience, I already wanted to do more than that. At that camp, I took photographs of the elephants, sometimes straying from the ones I used for identification and analysing size, where the elephant had to stand still and perpendicular to the camera. I turned and caught the oozie in a plastic helmet sitting nonchalantly on top of his young female elephant.

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