Africa addio Page #4

The new ones are yet to be written.

There's no one to protect the savanna

from vandals or hunters seeking meat.

For those who want to rob Africa

of all they can as quickly as possible,

the right moment has arrived.

If before it was absolutely forbidden for

Land Rovers to leave the roads or tracks,

now they enter the savanna with impunity

and wildly weave back and forth

among herds of elephants

to frighten them, divide them

and separate the mothers

from the babies.

Here's the quickest way to get

your hands on a little elephant today.

You exasperate the mother little

by little. You provoke her reaction.

Then you draw out her pursuit

as long as possible

giving the illusion

of letting her reach you

and when the poor beast

can't go on any longer

she'll be too far from her baby

to be able to defend it.

The price of a baby elephant

is around $3000...

assuming, of course, that it arrives

safe and sound to the ordering zoo.

The average is one out of ten.

The others don't survive

without their mother's milk.

But today,

Africa is an infinite reserve.

Where you can't go by foot,

you go by jeep

and where you can't go by jeep,

you go by helicopter.

Of all the types of safaris

that a hunter can choose from today

this is the quickest.

It's called

"elephant safari in a quarter hour."

The helicopter leaves from the

hotel terrace and drops the hunter here.

Then it goes to find the elephant

and chases it toward him.

The hunter fires, usually poorly, but with

a caliber big enough to bag a dinosaur.

Then he finishes it off

at point-blank range.

Just enough time for a souvenir photo,

and then he's off.

In the absence of modern transport

and the power of guns,

the Africans make do with numbers.

Up to 10,000 of them gather together and

surround an area as large as a big city.

Then they squeeze the vice.

Across the great line

traced by the Zambezi

the Wildlife Society has established its

headquarters in an old abandoned farm.

It's a large organization supported

mostly by private Anglo-Saxon capital

and does what it can to save what it can

in the midst of so much disorder.

Every message received or sent by radio,

every motion of the rake on the

large table in the operations room

corresponds to a massive displacement

of animals in some remote area.

The goal of so much feverish activity is

to collect at least some of the animals

from the areas most infested

with poachers

and transport them to territories

that are safer and better controlled.

After millennia of fascinating silences,

mysterious habits,

pathways covered in obedience

to the orders of nature,

man has imposed upon African fauna

wild tourism by train, bus, plane

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