National Geographic: Coming of Age with Elephants Page #4

---

paying particular attention

to the jaw and the skull,

and then, you know, backing around

and touching with the hind feet.

Joyce witnessed the death of

many elephants,

but the loss of one of her favorites

was especially painful.

It was the elderly matriarch Jezebel.

By the time Joyce arrived,

Jezebel's tusks had been stolen

and the corpse had been mutilated.

Feet have been taken!

She had been ill for a number of weeks

and I think when she fell,

she was tracked and her tusks

were taken.

The 1980s were ominous times

for elephants.

Amboseli had always been a sanctuary

for them

but throughout the rest of Africa,

elephants were being slaughtered

for their ivory.

I just found it devastating that

the more I was learning about

these incredible animals,

the faster they were being

slaughtered.

I just found that I had to

try and get out there

and do something about it.

The world was at war with elephants.

For Joyce Poole, it was time

to join the battle to save them.

In the late 1980s,

poachers were killing

thousands of elephants

to meet the demand for

ivory trinkets.

They targeted the males

for heavier tusks

and hacked the ivories

from their faces with machetes.

When the Amboseli elephants project

started,

there were 167,000 elephants

in Kenya,

now there were just 25,000.

In the vast area where the elephants

once roamed,

all that remained were

gleaming white skulls of the dead.

The social structure of the elephants

was on the brink of collapse.

Almost all the breeding males

were gone,

and many families unit

consisted entirely of orphans.

If the killing continued,

experts predicted,

Kenya's elephants would go instinct.

To save the country's wild life, the

government turned to Richard Leakey,

a third-generation Kenyan who

was already famous as paleontologist.

I am going to do my level best to

eliminate the elephant poachers...

In 1989, Leakey took over

Kenya's Wildlife Service

and immediately declare war

on the poachers.

He got off to a bold and

controversial start.

...and it would be my hope that

in the coming weeks

the press will not ask for permission

to film dead elephants,

but will have an opportunities

to film dead poachers.

Leakey turned Kenya's

Wildlife rangers

into a crack antipoachering army.

Now when poachers fire on them,

they have orders to shoot back.

The first year the rangers killed

...they unearthed huge caches of ivory

from butchered elephants.

Then Kenya did something

that shocked the world.

At Leakey's urging

President Daniel Arap Moi

burned three million dollars worth

of ivory.

It was Leakey's way to wake up

the world to the horror of poaching.

It was a very emotional moment

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes