The poor old lady on the right of this photo has her urethra blocked. She was dosed and treated by a veterinarian who did what she could, but she continued to decline in health. Every time I visit this region to train rangers and guides, I’m terrified that someone will ask me to euthanize it, and at the same time I wish I could simply end its suffering.
It was easy to find her. She hardly moves more than a mile or so from this piece of land by the river. The reason it doesn’t stray too far is because that region makes it easier for it to feed. There are many mopanes and a few other species of trees, as well as some grass that appears as the water level drops during this time of year.
Normally, she would travel long distances to get the variety of plant species she needs to get enough nutrients. Additionally, species such as mopanes are known for their sourness, a plant’s natural defense mechanism to prevent it from being overeaten. But what matters is that these plants are not healthy for the poor thing.
Sadly, she is slowly and undeniably starving. There are debates over whether she will be euthanized or euthanized in some way, as her illness is considered natural and therefore the policy is that nature should take care of its own affairs.
In any case, chances are high that she will die in this area on the riverbank and that her bones will lie there for quite some time.
In the same photo, in the distance, we can see a group of elephants. They are in the part shown in the photo below, where the remains of an elephant that died two years ago can be found. They are most likely examining the bones, which is normal behavior for elephants when they find bones from other elephants.
They carefully sniff the bones with their trunks and then pick them up and carry them around for a while before dropping them to the ground again. This behavior has been very well studied and documented by Joyce Poole in Kenya (search here in English: Elephant Gestures Database).
This poor animal was injured by poachers and he moved to the same area before dying on the riverbank. Most likely he went to this region for the same reasons: better source of easy food and close to water.
You can’t see it in the photo, but the bones can be found far away, where there’s a small stream in the upper right part of the image.
By contrast, the remains of the elephant pictured below, which was killed by poachers about nine months ago, are all still together. When you compare the two photos, it’s easy to see how much more spread out the bones in the top photo are.
In the photo below of an elephant killed by poachers three years ago, you can see some of the larger bones at the gruesome crime scene. When we walk around the area now, we can find bones scattered for several hundred meters.
All of these locations are within two kilometers of each other. There are others in the same area, of elephants that died of natural causes and, of course, others that died because of poachers’ gunshots. Over time, the bones are moved, mostly by elephants themselves, but also by nature and even other animals that gnaw on smaller bones for calcium (such as porcupines, tortoises and, most notably, giraffes — and it’s pretty weird to come across a giraffe gnawing on a bone, believe me). However, giraffes are not found in this area where the photos were taken, in the Omay district, in the middle of the Zambez-Kariba area.
But imagine now that you decided to take a walk around this area a few hundred years ago, and you had little knowledge of the behavior of the elevators, which was very much the case in the West until very recently, and all of a sudden you came across several scattered bones of several elephants many different. Considering the reputation of elephants, which have always been considered to be super intelligent, then it would not be unreasonable to assume that the animals had purposely come to this region to die.
In reality, they came to this place to try to survive, but they couldn’t.
Another reason the myth likely developed is the mass deaths during periods of intense drought, particularly in arid areas, when the few places with water that support elephants dry up. This has been recorded several times, most notably in the Namib Desert of Namibia and the Kalahari Desert of Botswana.
Finally, I must add that today elephant cemeteries are a very serious and tragic reality. They are the results of the unhealthy and rapidly spreading practice of poachers poisoning the watering holes of elephants.
This was most recently done in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. I was initially shocked and horrified to hear that eighty elephants had been killed in the incident. However, the number continues to rise and today I discovered that the count has now reached 300 elephants of all ages; entire herds.
Very, very soon, we’re only going to have elephant burial grounds to see, and not one live one.