http://www.gq.com/long-form/wh...to-shoot-an-elephant

Worth a read - probably about as good an article as you could hope for in the 'mainstream' press.

Well written article. Kudos to GQ for looking at hunting elephant with a fair and impartial lens.

This is exactly what I have been preaching. We, as hunters, both here in NA and Internationally need to be aware of spin. We need to be aware of imagery and optics. Social Media can be our biggest friend...if we are smart enough to use it as such. Now, it is perhaps our biggest foe.

Each and everyone of us, needs to make a conscience decision before we post up that elephant "hero shot" on youtube. is this harmful, or helpful to the betterment and longevity of our sport. If it is simply to thump your chest, you are part of the problem.

Sorry, That's not the way I see things, that's the way the entire rank and file American see's it on the internet.

FB the same, if we simply put stuff up to antagonize and energize the opposition, We are employing a circular firing squad to end the game, on the oppositions terms. If the goal is to change the publics perception of hunting, that is not the way to accomplish it.

Social Media, we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Steve

Excellent Read!!!!

I agree with you Steve.

Could someone post the article here? I cant get GQ to pull it up, and I live in North central Idaho so I imagine I would have to drive 200 miles to Boise to get a copy.

i clicked on the link using 2 different computers and nothing came up. Maybe its my systems.

quote:

Originally posted by Navaluk:
Could someone post the article here? I cant get GQ to pull it up, and I live in North central Idaho so I imagine I would have to drive 200 miles to Boise to get a copy.

i clicked on the link using 2 different computers and nothing came up. Maybe its my systems.

Navaluk

The link didn't work for me either--

so I went to www.gq.com and found the article and it loaded fine.

Here it is, there is some pictures deleted, nice ones. Sorry for any format issues

Credit--Copied from http://www.gq.com/long-form/wh...to-shoot-an-elephant



It is just before dawn at a hunting camp in Botswana’s game-rich northern savanna, and Robyn Waldrip is donning an ammunition belt that could double as a hernia girdle.

“You can’t help but feel like sort of a badass when you strap this thing on,” she says. Robyn, a Texan in her midthirties, seems to stand about six feet two, with piercing eyes of glacial blue shaded by about twelve swooping inches of eyelash. She’s a competitive bodybuilder and does those tractor-tire and sledgehammer workouts, and there is no part of her body, from the look of it, that you couldn’t crack a walnut on. In her audition video for a reality-television show called Ammo & Attitude, Robyn described herself as a stay-at-home mom whose “typical Friday-night date with [her] husband is going to the shooting range, burning through some ammo, smelling the gunpowder, going out for a rib-eye steak, and calling it a night.”

Robyn Waldrip could kick my ass, and also your ass, hopping on one leg. Her extensive résumé of exotic kills includes a kudu, a zebra, a warthog, and a giraffe. But she has never shot a Loxodonta africana, or African elephant, so before she sets out, her American guide, a professional hunter named Jeff Rann, conducts a three-minute tutorial on the art of killing the world’s largest land animal.

“You want to hit him on this line between his ear holes, four to six inches below his eyes,” Jeff explains, indicating the lethal horizontal on a textbook illustration of an elephant’s face. The ammo Robyn will be using is a .500 slug about the size of a Concord grape, propelled from a shell not quite as large as Shaquille O’Neal’s middle finger. About three feet of bone and skin insulate the elephant’s brain from the light of day, and it can take more than one head shot to effect a kill. “If he doesn’t go down on your second shot, I’ll break his hip and you can finish him off.”

“Anything else I need to know?” Robyn asks.

“That’s it,” says Jeff.

“Just start shooting when they all come at us?”

“The main thing is, just stay with the guns,” Jeff tells the rest of the party, which includes Robyn’s husband, Will Waldrip, two trackers, this journalist, a videographer who chronicles Jeff’s hunts for a television program, Deadliest Hunts, and a government game scout whose job it is to ensure that the hunt goes according to code. The bunch of us pile into the open bed of a Land Cruiser and set off into the savanna, the guides and the Waldrips peering into the lavender pre-dawn for an elephant to shoot.

If you are the sort of person who harbors prejudices against people who blow sums greater than America’s median yearly income to shoot rare animals for sport, let me say that Will and Robyn Waldrip are very easy people to like. They didn’t grow up doing this sort of thing. Robyn’s dad was a fireman who took her squirrel hunting because it was a cheap source of fun and meat. Will’s father was a park ranger. In his twenties, Will went into the architectural-steel business, and now he co-owns a company worth many millions of dollars. They look like models from a Cabela’s catalog. They are companionable and jolly, and part of the pleasure of their company is the feeling that you’ve been welcomed into a kind of America where no one is ever fat or weak or ugly or gets sad about things.



The Waldrips arrived in Rann’s camp on the eighth of July, and they’ve allotted ten days for the hunt. But it is unlikely to take that long to find their trophy. Botswana contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 154,000 elephants, most of them concentrated in this 4,000-square-mile stretch of northern bushland where the Kalahari Desert meets the Okavango Delta.

In addition to airfare, ammo, and equipment costs (the antique double-barreled Holland & Holland rifle Robyn bought for the trip typically sells for about $80,000), the Waldrips are paying Jeff Rann $60,000 for the privilege of shooting the animal, at least $10,000 of which goes to the Botswana government. In September 2013, a ban on elephant hunting goes into effect in Botswana, making the Waldrips’ hunt one of the last legal kills. It is a precious, expensive experience, and Robyn wants to take her time to find big ivory, not to simply blast away at the first elephant that wanders past her sights.

Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of Africa. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team. A softhearted or lazy dog who lets the prey escape can catch a serious ass-kicking from the rest of the heavies in the pack. What’s that, Mr. Wild Dog? You’re on the endangered-species list? Well, karma is a bitch. Let’s move along.

Now here is a pair of water buffalo. Charming they are not. They scowl sullenly from beneath scabrous plates of unmajestic, drooping horn. “Hostile, illiterate” are the descriptors I jot on my notepad.

And there is the southern yellow-billed hornbill, and there the lilac-breasted roller, which, yes, are weird and beautiful to look upon, but if you had birds jabbering like that outside your window every morning, would you not spray them with a can of Raid?

Say what? I’m unfairly harshing the fauna? Yes, I know I am. I’m sorry. To the extent that I’ve discussed it with Jeff Rann and the Waldrips and other blood-sport folk I know, I believe that hunters are being sincere when they say they harbor no ill will toward the animals they shoot. Not being a hunter myself, I subscribe to an admittedly sissyish philosophy whereby I only wish brain-piercing bullets upon creatures I dislike. I’ve truthfully promised Jeff Rann that I’m not here to write an anti-hunting screed, merely to chronicle the hunt coolly and transparently. But the thing is, I’m a little worried that some unprofessional, bleeding-heart sympathies might fog my lens when the elephant gets his bullet. So I’m trying to muster up some prophylactic loathing for the animals out here. I want to be properly psyched when the elephant goes down.





The local fauna, non-pachyderm population. From middle to right, starting with dogs: a pair of wild dogs, the shade of an acacia tree, a kudu, another kudu under attack, the yellow hornbill.
Teddy Roosevelt
Who Wants to Shoot a Hippo?
Teddy Roosevelt
“I am sitting on a cool verandah with vines growing through the trellises, having returned from a morning hunt in which I killed a Python and an Impalla Antelope. Yesterday I killed two Antelopes, and the day before a Rhino and a Hippo, and the day before that, Kermit killed a Leopard which charged him viciously, after mauling one of the beaters.”
—letter to his sister from Juja Farm, Nairobi, May 9, 1909
.

Perhaps out of a kind of kindred impulse, Will and Robyn Waldrip are quick to point out the violences elephants have inflicted on the local landscape. And it’s true, the Loxodonta africana isn’t shy about destroying trees. We are standing in an acreage of bare earth ringing a watering hole Jeff Rann maintains. It looks like a feedlot on the moon. Where there is not a broken tree or a giant dooky bolus, there is a crater where an elephant started eating the earth.

“Man, [the elephants] have just destroyed the ecosystem,” Will says. “People who oppose hunting ought to see this.” Will is a bowhunter. Elephants aren’t his bag. And while he has no reservations about Robyn shooting the elephant, he is doing, I think, some version of the hunt-justifying psych-up going on in my own head. He wants to feel like it’s a good deed his wife is doing out here, a Lorax-ly hit in the name of the trees.

It’s midafternoon before we spy a candidate for one of Robyn’s Concord grapes. In the shade of a very large tree, a couple of hundred yards from the jeep trail, is something that does not at first register as an animal, more a form of gray weather. We dismount and huddle before setting off into the brush.

The elephant appears to be a trophy-caliber animal, but at this distance, it’s hard to say for sure. “One thing,” Jeff says to Robyn. “If it charges, we have to shoot him.”

“If he charges, I’m gonna shoot him,” Robyn says. The entourage begins a dainty heel-to-toe march into the spiky undergrowth. As it turns out, it is not one elephant but two. One is the big, old, shootable bull. The other is a younger male. Elephants never stop growing, a meliorative aspect of which (elephant-hunt-misgivings-wise) is that the mongo bulls that hunters most want to shoot also happen to be the oldest animals, usually within five or so years of mandatory retirement, when elephants lose their last set of molars and starve to death.

For the record, this detail does not soothe me as the guns make their way toward the elephants under the tree. I have not yet figured out how to dislike elephants enough to want to see one shot. In private treason against my hosts, I am thinking, Not now, not now. Let it please not get shot today.

We near the creatures. The big bull shifts its ears, and it is a significant event, like the hoisting of a schooner’s rigging. Jeff lifts his binoculars. As it turns out, the bull is missing a tusk, probably broken off in a fight. So it will not be shot, its ultimate reward for the tusk-snapping tussle.

We creep back to the jeep. Robyn is electrified, breathing hard, her blue eyes luminous with adrenaline: “That was big!” she says to Will. “As soon as we got out of the truck, was your heart going?”

“Nah, but when he turned and his ears spread and he went from huge to massive? Yeah.”

“Huge,” says Robyn. “It could just mow us down.”

“We’d be jelly,” says Will. “But you wouldn’t want to have shot him on your first day, anyway.”



Uncheap Shots

Between trophy fees and tags, the price of killing an animal in Africa can easily run into the thousands. Here, the continent-wide averages for seven species.
Lion $12,787
Leopard $4,095
Giraffe $2,623
Hippopotamus $2,206
Zebra $1,179
Hamadryas Baboon $500
Warthog $419

Elephant with calf.

Regulations vary by country, but the young elephant here won't become a viable trophy candidate until its ivory weighs upwards of fifty pounds.
“The elephants have just destroyed the ecosystem,” Will says. “People who oppose hunting ought to see this.”
.


Chapter 2

Can You Save Thousands of Elephants by Shooting Just a Few?



Fair warning: An elephant does get shot in this story. It gets shot pretty soon. Maybe that upsets you, as it did 100 percent of the people (hunters and nonhunters) to whom I mentioned this assignment.

Elephants are obviously amazing, or rather, they are obvious receptacles for our amazement, because they seem to be a lot like us. They live about as long as we do. They understand it when we point at things, which our nearest living evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, doesn’t really. They can unlock locks with their trunks. They recognize themselves in mirrors. They are socially sophisticated. They stay with the same herds for life, or the cows do, anyway. They mourn their dead. They like getting drunk (and are known to loot village liquor stashes in Africa and India). When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry.

So why would you want to put a bullet in one? Well, if we are to take hunters at their word, it is because the experience of shooting an animal yields a thrill, a high that humans have been getting off on since we clubbed our first cave bear. And if you go in for this sort of thing, then it arguably stands to reason that the bigger the beast, the bigger the thrill when it hits the ground.

On the subject of hunting’s pleasures, Robyn Waldrip has this to say: “It kind of taps into your primal instincts. I think everybody has it in them.”
But an elephant?

“It was on my bucket list of hunting. It’s the largest land mammal, and just to go up against something that big, it’s exciting. I ran into this mom at the grocery store and she was like, ‘What are you doing for the summer?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Africa to do an elephant hunt.’ And she said, ‘Why in the world would you wanna do that?’ and I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’”

Jeff Rann has a similar take: “Hunting’s almost like a drug to people that do it.” In his thirty-eight-year career, Jeff has presided at the shootings of around 200 elephants, and he has never had a trophy get away from him. It is Jeff Rann whom King Juan Carlos I of Spain calls when he wants to shoot an elephant, as he did in April 2012. (King Juan Carlos likely will not get the hankering again. He broke his hip on the safari—in the shower, not on Rann’s watch—and amid the general outrage sparked by leaked photos of the king posed alongside his kill, Juan Carlos was booted from the honorary presidency of the World Wildlife Fund and compelled to issue a public apology.)

Rann is the most perfect exemplar I have ever met of Hemingway’s speak-softly-and-shoot-big-things-without-being-a-blowhard-about-it masculine ideal. He is lethally competent and incredibly understated and cool, even when he’s telling swashbuckling stories, such as the time he nearly got killed by a leopard: “The leopard charged. I shot him. It was a bad shot. He jumped on me, and we just kind of looked at each other. I remember those yellow eyes staring back at me. He bit me twice and dropped to the ground. He also pissed all over me. For about a year, I’d wake up in the night and I’d smell that strong cat smell. But I don’t think about it anymore.” Or the time he led the Botswana Defence Force into a camp of poachers who’d been hunting in the land he leases from the government. “We went into camp, and there were two old guys and one kid about 16 years old. The agents just opened up on them. Killed the two old guys outright. The one they shot eleven times, the other they shot fourteen times. The kid took off running, but they shot him a couple of times in the back.”
Q. So you, like, saw three guys get shot and killed?
A. Yeah.
Q. Whoa. Wow. What was that like?
A. Didn’t bother me.
Q. Wow, really? Weird. Do you think that’s because maybe you’ve seen so many animals killed over the years that seeing the poachers get shot, it’s, you know, just another animal?
[Patient silence during which Rann seems to be restraining self from uttering the word “pussy” in conjunction with visiting journalist.]
A. I don’t know. Hard to say. Those guys [illegally] killed a lot of animals. It pissed me off.

In addition to million-acre leases in Botswana, Rann has a hunting concession in Tanzania and a 5,500-acre rare-game ranch outside San Antonio. The economic downturn did not put much of a bite in Rann’s business, a happy fact he credits to the addictive nature of hunting’s elemental pleasures: “Our clients might not buy a new car as often, or buy a second or third home, but they’re still going to go hunting.” But this new hunting ban is poised to do to Rann’s elephant-hunting business what economic calamity could not.

There’s been a regulated hunting industry in Botswana since the 1960s. Before the ban took effect, the government was issuing roughly 400 elephant-bull tags per year, of which Jeff Rann was allowed to buy about forty. And counterintuitively, even in the presence of an active bullet-tourism industry, Botswana’s elephant population has multiplied twentyfold, from a low point of 8,000 in 1960 to more than 154,000 today. These healthy numbers, as people like Rann are keen to mention, mirror elephant populations in other African countries where hunting is allowed. Despite a recent uptick in poaching problems, both Tanzania (with 105,000 elephants) and Zimbabwe (with 51,000) have seen similar patterns of population growth. Kenya, on the other hand, banned elephant hunting in 1973 and has seen its elephant population decimated, from 167,000 to 27,000 or so in 2013. Some experts predict that elephants will be extinct in Kenya within a decade.




Ernest Hemingway
Who Wants to Shoot a Lion?
Ernest Hemingway
“The lion is a fine animal. He is not afraid or stupid. He does not want to fight, but sometimes man makes him, and then it is up to the man to shoot his way out of what he has got himself into.”
—to The New York Times, April 4, 1934
.


As the pro-hunting side has it, elephant safaris assist conservation by pretty simple means: A bull killed on a legal hunt is, in theory, worth more to the local economy than an animal slaughtered by poachers. In the most far-flung parts of the Botswana bush, the hunting industry has been the chief employer, offering a paycheck to people in places where there simply is no other gainful work.

When locals’ livelihoods are bound to the survival of the elephants, they’re less likely to tolerate poachers, or to summarily shoot animals that wander into their crop fields. Furthermore, hunting concessions are uninviting to poachers. Hunters like Jeff Rann employ private security forces to patrol the remoter parts of the preserve.

Hunting’s critics maintain that, in practice, the industry tends to fall short of these ideals. For every professional hunter who follows the rules, there are others who overshoot their quotas, or engage in illegal ivory tracking, or cheat their employees of a living wage. In countries more corruption-plagued than Botswana, crooked officials commonly siphon off safari profits before they reach the elephants’ rural human neighbors on whose mercy and financial interest the fate of the species ultimately depends. And lately, in Tanzania and Zimbabwe (where last year 300 elephants were poisoned in a single massacre), the hunting industry has proven no antidote to poaching. Citing “questionable management” and “lack of effective law enforcement” in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in April 2014, suspended the import of elephant trophies from both nations.

But Satsumo, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks employee who’s tagging along on the Waldrips’ safari, believes that Botswana’s hunting ban may ultimately turn out badly for the elephants. “There will be more poachers,” she says. “More elephants will get out of the reserve. They will go to people’s crop fields. The hunters pump the water for them, but now they will have to move to the villages to find it. It’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing.”


581

Number of seizures of illegal ivory in Kenya between 1989
and 2011


127

Number of seizures of illegal ivory in Botswana during the same period


15.6%

Portion of total seizures of illegal ivory in Africa over the last two decades
that occured in Kenya


3.4%

Portion of total seizures that occured in Botswana during the same period


Sometimes the poachers get hunted, too.

Sometimes the poachers
get hunted, too..



Elephants in Africa

A three-part animated map showing elephant habitats and populations over time



Abhorrent as the practice is to most Western, Dumbo-adoring sensibilities, elephant hunting occupies an awkward, grayed-out space in the landscape of conservation policy. Some nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund have quietly endorsed it as part of a conservation strategy but decline to discuss their position on record. The issue is such an emotional live wire, for people on both sides of the debate, and is so deeply laced with PR perils, that it’s just about impossible to find a frank and disinterested expert opinion about hunting’s efficacy as a means to help conserve the species. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find anyone on the anti-hunting side who could convincingly answer this question: If hunting is so disastrous for the long-term survival of the species, why do the countries where it’s legal to hunt elephants have so many more of them than those where the practice is banned?

With the next couple of tourist seasons, most of Botswana’s elephant concessions will be converted to photographic-safari destinations, which many conservationists promote as an effective way to monetize the animals and thereby protect them. But according to Jeff Rann, photo safaris aren’t all that difficult for poachers to work around. “[Photo tourists] are not armed. And they stick to a set, predictable routine, so the poachers just go kill animals in parts of the concessions where they know the photographics aren’t going to go.”

Obviously Rann’s got a vested interest in this perspective. But looking at the case of Kenya, home to one of Africa’s largest photo-safari sectors and a poaching problem of catastrophic proportions, you sort of have to give Rann his due. Of course, there’s every possibility that some combination of public policy, private money, and anti-ivory market pressures will render hunting obsolete as a conservation instrument. But for now, if you are one of those people who chokes up at reports of poachers poisoning elephants by the herd, you may have to countenance the uncomfortable possibility that one solution to the survival of the species may involve people paying lots of money to shoot elephants for fun.




If you are one
of those people
who chokes up
at reports of poachers poisoning elephants by the herd, you may have
to countenance
the uncomfortable possibility that one solution to the survival of the species may involve people paying
lots of money to shoot elephants.
.



Chapter 3

The Killing



The hunt continues. We are not back in the truck ten minutes before the tracker calls for a halt. Robyn and Will linger in the Land Cruiser while Jeff and the tracker go off into the bush to investigate. On the heels of our run-in with the monotusker and his pal, it feels as though the day has already coughed up a full lode of potential prey. So it registers as something of a surprise when Jeff returns with this news: “There’s five bulls, all of ’em pretty good size.” One of them is carrying at least sixty pounds of ivory, Jeff’s threshold, I gather, for trophy viability. “It’s a shooter,” he says. “If we get a shot, we’ve gotta shoot it.”

Robyn shoulders her rifle. Her eyes are incandescent. Off we troop over the sand.

The bush resounds with a din of timber destruction. The sun is making its descent, and perhaps a hundred yards off, through the brambles, tusks glow in the rich light. The animals are fanned out ahead of us, noisily munching. We come in closer, and the elephants begin to take note, though we register more as a mild irritant, not a mortal threat. The trophy animal is in a lane of dense shrubs, mooning us. Robyn could conceivably flank it and get an angle on its head, but in the thick undergrowth it would be a poor shot, and that first bullet might be all she’d get. There’s a risk that she would only wound it and her $60,000 would sprint off into the weeds. Jeff and Robyn whisper tactically. The elephant’s obliviousness is exasperating. It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain.

Not thirty feet from us, the elephant with the missing tusk, the same elephant we just ran into, suddenly appears, having made its approach way more stealthily than an animal the size of a bread truck ought to be capable of. The bull is pissed. It nods and snorts and tosses snoutfuls of sand our direction. Okay, whatever you are, it’s kind of annoying, so get the fuck out of here, please.

I find the performance convincing. It keeps coming. Two more strides and the elephant could reach out and touch someone with its trunk. The elephant looks to be about twelve feet tall. The trunk weighs hundreds of pounds and is easily capable of breaking a human spine.

Apologies if that sounds like sensationalistic inanities you’ve heard intoned sotto voce by Discovery Channel narrators trying to ramp up the drama of snorkeling with porpoises and such. But the elephant is about fifteen feet away, and I will now confess to being scared just about shitless. The elephant snorts and brandishes its vast head. Lunch goes to lava in my bowels. If not for my present state of sphincter-cinching terror, I would well be in the market for an adult diaper. This is an amazingly pure kind of fear. My arteries are suddenly capable of tasting my blood, which right now has the flavor of a nine-volt battery.

Jeff Rann is in dialogue with the elephant. This consists of whispering menacingly and jabbing his rifle around in the air. The elephant does its pissed-off little shuffle for perhaps a minute, probably less. And then the tape runs in slow reverse. The elephant retreats backward into the shrubs, eyeing us, curtsying hostilely as he goes.

“Wells, you good, buddy?” Robyn asks, grinning. Apparently I’m visibly, risibly freaked. I regain my bearings, and we resume our approach to the trophy bull.

It requires the same strategy. The target is in the middle of the fan of five. The elephants have arranged themselves such that it’s kind of diffcult to get an angle on the prize without straying into the paths of the others. A disquiet, a shared unease, is taking hold among these fellows. The racket of salad consumption is tapering off. The elephants are beginning to push on. But, goddamn, these guys could use a coach. The interaction with the one-tusker notwithstanding, their defense pretty much sucks. They’re moving, but it’s not so much flight as a slow and cranky mosey.

The light is caramelizing. If Robyn can’t get a shot in the next five or ten minutes, the sun will sink past the trees and it will be lion-o’clock out here. The sun, too, seems murderously slow in its descent. We move past one elephant, past another, until we are on the trophy beast. Again, its butt is to us. Nothing in the animal world tops an elephant’s ass as an emblem of indifference and reproof.

Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today.

And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress.

Robyn raises her rifle. For the past few months, she’s been rehearsing this moment in her bedroom closet in Texas, aiming, reloading, aiming again. She shoots.

The rifle’s thunder is somehow insignificant. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk. But an elephant brain is a big piece of equipment—it can weigh as much as twelve pounds. Robyn’s bullet did not apparently sever enough vital neurons to kill the animal in a single shot. He shakes his head, as if to wag away the pain of a wasp’s sting. There is a second shot that strikes him in the neck. He turns to flee, but his right foreleg has buckled. He strives to stand. The effect is of a cripple trying to pitch a broken circus tent. In the franticness of his movements, one can sense the elephant’s surprise that his body, a machine that has served him well for over fifty years, has suddenly stopped accepting his commands. To see so large and powerful an animal vised in an even larger and more powerful inevitability is, for lack of a better word, intense.

The other elephants scatter. Robyn and Jeff jog toward the animal. In the fervor of the moment, Robyn has momentarily forgotten to put fresh rounds in her gun. “Reload, reload, reload,” Jeff instructs. They advance to a distance of maybe twenty-five feet. “Okay, shoot him right in the hip.” The gun fires twice. The tent sags right and seems to sort of sway and billow, as though surrendering to wind.

“Okay, come with me,” Jeff says. He leads Robyn along the animal’s left flank. At the sound of the hunters coming in close, the elephant struggles more direly to rise, but instead, he loses ground against gravity and settles closer to the earth. “Just watch his trunk. [Be sure] he doesn’t hit you with it.”

Jeff leads her to a position perhaps ten feet from the elephant’s left temple. “Okay, hit him right in the ear hole.” At this point there is little the elephant can do except to turn his face away. The last shot claps into the elephant’s ear.

“Perfect,” says Jeff Rann. “Brain shot. You brained him.”

And the elephant, still swaying on its haunches, a slow faucet of blood trickling from his forehead, is no more.




King Juan Carlos (right)
Who Regrets He Shot
an Elephant?
King Juan Carlos (right)
“It won’t happen again.” —At apology press conference for his
African elephant hunt,
April 18, 2012
.



Chapter 4

How It Felt to Watch an Elephant Die



So that is how the elephant got shot. Once in the forehead, once in the neck, twice in the hip, once in the ear. How it felt to watch the elephant get shot is something else. As I watched the elephant go down, what obtruded into my consciousness was a kind of a thing, a psychological sensation with a very particular shape and weight and texture, a geometry as discrete and seemingly physical as a house key or a tire iron, but which I don’t have any useful language to describe. This thing, this mute-pseudo revelation, had something to do with adrenaline’s power to catalyze time into taffy. Forty seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last, yet what happened in those forty seconds seemed to happen out of time. It was another kind of time in which a new understanding of death impressed itself upon me more rapidly than my cognition could accommodate.

The indescribable thought sensation was not this, but some tiny part of it was sort of like this: Before I saw the elephant get shot, I understood that there was life, and there was its cessation. But now I understand there is this other thing—dying, when death stops being an idea and becomes a thing that the body, if not the conscious mind, grasps in its full intensity. Watching the elephant die granted the illusory understanding of death’s grammar and meaning, as with an alingual child who hears five words and thinks he knows a language. The first word went through the forehead, the second through the neck, the third and fourth through the hip, the fifth through the ear. The month before this trip, on another assignment for this magazine, for the first time in my life, I handled the corpse of a dead human being, and I learned nothing about death. I learned nothing about death, either, when Robyn Waldrip shot the elephant. But it left in my skull at least the languageless shadow of the indescribable thing: Death is this. Death is the elephant taking the first shot in the forehead, and the second in its neck, slumping, listing right, taking two in the hip, struggling, sinking, turning, taking one through the ear and not moving anymore. As it was in the beginning, and as it always will be: one in the forehead, one in the neck, two in the hip, one in the ear, world without end.

Sorry about all that. Useless, I know.




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Chapter 5

The Strange Rush of Death



The dead elephant is leaking audibly. A substance resembling scrambled egg is spattered on its ear. I’m jotting notes and hoping Jeff Rann or Robyn does not notice how badly my hand is shaking. But Robyn is off in her own intense moment. She is sort of hooting and jumping up and down, going “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” and generally experiencing an order of ecstasy we tend to share only with our intimates. On either side of the animal, we are both of us breathing hard, massively doped with a storm of neurochemicals that, if you could synthesize in a smokable form, would make you very rich. But the manner in which we are riding our respective highs is a pretty good illustration of why, in high school, Robyn was almost certainly a more welcome and popular presence at parties than I was. While I am privately gibbering darkly and visibly whacked-out, she is pepped up, thrilled. We embrace her congratulatorily. She kisses her fingertips and touches the bull’s trunk. Salt water, rather gratuitously, spills from the elephant’s eyes.





Sarah Palin
Who Wants to Shoot a Caribou?
Sarah Palin
“We eat, therefore we hunt.”
—Going Rogue: An American Life, November 2009
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Watch an Elephant “Harvest”

Time-lapse Slideshow


The day after a hunt, villagers break down the elephant, removing the tusks and other trophy parts before divvying up the meat. Only an empty field remains.

Play the time-lapse



Chapter 6

Breaking Down an Elephant



In the morning, the elephant is as we left it, unmolested by snacking carnivores. Today, the animal will be cleaned and butchered, its flesh shared out among the locals. The hide and other mementos will be packed up for the Waldrips. Though the tusks and the rest of it are, ostensibly, the prizes Robyn came to Africa to collect, the electricity has gone out of the safari. Returning to the animal has a cleaning-up-after-the-party sort of feel.

A team of a half-dozen Botswana men and women have turned out for the event. The equipment list includes an ax, a winch, and a bunch of cheap-looking plastic-handled boning knives. First order of business is a stropping orgy that lasts the better part of half an hour. While that’s going on, the Waldrips’ children—Lola, 6, and Will junior, 8—who have been back at the camp, play with the elephant, touch its trunk for its rough, lichenish feel, handle its ears.

“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Will senior says, squinting at the creature.
“Yeah,” says Robyn, a little dreamily. “I hope it stays that way for a long time.”

I’m feeling it, too, the slightly spongy sense of dislocation emanating from the previous day, but this is why I will never be a hunter: She wants to savor it. I am ready for it to go away. Before the skinning commences, the tableau is beautified and made camera-ready. The elephant’s tusks are scrubbed. One of Jeff’s assistants takes an ax to a tree that is casting an unphotogenic shadow.

“Look how long it takes him to chop that down,” Will observes. “An elephant would walk right over it.”

Larry the videographer takes some footage of the children perched on the elephant’s skull, though Jeff cautions him, “You might get shit if you put that in the show. You don’t want to be seen as disrespecting the animal.”

The children dismount, and the skinners move in.

The cleaning goes like this: First you take the ears. Each is the size of a manta ray. It is severed close to the head and laid in the dirt. Next, the trunk, the size of a middle-aged gator, is girdled at its bridge and then removed. Blood comes forth in an incredible tide, more of it than I’ve probably seen in aggregate over the course of my lifetime. Yet the flaying, surprisingly, inspires none of the mortal vertigo the killing did. As the knives flash, the animal becomes less extraordinary, less like the world’s largest land mammal and more a bricolage of familiar butcher-shop hues. The trunk is stripped of its leather, and for a time it lies in the dirt, looking like an automobile transmission made of fresh raspberry sorbet.

Will is by the elephant’s rear. He has taken up a knife, eager to do his share of the dismantlement. “I always tell my kids, anything you kill, you gotta clean it yourself. I know Jeff’s got clients who come out here and kill five elephants. Shoot ’em and leave ’em. To me that’s not right. Out of respect for the animal, you gotta do it yourself. I didn’t kill this elephant, but even still.”

A cut has been made along the spine. Will slashes away, pulling at the skin, revealing a goreless expanse of fibrous white fascia. The winch is applied to help peel the hide. The resistance is suffcient to pull the truck forward at first when the crank turns on.

Once the skin has been freed, Will and the skinners begin blocking out the meat. The sound is of hard, wet work.
Up front, they are getting at the skull. The skin is gone from the elephant’s cheeks, and the bare eye peering from the pale tissue is demonic. Below the eyes, the look of the tuskless head, still actively suppurating, recalls a cliff face after a strong rain. Then the head itself is cut off, into the arms of a pair of catchers. Later today or tomorrow, the skull will be buried for a period of ten days. Insects will attend to the finer details of cleaning the skull for its voyage to Texas.

When the head is removed, the elephant begins to speak in a morbid throat-flatus. Air escaping the trachea makes sounds of growls and shudders and sighs. This is not upsetting. By now, it is not elephant but a wrecked Volkswagen made of flesh.

The job wears on. How much of the creature, I ask Jeff Rann, do the skinners intend to take?

“Everything,” he says. “This’ll probably feed a hundred people.”

The skinners cut away fire-hydrant-sized wads of meat and fling them heavily into a Land Cruiser’s bed.

The carcass is winnowed to a pile of innards that calls to mind one of those inflatable-looking sports arenas. In the flawless blue above, a fleet of delighted buzzards has begun to wheel.
The work is mostly over. Will Waldrip can now retire from the job. He is abundantly daubed in blood and is exhausted, though chipper. “A little different than quartering out a whitetail,” he says.

Amid the spare parts lying in the grass is the elephant’s jaw, from which we can know the elephant’s age. An elephant gets six sets of teeth in its lifetime. This one was on its final set, and judging from its condition it was probably about 53. The sand of the savanna is hard on an elephant’s dentition. Five to seven more years and it’d have blown through this set and starved to death, assuming neither Jeff nor the poachers got him first.




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Looking at this rummage sale of elephant flesh inspires an equally messy inventory of contradictory thoughts.
1.Eww.
2.Then a sort of wordless, inner viola fugue that accompanies the sight of a magnificent organism that has been treading the savanna since the Kennedy administration, now scattered in pieces on the ground.
3.Then, this retort: Yeah, but wasn’t the leather your wallet’s made from once the property of a factory-raised cow whose sole field trip from the reeking, shrieking bedlam of the factory farm was a terrified excursion to the abattoir? And don’t you gobble bacon and steaks whenever you get the chance? And aren’t “hypocrite” and probably also “pantywaist” accurate words to describe a person who gets queasy at an animal being flayed but who eats meat and/or dons leather shoes?
4.Right, but elephants are so smart, and old.
5.A caged chicken once beat you at tic-tac-toe. I don’t hear you crusading for the pearl mussel, which can live for over a century.
6.But elephants are so splendid to look at.
7.Unlike a ten-point buck?
8.No, but okay, look: We can assume that most people, for whatever totally arbitrary reason, have an affnity for elephants over chickens and pearl mussels. Sure, it’s the same illogical pro-mammal bigotry that lets people mourn the slaughter of dolphins and not mind so much the squashing of an endangered spider. BUT? Isn’t it a little bit fucked, when the average person looks at an elephant and goes, “Aww, what an amazing animal,” to be the one guy in a thousand who goes, “Yeah, cool, I want to shoot it”?
9.So it’s bad to shoot elephants because other Westerners arbitrarily sentimentalize them? Consider your fantasies of grenading the deer who eat your gardenias. Multiply that by about 10,000 and you’ve probably got a good approximation of the feelings of the Botswana farmer who wakes up to find that elephants have munched a full year’s worth of crops.
10.No, I mean I guess I just don’t really understand the impulse behind wanting to shoot this big amazing animal, or how, after shooting one, you’d want to jump up and down.
11.So what’s she supposed to do? Cry and drop into the lotus position and sing a song in Navajo? It’s not terribly hard to understand why people go hunting. They go hunting because they find it exciting. As Robyn herself put it, you get a primal thrill. And whether or not you want to admit it, you had the thrill, the neurochemical bongload that hit you when the elephant died. It made Robyn Waldrip jump up and down and it made you go on a pompous, half-baked death trip, which is your version of jumping up and down. You were at the party, bro.
12.But I’m not the one who shot the elephant.
13.No, you’re the one who came on this hunt so that you could ride the adrenaline high while at the same time reserving the right to be ethically fastidious about it. I mean, what really distinguishes your presence here from Jeff Rann’s or the Waldrips’?
14.Maybe only this: Though the harrowing intensity of the elephant’s death will, in time, denature into a fun story to tell at cocktail parties, right now I would trade all of it—the morbid high, the anecdote for my memoirs—to bring this particular elephant back to life.




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Chapter 7

The Buzzard in the Baobab Tree



The elephant’s skull is buried. Its flesh has been hung out to dry. The Waldrips are booked at Jeff Rann’s safari camp for eight more days, but these folk are hunters, and the notion of spending a week doing nothing but observing creatures of the wild holds little interest for them. So tomorrow, they will go to South Africa, because Will Waldrip Jr. wants to undertake something called a “springbok slam,” which involves shooting one of each of that species’ four subvarieties. Jeff has an extra elephant tag for his concession in Tanzania. He offers this to Will senior, and Will declines.

Our last evening in camp, we go for sunset cocktails at a locally famous baobab tree. The tree is craggy, Gandalfian, and 1,000 years old. It has a crazed unruly spread of branches, which inspired the folk saying, Jeff tells us, that “God pulled the baobab out of the ground and stuck it upside down.” A leopard sometimes hangs out in the man-sized cave in its trunk. The leopard isn’t home. The only locals on the scene are a squadron of huge buzzards, resting in the baobab’s branches. The camp dumps its hunting refuse not too far from here, and the buzzards, Jeff tells us, have likely spent the day gorging on the remains of Robyn’s elephant. At our approach, they take grudging flight in a storm of black wings.

While Jeff’s wife is arranging the cocktail table, the party moves in to have a look at the leopard hole. Suddenly the sounds of shrieking pierce the quiet of the dusk. My first thought is that the leopard was home after all and has mauled one of the children. But it turns out that one last buzzard had been hiding in the tree. The bird had gobbled so much of Robyn’s elephant that it couldn’t take off. So, to attain flight weight, the buzzard started puking on the safari group. Fran, the Waldrips’ nanny, got the heftiest portion of Robyn’s elephant, on her shoulders and hair, and Jeff Rann got speckled a bit. The elephant huntress herself dodged the vomit entirely as the bird set a course for the sun.


Wells Tower is a GQ correspondent.

Wow. Very well written. Also great additional stats & info on the margins.

And the answer to the question is-----



ME

Thanks Mark Clark.

As soon as i have the money to take a proper elephant safari...

Not a bad article, especially from someone clearly not at ease about sport hunting. Nothing about what it takes to be ready for hunting elephant physically, mentally, even spiritually. Not surprising.
Also not surprising is the venom in the comments.

It was a great piece. I sent an interview request to the author but have yet to hear back

Having only glanced at the article and a few of the responses, while I have never had the desire to shoot an Elephant I sincerely hope that those that do want to shoot one continue having the opportunity to do so.

A good article indeed. I am always a bit perplexed when people seem surprised when they meet hunters and they are not like they expect, but more like 'normal' people. I think this says a lot for how hunters are often regarded; that they are just maniacal killers thirsting for blood.

Also, when he says he hasn't thought of a way to dislike an elephant enough to want to shoot one...this is a very telling comment. Again, the conflation of dislike for an animal and the desire to hunt one. Most hunters know those are diametrically opposed ideas, but it is common among those who do not hunt or like to do so.

I hope people will read his article very carefully, because it deserves it.

that is truly a superb article.

I liked the article,

Most people are ruled by there emotions not logic.
I see it all the time. No one balks at killing a wild boar. There ugly, destructive, dangerous vermin. Same for the coyote and the turkey. But show the same person a picture of a dead deer or wood duck and you get a "how could you shoot something so beautiful" look.

Theres a reason he couldn't find an anti to answer his question about Kenya vs. Botswana. If they told the truth they would expose themselves as the hypocrites they are.

As ThunderHead said, there are studies that show that about 75% of people think with their heart/gut; the balance think with their head; a sad commentary actually.

One study I saw reaching that conclusion concluded that about 80% of lawyers think with their head. The message was that when communicating with juries, we need to repackage things from our usual rather cold, impersonal analysis of the facts and causation to appeal to most people's emotional response.

If you don't believe it, watch the National Geographic channel. Great cinematography, but they prey on the emotions. The animals have names and predators (and elephants) get the sympathy.

In places, there are too many elephants and some need to be shot. Poaching needs to be stopped everywhere; it's a problem in some areas more than others -- usually depending upon Chinese influence. But the general public doesn't want the truth -- they "can't handle the truth."

These are plain, unemotional facts. That won't sell to the larger population. We need to "humanize" it, even from the animal perspective or many, many people just won't get it. Some never will.

Unfortunately it's a hard sell when a hunter is standing next to an elephant with a goofy grin on their face. All that says to someone who isn't in the know is that this person thinks killing the largest land mammal is fun...and now I hate that person. The perception is that elephant live in one big (or very small) habitat and that they all cavort together and that there are few very of them. Overpopulation? No, they say. But then again they see the entirety of Africa as a single habitat. They forget that from southern Botswana to northern Kenya is almost 2500 miles and that the elephant by and large live in pockets along the way. It's ignorance all the way around. MOst people still think an elephant lives well over 100 on average, and could not tell you what an elephant dies from if he lives long enough. At the point most old bulls are shot, I look at it as hastening an inevitability. The elephant WILL die. How is another matter. It's one of the things I noticed in the article, that he wished the elephant could come back to life. But there he stopped. I think a lot of people think that as well, s they can walk away and convince themselves that the elephant will live forever because it was living when they left. there is no doubt watching an elephant be shot can be a traumatic experience, but that's only because no one is around to watch one become so malnourished that he falls on his side, too weak to stand, only to lay and eek out shallow breaths until he finally dies, but not before predators likely begin their work before that time.

Again, a great article. but I very seriously doubt the average GQ reader is sitting around talking about the plight of elephant, They've got far more important things to attend to.

I appreciated the author's objective take on elephant hunting.

But I think he should have been a bit more careful concerning his take on the motives and behavior of elephant hunters, and hunters in general.

I have hunted bull elephants purely for the tradition, the challenge and the test of skill involved. I was selfish about it, I suppose. I would never take a journalist along on such an adventure, although I can see from this case that the resulting story might be a good one.

I also don't understand the "jumping up and down after shooting" syndrome exhibited by this hunter and others. To me, killing a game animal, and for whatever reason, especially an elephant, is above all else a somber thing. When I have succeeded, I have been thankful, in a kind of cosmic way, that I was able to do my part, ably and well, in the natural scheme of things.

There is satisfaction in that, but I have never forgotten for a moment that an animal has died as a result of my actions. Respect for the game almost always keeps me circumspect at such times.

The only exceptions I can recall were my first whitetail, which I over-celebrated with a fellow hunter, and a spontaneous, wild and uncontrollable outburst of joy I felt after my PH, Vaughan Fulton, and I killed a charging lion. I was damn glad that the lion was dead and we were not!

But even those feelings were short-lived, and were replaced by what I would call sadness (not regret) as I contemplated the still beauty of the dead beasts.

Hunting, including elephant hunting, is different things to different hunters.

I'm glad that some of you enjoyed the article.

I am a strong believer of the fact that if hunters do not engage with the wider 'general public' then we will see a slow and steady loss of the sport we all love.

We have allowed the anti hunting lobby to get the upper hand over the last few decades - dismissing them as a lunatic fringe is a massive mistake IMO. They have dominated the message going out to the rest of the folks that don't hunt and are fooling many of those people with their lies.

Personally I think we should be singing from the rooftops about the benefits of hunting to both the conservation of wildlife and the preservation of the habitats they live in.

We should use the power of social media to spread the word and when the anti's come with their bile and hatred we should respond calmly and with the facts.

quote:

Originally posted by Michael Robinson:
I also don't understand the "jumping up and down after shooting" syndrome exhibited by this hunter and others. To me, killing a game animal, and for whatever reason, especially an elephant, is above all else a somber thing.

I agree 100%. I have been accused of looking like I was attending a funeral in my trophy pics. I won't argue, indeed I was.

quote:

Originally posted by BaxterB:
I think a lot of people think that as well, s they can walk away and convince themselves that the elephant will live forever because it was living when they left.

That is exactly correct. 99% of the population of the US believes that an animal(any animal) lives forever. They never once stop to thing that the killing of an animal by a trophy hunter shortens the animal's life by about 10% on average.

If you point this out to them and they have the ability to accept this it is creates a paradigm shift.

If you think you can't convince those who sit on the fence, you are wrong.