Have any of you ever ran after a spooked elephant?

It can be done. On my first trip to Zim, we were driving to a water hole when I spotted a nice tusker about 200 yds away in a mostly open field.

I tapped on the top of the truck and the PH stopped, got out an glassed the ellie.

He got excited and said that's a nice bull. By that time the ellie had noticed us and turned and took off. So we grabbed the guns and took after the ellie. We ran about 300 yds or so, and every time the ellie stopped we stopped as well.

We eventually caught up to the ellie, and after 3 or 4 false charges I dropped the bull at about 30 yds.

It had just under 60 lbs of ivory on each side. The tusks were almost identical to each other without any grooves or broken tips.

Anyone ever hear or try this strategy on ellie?

BH63

Selous and many other noted elephant hunters were fit enough to run miles after elephant.

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Originally posted by fairgame:
Selous and many other noted elephant hunters were fit enough to run miles after elephant.

I've been reading Selous and Baldwin and Cummings in a new batch of Rhodesian books I got. Seems like most of their elephants were ridden down on horseback and/or bayed with dogs. An awful lot wounded and lost. And Neumann shooting them 40 times to bring them down...

I think it would be much harder today than a few years back. At least in the Valley they have been hammered so hard by poachers that they may become aggressive, but more likely to put as much distance as possible between you and them. Catching up to them unawares is harder, I think, than it was just 10 years ago.

When an Elephant is aware and not happy with what is going on, i.e, feels threatened, it can out-walk any human being on a proportionate pace distance of 3:1 and should it decide to extend the walk to "fast mode" you may as well forget it.

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And Neumann shooting them 40 times to bring them down...

I seriously doubt that they had the quality bullets that we do today.

The early hunters use to chase them down on horseback but you would have to be really lucky to do that on foot.

I chased a elephant herd on horseback once in Botswana and it was easy to keep up with them but that dust cloud was so nasty I had to get slightly upwind to keep them in sight. I wasn't hunting but on a horse safari on the Mashatu game reserve in the Tuli area. The safari company owner at that time was Steven Rufus and he was a wild man. The new owners wouldn't even dream of disturbing or galloping after game.

I miss the old days.

This ellie would run for a couple hundred yards and then stop to see if we were still following him. As long as we stopped he wasn’t sure. The PH said that when the bull was running it couldn’t hear us. We caught up within just a short time.

The PH was Kirk Mason. As keen a hunter as anyone I’ve ever met.

BH63