Elephant on the menu

It is a threatened species all over Africa and Asia. So why is it still turning up on the dinner plate, asks Jerry Hopkins

Wednesday March 23, 2005
The Guardian

1 elephant
Brown gravy
Salt and pepper to taste
2 rabbits (optional)

First, find your elephant. Cut elephant into bite-sized pieces. Be sure to allow adequate time. In a large pot, cover pieces with brown gravy and simmer. Cook over an open fire for four weeks at 465F. This will serve about 3,800 people. If more guests are expected, two rabbits may be added, but do this only if necessary as most people dislike finding a hare in their stew.


Elephant conservationists may not think this is funny, because both surviving species of elephant - the Asian and the African - are listed by every environmental group worldwide as endangered species. Where once large numbers of elephants roamed Africa from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope and occupied Asian forests nearly everywhere, now the numbers are small nearly everywhere and the prospects are grim. Poachers continue to kill them for their ivory, a trade that is blamed for the slaughter of 700,000 elephants in the decade before it was banned in 1989. Deforestation has removed much of their natural habitat, especially in Asia. Except for small numbers required in the tourism trade, few are needed now for transportation. At the same time, logging restrictions in many countries have taken away other traditional work.
That said, the African elephant is still being killed for food. Legally. And it is possible - if you visit one of the countries where elephant finds it way to a restaurant menu - to enjoy elephant stew, without hare,as well as elephant trunk steak, which is believed to be the tastiest cut. You may even be able to find elephant meat in a tin to take home as a souvenir - to impress, or offend, your friends. (In Thailand, and perhaps elsewhere, the "finger" at the tip of the trunk is seen as an aphrodisiac.)

Elephant meat has been eaten for tens of thousands of years, going back to when primitive man hunted the modern pachyderm's ancestors, the mammoths and mastodons, with spears, as shown in drawings on the walls of prehistoric caves in Europe and elsewhere. (They also killed them by driving them off cliffs with fire.) Recently many African peoples included the animal in their diet. The pygmies of the Congo were known for their prowess in bringing down these giants with poisoned spears.

Such activity did not affect the population; those killed numbered fewer than those born. The harvest was sustainable.

Today in most African and Asian countries, the elephant population is severely threatened. Most, but not all. In Zimbabwe, in 1995, protection efforts were so successful that the government initiated a programme to cull the elephant population. George Pangeti, deputy director of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, said there were between 70,000 and 80,000 elephants in an environment that could support only half that number. An adult elephant ate at least 450 pounds of vegetation a day, he said, and large areas of the national parks were being ravaged by overpopulation, upsetting the ecological balance needed to sustain other wildlife.

The same argument was voiced in South Africa, where in Kruger National Park, a game reserve the size of Israel, the elephant population grew to 8,000 from the few hundred the ivory hunters left in the early 1990s. With park officials warning that the reserve could sustain only 7,000 and that larger numbers would endanger other species, pushing them to the brink of extinction, or at least to hunger, the government proposed a culling program that included selling the hides (for expensive luggage and so on) and the meat, which in turn would bring up to $500,000 (£264,000) a year, to be assigned to conservation programmes.

An alternative is reminiscent of the days when Ernest Hemingway banged away at big game in Africa. In 1999, Mozambique lifted a ban on elephant-hunting safaris imposed during the country's 16-year-long civil war.

Unsurprisingly, safaris and culling are controversial, as the idea of killing any elephant upsets not just human sensitivities but also the strong social bonds of the animals themselves, and has led to bad behaviour - including killing rhinoceroses - in young bulls whose mothers were killed. Animal welfare groups in Europe and the US argued that the culling would weaken the ivory trade ban as well as encourage more poaching by creating new markets for the meat and skins.

Why not send the unwanted beasts elsewhere? South Africa did that, relocating hundreds to smaller reserves, as did Kenya, moving elephants from crowded areas to parks where the herds had been decimated. As might be imagined, such programmes are logistically complex and expensive, and governments usually find something else to spend their stretched budgets on.

Meanwhile, the overpopulation problem remains in some areas.

With politicians nervous about endorsing any law that sanctioned the killing of elephants, the beasts were put up for sale and "adoption". There were few takers and finally the herds were thinned by government hunters in helicopters using drugged darts, at last sending the meat and hides to the marketplace.

Such government programmes were not cheap, either. Skinning an elephant required a team of people, several hours and 500 pounds of salt to treat a single skin, while hauling a thousand or more pounds of meat a long distance was no easy matter. In fact, the scale of the economics brought one effort at culling to its knees in 1965. This was funded by the United Nations, creating an abattoir in Zambia that was designed to cut 5% of the local populations of elephant, hippo and buffalo. By 1970, the programme was scrapped, due, largely to the cost of transporting carcasses over long distances and poor marketing. Because of the tropical heat, it was also required that such transport be made in refrigerated trucks. Today in South Africa, most elephant meat feeds the poor, who live in densely populated areas near the game reserves.

Historically, most elephant meat has been consumed on the spot, or smoked and dried for later use. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, "there were elephants in ancient Egypt, where their meat was regarded as a delicacy, and King Ptolemy Philadelphus (308-245 BC) forbade killing them, but they did not survive." During the siege of Paris in 1870, when all food was scarce, elephants from the zoo started showing up in butcher shops and restaurants, along with other wild animals. One restaurant offered braised elephant's feet with ham, garlic, spices and Madeira, and at least one butcher sold elephant-blood pudding. About the same time, a British explorer, Sir Samuel Baker, described how to dig an oven in the ground and cook a foot. He said that after 30-plus hours, the food was dug up and the hard sole was removed like a shoe, exposing a delicate white meat beneath - best served hot; add oil and vinegar when cold.

Most of the elephant meat consumed in Asia today occurs when an animal dies a healthy death. (Its life span is approximately that of a human.) Usually this occurs from old age, but in modern Asia, many pachyderms have their lives cut short by trucks, trains and land mines. Sometimes a rogue elephant is shot after tearing up crops and homes and killing villagers, as occurs most frequently in India. (As a rule, an animal felled by disease will not be eaten.)

In northern Thailand from 2000 to 2002, there were numerous reports of elephants being deliberately killed for their meat, a strange fate for the animal that is the country's symbol and something many elephant experts contest, never having heard of any such incidents, adding that whoever did it would be ostracised. But, said Prasong Chumchoey, speaking for the Phrae province's government, "elephant meat is a good seller. Believe or not, when elephant meat is available, beef, pork and buffalo meat are ignored." Because domesticated elephants in Thailand were in the same official category as cattle, there were no laws forbidding its consumption, opening the door for its trade.

The trunks and feet are considered the choicest cuts and elephant fat has been rendered into cooking oil. Even after 12 or more hours of cooking (or long aging in the open air), the meat is regarded as chewy. The flesh, which is muscular and gelatinous, compares with beef tongue, which it also resembles in taste, only gamier.

If you wish to try this delicacy in Africa, book a flight early. In Johannesburg, the government has already introduced elephant birth control.

Big foot for breakfast


In Travels from the Cape of Good Hope into the Interior Parts of Africa (1790), Francois LeVaillant gave this account of a breakfast of elephant foot baked by the Hottentots:

"It exhaled such a savoury odour, that I soon tasted and found it to be delicious. I had often heard the feet of bears commended, but could not conceive that so gross and heavy an animal as the elephant would afford such a delicate food. 'Never,' said I, 'can our modern epicures have such a dainty at their tables; let forced fruits and the contributions of various countries contribute to their luxury, yet cannot they procure so excellent a dish as I have now before me.'"

I ate the meat from the elephants I shot in Zim, including the bull. It was very good, not gamey or tough at all.
I cannot wait to taste some more.

Where can I buy a pot that big ??

Kathi

I ate elephant a couple of times but found it quite tough but not unpalatable by any means. I'm sure if the meat could have aged a little while it would have been very nice in deed.

Regards,

Mark

Man, Mark you have one hell of an appetite..

Mama, put some more water in the beans, Marks coming to supper!!!

This is better than an old Italian recipe book that had a recipe that begun like:
"Take a red deer..." as if it were and is absolutely common have a red deer to prepare any dish