Hannah Mumby - Elephants: Birth, Death and Family in the Lives of the Giants

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright Hannah Mumby 2020

Images copyright Hannah Mumby unless otherwise specified

Cover photograph Jennifer Latuperisa-Andresen/Unsplash

Hannah Mumby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008331672

Ebook Edition June 2019 ISBN: 9780008331696

Version: 2020-03-02

Quand je vous parle de moi, je vous parle de vous Ah! Insens, qui croit que je ne suis pas toi!

When I speak to you about myself, I speak to you about yourself. What mad person are you, to believe I am not you!

Victor Hugo

What do you see when you look in the mirror? A sentient being? One with a family and broader social network, a history and memory? An individual with myriad identities, complex relationships fostered over a (potentially, hopefully) long life? Someone capable of expressing emotion, conveying information, communicating with and recognising lots of other individuals and members of other species? Someone aware that theyre looking at a reflection of themselves in the mirror?

When I look in the mirror, I see an elephant. That might sound implausible. Lets peer again. Of course I see glasses (or the blur that comes with the lack of glasses) and blonde hair and more spots than a 32-year-old should ever have. I dont see grey, wrinkled skin (at least not to the extent I could seriously be classified as a thick-skinned pachyderm) or tusks. I dont have a trunk, although I heartily wish I did for practical purposes. But we all know that when you look in the mirror, its not actually you that youre looking at, its a perception of reflection.

The reason I see myself as an elephant is that when you strip back all the packaging, I dont think Im different to an elephant in many ways. All the questions I posed above could be answered in the affirmative by an elephant if she were asked. You dont even have to ask her; you just have to watch her live her life. In this book, Im asking you to squint a little bit into the mirror and reflect on the fact that you might have a lot in common with an elephant. I will go through my experiences with elephants, loosely based around key landmarks in the map of an elephant (and human) life. Ill discuss their behaviour, physical changes and interactions with humans they have over the course of their lives. The ultimate aim is to reintroduce you to elephants, not just as majestic and incredible creatures, but also as relatable individuals, friends or even family members, which they become to the people who live alongside them. This is not to lose the science or the wonder, but to give us the tools to rethink our approach to animals and perhaps our priorities in conservation (or just how we define our friendship circle). And to highlight the fact that who we are isnt always as obvious as we might think.

To be very clear, this is not the book I intended to write. Early in the process, as a visiting scholar I sat on an oval of grass at Colorado State University, the bright sun glaring on the screen as I typed on my laptop. It was a devastatingly sunny early autumn day, unfamiliar enough to surprise me and challenge me to confront my barely concealed resentment that a season defined by endings and the spectre of death should be so riotously bright and beautiful. Autumn in Cambridge (the one in England, the one I knew too well) was somehow less contradictory, much more comforting in its gloom. A student approached me and asked what I was doing, and I told him I was attempting to write a popular science book about elephants. He told me it was a bit presumptuous to suppose it would be popular. So, advice heeded, I decided I was trying to write a science book on the topic of elephants. It seemed like an opportunity to convey my ideas to a wider audience than Id ever had before. I was also excited to go beyond the bounds of my academic writing. After all, theres writing about elephants and then theres writing about actually being an elephant. I know which I think is more fun, and if you cant guess, Im trumpeting as I write this.

So there I was: Colorado, fall (autumn in my head), my scientific knowledge distilling into something resembling a passable Scotch. Where could I go wrong? Then I wrote something which didnt feel right at all a chronological and stale list of stuff about elephants. I talked to people and they kept telling me the same thing: I cant see you in this writing and I dont see the science shining through. I had wanted the latter without the former. As with many scientists, I like to take myself out of the equation, because it makes the equation simpler. We are taught to be reductive, to shave everything down with Occams razor. And in a lot of cases this leads to elegant and rational solutions. But in this case, I had executed a bit of a Sweeney Todd on myself and haemorrhaged all over the floor. I didnt even make a decent pie from the remains. So it was decided: I would enter the book.

I dont find writing about myself interesting; instead, I often find it embarrassing, narcissistic. I judge myself harshly even as I type. But for the purposes of navigating the jumping timeline of this book, my trajectory becomes relevant. I first became interested in animal lives as an undergraduate, between 2004 and 2007. I have worked with elephants since I was an intern in Kenya in 2010. I continued through my PhD, for which I did fieldwork in Myanmar, and my first post-doctoral position. I was fortunate to receive a series of academic fellowships to return to research in Africa from 2015 onwards, where I built up a team and had the joy of taking my own students on. In 2019, I became an Assistant Professor and moved back to Asia. After a decade of elephants, and a decade and half or so of academia, who I am now is someone wholly consumed with thinking about animals and how people relate to them. Its my job as a scientist, but its my passion as a person too. In particular, I think about my favourite animals, the elephants, and the animals I have the most complicated relationship with, humans. I think about how elephants interact with each other, with the abiotic and biotic aspects of their environments including us. Its not just thinking, though. I watch elephants and ask people about them. I try to test what the elephants are doing and why, and sometimes I sit in a hide and hope something will happen beyond my legs going numb. I do all of this to the point that I completely lose my sense of whether steamy balls of elephant dung are appropriate for conversation over dinner. Im going to tell you theyre absolutely marvellous for me, but that for other people they might be best reserved for post-dinner drinks, particularly if anything spherical, brown or sticky is on the menu.