Saba Douglas-Hamilton has lived close to elephants and fought the cause for their survival and wellbeing almost all her life and she will tell Eden Court's audience on Thursday there is some good news
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Kenyan wildlife conservationist, filmmaker and anthropologist Saba Douglas-Hamilton returns to Inverness to talk about elephants – and their part in her life, hers in theirs.
And she comes with good news.
Her last visit to Eden Court in 2017 included telling a packed audience about the dangers elephants faced and what we could do about it.
And the extraordinary news when there is so much to be depressed and worried about with climate change and wildlife facing extinction, is that for elephants some things have got better.
“One of the things I want to talk about is the success we have had knocking the ivory trade into retreat,” Saba said.
“The last time I came to Inverness we were in a state of utter crisis. It was very difficult, the conservation organisations were throwing everything they could at the problem and were trying to stop it.
“What is amazing looking back at that now is there is what looks like a logical arc taking us from A to B to C where all the efforts that went on, to improve anti-poaching, cracking down on trafficking, really reaching out to the Chinese through celebrities and social media and the governments getting the correct legislation in place, which then allowed domestic markets to be closed which in turn has crashed the market. We are now in a really happy place when it comes to ivory trade.
“The price of ivory has plummeted across Africa and poaching has decreased automatically.
“So we can now start focusing on the next big issues to affect elephants like conflict with people in a much-changing landscape.
“But partly I am coming back to say thank you to everybody – it was such a huge combined effort. All the people who wrote to their MPs or who raised money or who went marching out in the streets to save elephants – that worked and has put us in a really good place.
“I think it is important to say that when people are feeling in despair about ‘How do we change the world and how do we deal with these impossible problems?’, you need to keep on going and keep on doing the little things you are doing because you are not doing them alone, but with thousands, millions of other people, actually.
“And all that adds up and becomes a very forceful power for change.
“All the ways we are changing – people changing their eating habits and what they wear, sharing that information, hopefully all that will start moving things along in terms of things like the rainforest and you do eventually get a change in government. And different governments think in different ways and do things differently. And actually, with all of this stuff, you have to have that critical push from people to reach that tipping point and at the end of the day it does come down to government legislation and governments are voted in by the people.
“So that is where our power lies.”
It has been a while since Saba has made films or TV such as the BBC series she presented, The Secret Life Of Elephants, or featured in anything like This Wild Life, the BBC series about her move with her family, husband Frank Pope and her three daughters, to run the bespoke eco-lodge enterprise Elephant Watch Camp offering unique encounters with elephants, training the nomad Samburu people as guides, in the project started by her mother Oria in North Kenya in the Samburu National Reserve. Saba also continues the work of her father Ian’s charity Save The Elephants which has cared for the African elephant since 1993.
The natural storytelling skills that make Saba a charismatic TV presenter draw you in as she shares stories – as the title of her talk says – In The Footsteps Of Elephants.
In one story, Saba was possibly lucky not to end up trampled by an elephant’s footsteps.
But as she tells you about the moonlit encounter with a bull elephant during a filming trip, it’s not the possible danger you are thinking of as she speaks, but how magical the experience sounds.
“I was working in the Namibian desert with the BBC at that stage.
“One film crew had come and gone and a new film crew had arrived that day and every night I had been dragging my mattress out into the middle of a dry sandy riverbed and sleeping out under the stars.
“Some people had joined me previously but on that particular night I was there on my own. It’s very safe to do that there is nothing dangerous or crazy about doing that.
“I could hear elephants and they would often walk along these riverbeds, but they would tend to stay on the edges where the trees were and they go and feed.
“I could hear them feeding on acacias maybe about half a kilometre away from us and was dipping in and out of sleep, feeling very comfortable and at ease with these elephants around.
“Then suddenly I woke up, wide awake in the middle of the night and I rolled over onto my stomach and I could see this beautiful big elephant just pacing along the edge of the riverbank, lit up by the moon. And I thought ‘Gosh! This is exactly why I love sleeping out here seeing these things and everyone else is in their tent missing out on this amazing moment!’.
“He was feeding a bit and then he suddenly turned round and looked in my direction and from his perspective there was this lovely silvery riverbed that he knew so well and right in the middle of it was this very strange black rectangle and he must have thought ‘I wonder what that is, I better go and have a look’.
“So before I knew it, he started walking towards me. He had been about 100 metres away from me originally and I looked around frantically thinking ‘Oh my goodness, what am I going to do?’. There wasn’t a tree anywhere near, there were some scrubby little bushes which offered no cover and there was a very big moon so if I moved he would have seen me and that might have triggered an aggressive reaction from him because he might have thought I was a lion or a predator.
“I realised with a sinking heart that the only option I had was to lie there and play dead.
“It was an unbelievably stressful and dangerous situation and I thought I was probably going to die! He got closer and closer and closer and it got to the point where I had to roll onto my back again because I couldn’t lift my head up to look at him so I had to look at him backwards if you know what I mean, tipping my head back to look at him. I was flat on the ground, right at his feet. And he came and stopped maybe a metre and a half from me
“He completely blocked out the moon and the sky above my head. I thought ‘Now he is going to smell me, realise I’m human and probably just kill me - kneel on me and tusk me’.
“So I was thinking these were my last seconds. But instead, he reached out his trunk, started to smell me, first my head then all the way down my body to my toes and all the way back up again.
“I could feel his breath as he sucked the air in and out. Then he curled his trunk up a little bit and stood there pondering for a long time – about five to 10 minutes.
”Then, he just walked away and I was in such a state of extreme elation and relief and adrenalin and just utter humility that, in his grace, he had given me my life.
“I had often wondered – another thing I often used to do was climb up into trees on an elephant pathway and have the elephants walking underneath me, you would be in the branches above them and it would be this magical thing, they would never react and didn’t feel compromised by that. They probably knew you were there and could smell you. But they were quite happy going underneath - you were a bit like a baboon sitting in a tree.
“I had often wondered what would happen if you were just on a pathway and were very small and unthreatening, what would happen? And this was exactly what happened.
“They are not aggressive innately, it’s only if they are pushed into that position. Elephants are very clever and they know exactly what you are, they can smell you. Their senses that dominate are sound, smell and touch and they are fully aware of what you are, but if they don’t feel threatened there is no reason to kill you. There has got to be a good reason to do that.”
Though Saba has lived in Africa all her life – apart from her time studying anthropology at St Andrews – Scotland is where her father’s family come from.
"Scotland is very dear to me, I have very dear family who live close to Inverness. My father went out to Tanzania in the mid-1960s and did the first-ever study of the social behaviour of wild African elephants, and his big discovery that he wrote his DPhil at Oxford about was that elephant herds are matriarchies – led by the females. Nobody knew it before then.
"That study continued but got very railroaded by the first really big cycle of ivory trade which went out of control in the mid-70s. And my parents had to commit about 15 years of their lives to fighting that and trying to wake up the world to what was going on. That ended in 1989 with an international ban on ivory trade and my father was able to go back to his research.
"That was when I started joining him as an adult, and becoming involved in that, and more conservation work.
“I was born and brought up Kenya, my mother is also Kenyan but of French and Italian origin. We’re a real mix of things. I never know if I’m an African or an Italian or a Scot!
“I always find the hardest bit is the Italian extravagance set against the Scottish thrift!” Saba laughed.
“Elephants were always a major part of my life, right from the beginning.
“I was also always very interested in culture. I was brought up amongst 40 different tribes in Kenya and each one has their own language, their own traditions and perspective and all that fed into the way me and my sister learned to understand the world.
“When I came to study at university in St Andrews it was anthropology – and conservation and biology are always closely bound together with that.
“I found it really invaluable having studied anthropology and then going back to Africa and having an understanding of how different peoples construct their universe and concepts and how helpful that can be when you are looking at things like conservation and how dangerous it is to come in with a one-sided perspective
“How much richer we are hearing the many different sides in a discussion, including a perspective from the side of the animals.”
Saba understands the pressures poverty puts on indigenous people to poach or traffic elephants to make money to survive.
“I think compassion is always an important thing,” Saba began. “There are people who poach to feed their families.
“But then there are people who poach because it is a lucrative high-level activity which they can get rich on.
“Most of the time poachers are people who are at the sharp end of it and are desperate and being exploited by the traffickers.
“They really are the cynics, the middle men who are there making the money from illegal killing and not actually getting their hands dirty but making sure someone else goes out to do it.
“But they make a lot of money in the mark-up when the item comes to them – like any other illegal trade or contraband. It tends to attract the same kind of criminal networks who are extremely well-oiled and extremely difficult to crack.
“Then the far side of that is always demand.
“The thing to do is to try to reduce demand and to share knowledge and understanding in the countries where the markets are. Because a lot of the time, people have no idea that what they buy is causing such mayhem in its source country.”
The chance to spend time seeing and getting close to elephants in their own environment is a good way to attract people to the cause of conservation. And at the Elephant Watch Camp, the understanding and the experience over generations of local nomad guides and the years of research’s bank of knowledge about the elephant families there, is probably unique.
Saba said: “That is where the anthropological side comes in or certainly my fascination for other perspectives.
“This camp was set up by my mum 20-plus years ago. We have always hugely admired the nomadic people who live up in North Kenya. They are an extremely hardy, stoic people who have an incredible, enormous repository of traditional knowledge – about the land and the flora and the fauna.
“We believe they are the best potential ambassadors for conservation and wildlife, certainly for elephants, and for tourism and we employ entirely from the local community of nomads many of whom don’t have any education at all, in terms of being able to read and write, but they bring so much to the table.
“We train everybody up in high level tourism so basically the whole camp is run by nomads. Then people from all round the world come and visit us and we take them out elephant-watching. So that is our strength.
“We do something very different that nobody else does which is we springboard off the work that is being done and has been done by our research team at Save The Elephants for the last 25 years or so, with some groups, a little bit more than that.
“So they know all the elephants individually that move through these reserves, it is a completely open wilderness with no fences or barriers to stop the elephants from moving. But we are only looking at the ones that come through this small patch, they use it as part of their range.
“Our team has been studying these elephants since 1997. They know every individual, they can trace a baby back four generations, so they know the great-grandmothers and relationships that have existed between those great-grandmothers that are no longer alive and how those relationships can impact decisions made by a new mother and her baby in terms of the associations she makes with other families, what she does in times of difficulty, how she draws on her life expertise or the wisdom of the other matriarchs around her to make difficult choices or to respond to threat.
“So we take people very deep into these elephant families. You don’t go and meet an elephant. You meet Cleopatra from the Royals and her sister Anastasia who is a joint matriarch with her.
“You learn about all their babies and what happened and how they dealt with the great drought in 1999 and so on.
“And having the Samburus as the people who show you that world through their eyes, the eyes of nomads and their extraordinary very particular perspective on the landscape, it has become a very potent situation that has recruited many people to the elephant cause.
“So that is how we feel we are pulling all these things together in a rather magical synergy, all coming back to help elephant conservation.
“I was very lucky first of all to be brought up with wildlife and to have that almost second language that you learn about how to interact with animals and not cross that invisible line that encroaches onto their space and makes them feel compromised – and learning, not how they speak to you, but you start being able to understand a little bit more or make some predictions about what they are going to do and you get very sensitive to their body language and what is going on around you.
“There is nothing that makes me happier than being out and surrounded by this expansive biodiversity that you find in Africa.”
In The Footsteps Of Elephants finishes Saba Douglas-Hamilton’s tour in Inverness at Eden Court on Thursday, October 13. More info: https://sabadouglashamilton.com/ and eden-court.co.uk
