Ronny’s eyes were fixed in the distance. He knew how to track elephants and other animals, so I knew to take my cues from him. He grew up at a nearby safari lodge, where his mum worked in housekeeping, and his uncle was a tracker. Today we were searching for tell-tale signs of elephants: movement in the trees on the horizon or the sound of breaking branches. I could complain about the flashy technology letting us down, but this was really the way to find elephants. You got more of a sense of scale, of how they fitted into the picture; to rely on your senses and be aware of the bush, the sun, and of yourself within it all. Having said that, I’d made plenty of phantom elephant sightings, mistaking rocks, tree trunks or buffalo for one of our big grey study animals. Today, we were going to get the real thing.
Suddenly, Ronny smiled. ‘There he is! In that big block of trees!’
I held up the binoculars to my myopic eyes, a result of too many hours looking at screens and books close-up and not enough out here. Of course, Ronny was right. Bulumko. He was a towering and impressive bull in his prime. He was old enough to have distinctive notches in his ears. He probably caught them on branches or thorns, and elephants tend to have more ragged ears the older they get. We used them to confirm his identity. He’d also grown a pair of jutting tusks, by no means the biggest I had seen, but each over a metre long. He had been tracked for years by Elephants Alive; and knowing the elephants as individuals with their own lives and experiences over time was what attracted me to them in the first place. What’s more, the elephants had names, not just numbers. Bulumko’s name meant wisdom, but what always struck me was the way he moved. He ambled, feeling the trees with his trunk and taking time to determine his route. He favoured travelling along the dirt roads that we drove along in our vehicle, and he occasionally lingered by water sources longer than the other males. Like every elephant I had ever known, Bulumko had his quirks and unique features. But he was a little different even beyond that. Bulumko was blind.
In many species, a blind individual just wouldn’t survive. But sight isn’t as important for elephants as it is for other animals. Hearing and smell are much more critical. Bulumko has not just found a way to navigate the world without his sight, he’d also found a way to navigate social life. He could displace other males for access to the freshest water or a prime shady spot to rest in. Even if he wasn’t receiving direct care from other animals, he was certainly accepted and even dominant because of his stature, age and tusks. Our relationship with Bulumko was singular, because while the other elephants we watched became habituated to our presence, Bulumko accepted us as friends and co-travellers. We could stay with him for hours by a waterhole as he bathed and we enviously sweated in the sun. When he moved off, he rumbled, a short but low and sonorous sound indicating to us to follow – let’s go! I often wondered whether Bulumko was more likely than other elephants to communicate with us in this way precisely because of his blindness. With him, we were beyond being observers, we were almost another elephant. Perhaps not seeing us made it easier for him to interact with us as companions, and our car was like another big animal. Except it smelt of people and talked like us too.
Excited to ‘talk’ to Bulumko again and, of course, to listen, I clambered down off the roof, eager to drive to a spot where we could get a better sighting of him. I smiled at Ronny and Jess. ‘This is the life!’ Jess laughed and shook her head at me. But it really was what I wanted, to be treated like an elephant by an elephant. Then Jess revved Shrek’s heavy engine and we drove to Bulumko, leaving a trail of dust in our wake.
What is an elephant? A favourite character in a childhood book, a weapon of war, a religious icon, a draught animal, a pest, a conservation flagship, a source of income, a drain on income, a hunting prize, a tourist trap, a terrifying beast, a gentle giant, a source of ivory or a source of power. It has at one time or another been all of these, and the diversity of responses illustrates the complexity and history of our relationship with our world’s biggest land mammals. Few animals evoke such heartfelt passion and division of opinion. It often strikes me that these enormous animals carry with them so much meaning, symbolism and sometimes baggage, but at least they have the strength for it. Many scientists have to carefully introduce and describe their study species of cichlid fishes, fruit flies, honeyguides or sticklebacks. When I say that I work with elephants, most people already have a firm image in their minds, which can be hard for me to compete with. But the way I see elephants is as personal as it is for everyone else. For me, elephants are the biggest, most complex and endlessly fascinating puzzle I have ever faced. And I’ve done one of those thousand-piece jigsaws. How elephants can make evolutionary sense with their long lives, inefficient guts and slow reproduction in a world where being small, reproducing fast and multiplying exponentially is an option continues to intrigue me. How do we have giants in this world? And how do we live with them?
It wasn’t inevitable that my life would end up this way, defined by elephants: their lives, their movements, their habits and the similarities and differences between us and them. I didn’t grow up in the bush like Ronny. I’m not South African like him and Jess. If you’d asked me when I was seven what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d have said Indiana Jones or David Attenborough. But these early field-based dreams drifted away as I was increasingly buried in academic literature, revision and exams. I feel as though I came to from my teenage years as an undergraduate student at King’s College, Cambridge: slightly baffled as to how as a first generation university student I managed to end up there, but equally determined that I had been very sure it was where I should be. I was overwhelmed by the looming architecture, at once oppressively cloistered and staggeringly grand. It echoed my inability to engage with both the nuanced and visually spectacular traditions, acted out by others with an ease and naturalness I couldn’t hope to emulate. I was equally intimidated by the wider features of the student experience. I didn’t row in one of the college boats, I didn’t act or write for the newspaper, I didn’t get a glitzy internship. I sat in the library, shell-shocked by how very little I knew and could ever hope to know.
Feeling adrift, I needed a framework to understand myself, as an individual and as a human being. I decided the solution to understanding my place in the world was to get to the bottom of what it means to be human. Unsurprisingly, even this task was a little over-ambitious for my undergraduate dissertation. Then, in a second-year lecture, my Cambridge experience turned around dramatically. I found the ideas of life history, and, with it, an elegant clarity that comes with the most beautifully constructed scientific theories. At its core, the theory is about explaining how living organisms balance energy and time in their development, reproduction and senescence.
For me, it was about understanding any living organism by getting to the nuts and bolts of how it is born or comes to being, grows, reproduces (or not) and dies. These are universal traits that bind us living things together, but we experience them as individuals. This means we can observe enormous variation both between organisms and between lives; for example, the overall picture is that humans are long-lived animals with slow-paced lives, but this masks the fact that some of us live a few minutes or hours and others live for over a century. How do these patterns of mortality put pressure on the shape of our lives as a species? It was the perfect lens through which to see myself and the world. It allowed me to put aside the idea of humans as exceptional and use the principles to understand my own life as just another creature.
With this in mind, I started studying the lives of primates. Non-human primates like monkeys, apes and lemurs are the go-to comparative organisms for humans. This makes complete sense on one level, because they are our closest relatives. I launched myself into conducting an ambitious study for my undergraduate dissertation. I was trying to use a life-history formula to determine whether the pace of human life was typical of a primate, or if it was an outlier, standing out from the usual pattern. What I mean by the pace of life isn’t just the lifespan. I mean whether key ‘milestones’ in our life history, such as weaning and age at first