The Secret Lives of Elephants. Hannah Mumby

trunk and turned them gently, detecting the scent of their former wearers, faded over time. I remember his face so clearly. It was wide above the trunk, as happens to males with age, with deep horizontal wrinkles traversing the front of his face. Either side, his eyes were looking downwards, the direction of his gaze emphasised by the dramatically long and spindly eyelashes shading them. His tusks were thick at the base, another sign of his age. His right tusk splayed out to the side and formed a stubby but impressive point, while the left one had a messy jagged break about 5 centimetres down from his lip line, exposing the layers of hard tissue and giving him a rakish, rugged appearance.

      Yeager moved so slowly, but with so much power and intention. I watched him pull up grass with the tip of his trunk, flick the trunk back and forth to remove the dust from the roots and place the grass in his mouth, chewing methodically and rhythmically. I don’t know how long I watched him for. It could have been minutes or hours, but it didn’t matter because it was on his time. The pace of my perception slowed to match his, and with it some of the urgency of this world diminished: the irresistible urge to push forward, even when I didn’t know why I was doing it. As he eventually eased his way out of the camp, he paused to defecate, dropping five balls of caramel-coloured dung. When he was safely out of the way, I walked over to where he had been, taking time to look at his footprints in the sand, with their crisscrossing cracks like trails on a map. From the flat area at the back of his foot I could work out the direction in which he had been walking. I could see where he had rested his trunk on the ground, leaving a valley of ripples. I smelled his dung, grassy, warm and not the slightest bit repulsive. I squeezed it between my fingers, letting the green-yellow water run down my arm. There was life in that dung. I felt the barely digested plant material, gathered from kilometres away and deposited here; the potential for dung beetles to roll it away, or a frog to take up residence there, or the seeds in it to germinate. I thought of the worm eggs that I’d only later see under the microscope, and, smaller still, his DNA, the bacteria from his gut, the metabolised fragments of all his hormones. I saw him at once as more than the sum of his parts, a vital part of a system that was both much bigger and much smaller than him.

      I had come to Kenya looking for a slow-living animal, a model on which to test my ideas. I laughed at myself for dismissing Iain as an elephant before I had met one myself. What Yeager gave me was the experience of feeling my own life slow down, when I watched him and his face being seared onto my soul. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life working with elephants. But for me, it wasn’t enough to watch in awe and appreciate. My love and science had collided again, just as they had done at the first life-history lecture I attended. Yeager raised more questions in me than he answered. The biggest scientific issue for me was that perhaps my theoretical framework had been too reductive: by considering individuals as the embodiment of their life-history landmarks, I had lost too much of their complexity. Although Yeager was alone, I saw so much interaction – the grass he ate, the collars he sniffed, that incredible dung he dropped. For me, this crystallised the fact that elephants in isolation from their environment make no sense. I knew elephants had startling parallels with humans in terms of their life history, but broadening what I could imagine, see, test and understand about them might reveal even more intriguing parallels and contrasts. I couldn’t study them the way I had originally intended, with elephants just as a model. By doing that I would limit them, limit Yeager because he was so much more. I had to understand what it was to be an elephant and try, in the limited and human way I could, to conduct my studies from that point of view. A big evolutionary, ecological puzzle like an elephant deserves more than just our fascination, it deserves our critical thinking. That way I could enhance both my experience of being human and my understanding of being human on every level, from the deeply personal to the scientifically challenging.

      I am a human. I am an elephant. The study of life has separated humans from other animals with no particular scientific justification for this exceptionalism, other than that as humans we might be both most familiar with and most intrigued by our own species. Many beautiful and reasoned arguments have been made against human exceptionalism (I refer you to anything by ethologist Frans de Waal), and there are wonderful accounts of individual animals exhibiting behaviours that we might once have thought exclusive to humans, eliciting responses and understanding concepts, from honey bees to scrub jays. What doesn’t seem to have changed much is the way we do science. When we study humans, we are ethnographers: we place ourselves within the context that we are interested in and participate with informants trying to understand what they are doing and why. When we study other animals, we try to make ourselves invisible and remove ourselves from the context, just as I had planned and monumentally failed to do in the writing of this book. Why? Is it because we think we are a distraction, that we will alter the behaviour of the animals? Perhaps, in part. But there is a huge wealth of material on reflexivity, positionality and the role of the researcher in social science that natural scientists could tap into. Acknowledging the presence of the researcher, and all of the complication that comes with that, actually makes the studies richer. I think part of the problem is our deeply ingrained sense of difference from other animals and it is holding us back as scientists. If we were more free, if we were willing to rumble right back to Bulumko, what world of understanding could it open to us?