If, for one moment, you imagine life getting unbearable in the current economic reality, spare a thought for Kenyan wildlife. The elephant and the rhino are doing particularly badly.
Poachers are slaughtering animals at will and there is not enough outrage. Greed in this country is the elephant in the room and if we keep looking away, we might look back and find them all gone. The obvious question; Why don’t Kenyans react as passionately to the elephant poaching crisis as say the determination to have David Moyes sacked as coach Manchester United coach?
The answer may lie in our cultural conditioning. I saw my first elephant in its natural habitat in my early twenties, which is quite old for someone who was not living abroad. The encountered happened in Mt. Kenya during a hiking expedition.
Tracking through thick bush, we almost accidentally walked straight into an elephant family. Luckily, we had a smart guide who stopped us forty metres short of getting detected. It was a terribly frightening and exhilarating experience.
We marveled at the size but remained acutely aware of our vulnerability should the elephants react to our presence. We are socially conditioned to think of wild animals as restricted to our version of an open plain zoo. Where handlers are responsible for their upkeep and in exchange foreigners pay to gawk and take pictures.
We tolerate violence meted against them and we still call their homes ‘game’ parks. There is a need to teach the young from an early age to develop a reverence for animal life and stop thinking of them as game. In the next two decades the elephant and the rhino could disappear and we will be faced with the sad irony of having to fly to Asia or Europe to see an African elephant in a zoo.
