June 9
These beasts are bloody big, right? If you haven’t seen a wild African elephant up close, with over 6-tonne of pure muscle staring at the insignificant little human figure in front of it, you may not quite understand just how threatening these animals really can be. Given a single move that a well grown adult considers not to its liking, he’ll flip even the sturdiest of vehicles without so much as raising a sweat. So as you can well imagine, physically relocating several of these behemoths from one Malawian game reserve to another, over 100km away, is not exactly a stroll in the park. The locals here aren’t the best at anything to do with organisation, so getting the South Africans in for this job was probably not the worst idea in the world.
Helicopter spotters complete with stun-dart armed rangers, massive craning equipment and elephant sized trucks; there was nothing small about this operation. Apparently all went well over the several weeks of work, with all the required elephants being bundled up successfully from Liwonde and delivered completely unharmed to Majete... hats off to all concerned. The problem, and of course there a problem, lay not in the transporting, but in the fencing. When 6-tonne of pure muscle gets a little disoriented in new surrounds, added to this a pinch of homesickness creeping in, a few flimsy fences ‘aint going to stop it. So as it turns out two of the bigger of the group decided on a little field trip through Southern Malawi… and this isn’t exactly a lightly populated region of the country.
Helicopter spotters complete with stun-dart armed rangers, massive craning equipment and elephant sized trucks; there was nothing small about this operation. Apparently all went well over the several weeks of work, with all the required elephants being bundled up successfully from Liwonde and delivered completely unharmed to Majete... hats off to all concerned. The problem, and of course there a problem, lay not in the transporting, but in the fencing. When 6-tonne of pure muscle gets a little disoriented in new surrounds, added to this a pinch of homesickness creeping in, a few flimsy fences ‘aint going to stop it. So as it turns out two of the bigger of the group decided on a little field trip through Southern Malawi… and this isn’t exactly a lightly populated region of the country.
If I was a local Malawian, minding my own business grinding my maize for dinner or lazily slinging my kid over my back and wrapping my chitenge around them, and I was confronted with a large grey monster over one hundred times my weight coming crashing through the trees, I’d shit myself too. Unfortunately for one unsuspecting villager, their reaction to the visiting elephant wasn’t seen as favourable by the oversized intruder, and the poor villager was consequently squashed into nothingness. More distressing however, was the reaction of the authorities who had let this bewildered beast wander off. With the South Africans unable to bring all their fancy equipment to the area where the stray elephant had now wandered (only a few kilometers outside Blantyre), the organisers decided to take matters into their own hands. Dumbo, simply trying to make his way back to Liwonde, was subsequently shot.
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