Full Circle Digital Magazine February 2014 | Page 17

C O N S E R VAT I O N • R E P R E S E N T I N G E L E P H A N T S
Selous, Rider-Haggard and, later, Hemmingway.
Although the texts of hunting down the great tuskers
are unpalatable by today’s standards, these men
always described an uncanny familiarity with elephants
and an upwelling of guilt for killing such magnificent
beings. Thereafter, the hunter’s observation began to
morph into the first full-scale ethology.
The macho-style prose was replaced with gentler nonfiction works by those with a deep love for the animals
– Richard Leakey, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Daphne
Sheldrick and Cynthia Moss to name a few; or in novels
like our own Dalene Matthee’s Circles in the Forest, and
even one from the elephant’s perspective - Barbara
Gowdry’s The White Bone. In fact, Wylie notes that while
rare in adult literature, tales told from the elephant’s
perspective abound in classical children’s literature.
Dr. Seuss’ Horton, A.A. Milne’s Heffalump, Rudyard
Kipling’s Elephant Child, Walt Disney’s Dumbo and
the most widely read of all - Jean then Laurent du
Brunhoff’s Barbar. The latter has sold over 12 million
copies, spawned a TV show of 79 episodes that have
been screened in 150 countries. Professor Wylie
reckons that every second Japanese woman under 30
owns a Barbar artefact. With such a depth and variety
of representations in our childhood consciousness, it’s
no wonder we all feel a connection with elephants.

Speaking of artefacts – T-shirts, mugs, postcards and
stamps of elephants are some of the most popular
images floating about global society today, even more
so in commercial branding. There are no less than six
beer labels that use the elephant as their motif and in
South Africa we have a famous liqueur using an image
of an elephant; a provincial car plate and a national
bank note. Political parties too. The Inkatha Freedom
Party, borrowing from the Zulu royal house, uses a
family of elephants to symbolise stability and unity; and
more famously, in a land where elephants have never
occurred, the US’s Republican Party is represented by
the elephant [