The mystery behind this elephant herd's journey

Brut America

China’s wandering elephants have “won” the internet, with millions tuning in to follow their every move. But a darker reality may be the cause of their migration ...

Transcript

00:00It seems like they were pushed out, and now they're just trying to figure out where to go.

00:16Many people don't realize that there are still wild elephants in southern China.

00:20Historically, elephants would migrate out of this region.

00:25It was all elephant habitat originally.

00:31That's not an unusual distance for elephants to travel during a migration.

00:36They can travel several hundred miles.

00:38Between Namibia and Botswana, where I work,

00:42this would be a regular pattern over the course of a season.

00:52And it's usually the oldest, wisest, the matriarch,

00:57that is the repository of knowledge.

01:00And she makes all the decisions about safety and where to go.

01:04And they remember migratory paths from many years ago.

01:08Because these matriarchs can be anywhere.

01:10A young matriarch might be 30, but an older matriarch could be 60 or older, 70.

01:17And if those elephants were old enough,

01:20you might think that the matriarch would remember a migratory path and follow it.

01:25But that's unlikely because the matriarchs wouldn't be old enough

01:29to have experienced a migration when they used to occur.

01:44I don't know what triggered this particular attempt at migration,

01:50but it probably had to do with some kind of human activity in the area

01:56or that the very small population that exists there,

02:01built to capacity where there was more dominant families

02:06and they pushed out the lower-ranking families.

02:09We see that in Namibia and other countries in Africa,

02:12where the higher-ranking families get the preferred habitat

02:16and the lower-ranking ones have to go into the more disturbed and risky environments.

02:21And it could be that they just ended up outside the park and then got lost.

02:40It's also very scary for those farmers that know these elephants are coming

02:45in Asian elephant interactions with humans.

02:49They're extremely aggressive and for good reason.

02:54They remember aggressive interactions with humans.

02:57There hasn't been a good relationship there.

02:59And understandably, farmers do not want elephants in their cornfields.

03:04They could eat their whole year's worth of food in a single night.

03:16The question now is, do they bring them back to Sichuan Banang?

03:21Whatever that trigger was that caused them to migrate in the first place,

03:25that's still there.

03:27So there's a lot of decisions that need to be made.

03:30I think one of the take-home messages is that there's still hope.

03:34There's still hope for wild elephants.

03:36And what can we do to make sure that we keep them in the wild?

03:42And what can we do to make sure that we keep land set aside for them?

03:47And seeing this family and the general interest in what's happening here

03:52is really important for us to take that interest and say,

03:56okay, it's not too late.

03:58What can we do to keep these elephants safe?

04:02Why did they leave this park?

04:04Are there things we can do to make them feel more safe

04:07so that they don't go out and risk their lives

04:10and risk the people's lives, the farmers that they encounter along the way?

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