An armed rhino poacher in South Africa’s Kruger National Park was trampled to death when a herd of elephants charged as he lined up a shot for the animals’ lucrative horns
An armed rhino poacher in South Africa’s Kruger National Park was trampled to death when a herd of elephants charged as he lined up a shot for the animals’ lucrative horns
Do I need to copy-paste the article I have by the (white) guy who manages the elephant population in Kruger National Park (again, look up who Kruger is and where the park is) writing about the absolute havoc that elephants wreak on the biomes of the park? How they only appeared there after the land was stolen from the (human) inhabitants of the border with Mozambique by the apartheid government and turned into an “eden” for white South Africans to gawk at charismatic megafauna who are doing exactly the kind of environmental destruction we shit on people for doing? That we shit on cattle for doing? In exactly the kind of artificial “wilderness” that exists as an apartheid border security measure/convenient excuse to do some mass deportations to a Bantustan? How if they aren’t regularly culled the biomes there will result in the extinction of less charismatic flora and fauna, but flora and fauna that also deserve a habitat?
I do not support poaching. I also do not support summary execution for poaching, which is what we’re talking about here. ACAB includes the Boer elephant, in this case. I refuse to celebrate somebody, presumably with a family, certainly with people who will mourn them (people mourn other people’s death, similarly to elephants, which it’s worth noting here) living enough on the margins that poaching is worth doing (because elephants are bastards and will kill you if they want to), getting killed by an animal that was getting culled anyways, and is getting culled for sure now for having killed somebody. I understand the eye-watering racism of imperial core environmentalism isn’t obvious to most people, but it’s real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The number of people I have read, seen, heard talk about transforming the African continent into what is effectively eco-Rhodesia is far too high.
I do celebrate every big game hunter who gets trampled to death. I do not celebrate the deaths of marginalized people in ZA trying to survive. And, like I said, that elephant is for sure dead now, but dead at the hands of a white technocrat - his name is literally Whyte, ffs, which is fine? At least a (almost certainly Black) guy got reduced to goo and we get to celebrate his death without having to reckon with the possibility that it might be a little bit racist? Especially given that racialized South Africans have long been denied the same moral standing that elephants have, by conservationists and the ZA government? This is a miserable story. There’s nothing feel-good about it. I would feel differently if it were a big game hunter or a Boer getting stomped, but it’s not. They’re not the ones poaching in Kruger.
There’s a point to be made about elephants not being a particularly good fit for the locality. But “Boer elephants”? Are you kidding me? Over 30 years after the end of apartheid, and with a pluralistic governing structure that White Afrikaners have been mocked for fleeing from in large numbers?
What we’re seeing here is a sort of inter-species solidarity/collective defense. That’s really all it is. You can’t project racism onto an animal, the most they’ve been known to do is be aware of who is a threat (like a human carrying a gun). It doesn’t matter to the wildlife if they’re being killed by someone from nearby or a rich tourist. I don’t hold any kind of
filter to it, recto or verso.
The structure of the argument you’re making here is “we shouldn’t have animosity for the people who directly purvey the violence; all of the blame should go on the people on the other side of the obscured economic apparatus who generate the demand for violence”. I’m sure within a hair of a doubt that you don’t take that stance most of the time.
I do take that stance most of the time. Do we cheer for the deaths of coltan miners in the DRC when their informal mines collapse and kill them because it’s a net gain for the environment? Do we cheer for the summary execution of people in the imperial core (and especially the burgerreich) for stealing bread, or robbing banks, or whatever? The systems that make poaching economically viable are the actual problem. A dead poacher only means a dead elephant and a grieving family and does nothing to address the real, lingering material conditions that are a direct result of apartheid South African wildlife conservation efforts (wildlife conservation efforts themselves have the irredeemable stink of white supremacy on them but that is another post entirely) that lead to deaths like this. Deaths like this do not happen in African countries where elephants live near people that don’t have a history of apartheid. You cannot separate the two and actual white supremacists are happy to cheer on the murder of the poorest, most desperate racialized people in the world in order to save charismatic megafauna.
Come back when you’re ready to depopulate and turn the Tennessee River Valley into a fenced off, guarded nature reserve for the snail darter, to be policed by USAmerican law enforcement and whatever predators happen to repopulate the area.
This deserves a bigger effortpost than I’m able to give right now. I understand that “wildlife preservation is white supremacist, a tool of settler-colonialism, and of USAmerican soft power overseas that has resulted in the enclosure of indigenous land and death of thousands of people for the primary benefit of charismatic megafauna and the imperial core tourists who pay to see them, to the detriment of people who were already managing the environment and the environment both” is not a common argument to hear, at least in the imperial core, but it is the historical and material reality of it.
Those elephants, those rhinos, that you say have a right to defend themselves from poachers, have their populations culled regularly by technocratic, white, resource managers. That’s how ZA National Parks operate. That’s how most National Parks operate. We don’t hear about them killing rhinos or elephants from helicopters. They get death threats for doing it but if they don’t there are grave environmental consequences for other species.
And I am completely serious about Boer elephants. The elephants are in the Boer park gleefully trampling dispossessed black South Africans because of the planning that was done under apartheid and that continues today. You do not see this happening in Tanzania, say, because they never had an apartheid regime there (you do have wildlife conservationists calling for the eradication or further dispossession of Masai people for “trespassing” on their own land, where elephants live, because we as people who do not live with elephants or rhinos value the lives of animals more than we value the lives of living, breathing, racialized human beings.
And lastly, the poachers aren’t the ones doing “all of the violence”. This is one man, who we learn nothing about from the article in a British tabloid that this story is sourced from, whose actions are ultimately inconsequential, who has no way to cull a rhino through the accepted channels. And if you actually want to stop poaching, the way you do it without killing human beings (who again, even the racialized ones, do mourn their dead in elaborate rituals similar to those of the elephants we grant moral standing we do not grant to other human beings) is to address the material conditions that lead to the kind of poaching that occurs in ZA.
You have to look at the historical context, or you will find yourself cheering for the death of desperate people who would garner sympathy, who should garner sympathy, and not have their lives dismissed as disposable, as less than human, as less than animal, even, as they have been for centuries. Which winds up upholding white supremacy and doing nothing to help elephants, rhinos, poachers, or anyone. This happens over and over again.
A poor South African dying suddenly is sad in its own way. But the overall angle I had on the article was “wildlife can act in defense of other wildlife, why can’t we?” or something thereabouts.
Maybe not the whole basin, but one of my orgs is kinda sorta working on this, one baby step at a time. For a long time I have been a huge advocate of desuburbanization and de-exurbanization and rural redefinition, and in the past few years I’ve made contact with groups that can take these dreams somewhere.