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 ...
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
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?