“Human population growth along with wholesale abuse of the environment have put us at war with wildlife. And it is a war that, if humanity isn’t careful, we will win. But it will be a tragic and Pyrrhic victory of epic proportion. Very simply, I worry that a world without animals will be a world we won’t want to—or be able to—live in. The last stop on the road to our own extinction. ”

— Scott Asen, Wildlife Direct

On a beautiful sunny day in Amboseli National Park, against the backdrop of snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro, a small group of cars was gathered at a safe distance around the prostrate bull elephant. The elephant lay still in the dust, head on the ground, his enormous tusks and trunk stretched out in front of him. Tension rose among the onlookers as the minutes passed.

Then the huge elephant flapped his ear, got up gently, shook his head vigorously in a vain attempt to dislodge the strange object around his neck, and walked off. We all breathed a sigh of relief. The operation to attach a tracking collar to Tim had gone perfectly.

That was Kenya conservationist and elephant researcher Paula Kahumbu writing in The Guardian on Feb. 14, 2018, virtually two years ago to the day.

The elephant in question was Big Tim, one of just 100 remaining African tuskers — so named when an elephant’s tusks grow so long they touch the ground.

The operation, affixing a GPS tracking device as part of a larger program to track the area’s elephants and alleviate human-wildlife conflict by discouraging elephants from raiding farmers’ crops, proved a success. The latest satellite technology is helping keep elephants safe from poachers — and away from farmers’ crops.

At the time, Big Tim would have been in his late 40s — old by wild elephants’ standards where a prolonged surge in poaching and illegal hunting has put the entire species at risk.

This past Wednesday, the Kenya Wildlife Service reported that Big Tim had died, presumably of natural causes, at age 50.

Word of Big Tim’s passing, one of the most famous — and most photographed — elephants in East Africa made news headlines everywhere from Nairobi’s Daily Nation to BBC, CNN and NPR in the US.

“Rest in Peace, Grand Old Man,” Elite Anti-Poaching Units and Combat Trackers posted on the group’s Facebook page. “Tim was loved by all and will be deeply missed,” the post continued. “He was protected 24/7 by the phenomenal rangers at Big Life Foundation and Kenya Wildlife Service.

“Over the years, we did not post photos of Tim to ensure his safety. But even as an aging tusker, Tim was prone to his escapades.”

The accompanying photo was taken by Big Life Foundation’s Daniel Ole Sambu.

The satellite tracking program is costly and labour intensive but it has proven effective.

Amboseli, a 39,000-hectare national park a stone’s throw across the border from Mt. Kilimanjaro in neighbouring Tanzania, is situated on Maasai land, and the Maasai needed convincing that the satellite program wasn’t just another empty PR stunt on the part of NGOs that always claim to know what’s best for pastoral cattle herders. Security teams track collared elephants, like Tim, on a map on a cell phone. If the signal shows an elephant to be moving close to agricultural areas, the security teams can respond by moving the elephant away before they cause trouble. If the GPS signal shows the elephant to be standing still for several hours, it sends an alert that the elephant may be in trouble.

Tim’s passing is more than just another highlight moment in media sentimentality and anthropomorphism. “The tuskers are an irreplaceable symbol of our continent’s natural heritage,” Kahumbu noted. Over the years, the systematic extermination of elephant tuskers by trophy hunters and ivory poachers has acted as a form of unnatural selection, in that their gene pool is not being passed to the next generation of East Africa’s dwindling population of wild elephants. Despite their seeming ubiquity in zoos and circuses, elephants do not do well in captivity because very few zoological exhibits — basically, none — can replicate the space needed to sustain a viable breeding herds, let alone feed the gene pool.

The name “Tim” wasn’t just an attempt to anthropomorphize a cuddly animal to the public at large. Amboseli elephant researcher Cynthia Moss, one of the pioneers of the world’s most comprehensive, detailed elephant study program, took a page from Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research groups by naming individual animals with the first letter in their name corresponding with their family group.

Tim, in other words, is readily identifiable — to anyone, and not just researchers — as being a member of the “T” family group, like his mother Trista. Over the years, Moss’s NGO, The Amboseli Trust for Elephants, has provided comprehensive — and critical — information about the habits of wild elephants to the world at large. As the species teeters on the edge of oblivion, that is more important today than ever.

In death as in life, researchers hope that Tim’s memory will inspire further efforts to find viable solutions to the increasing number of incidents involving human-wildlife conflict — not just with elephants but with all wild animals.

“In every walk with nature,” John Muir once said, “one receives far more than he seeks.”

https://biglife.org/news-events/bush-journal/famous-tusker-gets-hi-tech-necklace