Hannah Mumby - The Secret Lives of Elephants

To be very clear, this is not the book I intended to write. Early in the process, as a visiting scholar I sat on an oval of grass at Colorado State University, the bright sun glaring on the screen as I typed on my laptop. It was a devastatingly sunny early autumn day, unfamiliar enough to surprise me and challenge me to confront my barely concealed resentment that a season defined by endings and the spectre of death should be so riotously bright and beautiful. Autumn in Cambridge (the one in England, the one I knew too well) was somehow less contradictory, much more comforting in its gloom. A student approached me and asked what I was doing, and I told him I was attempting to write a ‘popular science book’ about elephants. He told me it was a bit presumptuous to suppose it would be popular. So, advice heeded, I decided I was trying to write a science book on the topic of elephants. It seemed like an opportunity to convey my ideas to a wider audience than I’d ever had before. I was also excited to go beyond the bounds of my academic writing. After all, there’s writing about elephants and then there’s writing about actually being an elephant. I know which I think is more fun, and if you can’t guess, I’m trumpeting as I write this.

So there I was: Colorado, fall (autumn in my head), my scientific knowledge distilling into something resembling a passable Scotch. Where could I go wrong? Then I wrote something which didn’t feel right at all – a chronological and stale list of ‘stuff about elephants’. I talked to people and they kept telling me the same thing: I can’t see you in this writing and I don’t see the science shining through. I had wanted the latter without the former. As with many scientists, I like to take myself out of the equation, because it makes the equation simpler. We are taught to be reductive, to shave everything down with Occam’s razor. And in a lot of cases this leads to elegant and rational solutions. But in this case, I had executed a bit of a Sweeney Todd on myself and haemorrhaged all over the floor. I didn’t even make a decent pie from the remains. So it was decided: I would enter the book.

I don’t find writing about myself interesting; instead, I often find it embarrassing, narcissistic. I judge myself harshly even as I type. But for the purposes of navigating the jumping timeline of this book, my trajectory becomes relevant. I first became interested in animal lives as an undergraduate, between 2004 and 2007. I have worked with elephants since I was an intern in Kenya in 2010. I continued through my PhD, for which I did fieldwork in Myanmar, and my first post-doctoral position. I was fortunate to receive a series of academic fellowships to return to research in Africa from 2015 onwards, where I built up a team and had the joy of taking my own students on. In 2019, I became an Assistant Professor and moved back to Asia. After a decade of elephants, and a decade and half or so of academia, who I am now is someone wholly consumed with thinking about animals and how people relate to them. It’s my job as a scientist, but it’s my passion as a person too. In particular, I think about my favourite animals, the elephants, and the animals I have the most complicated relationship with, humans. I think about how elephants interact with each other, with the abiotic and biotic aspects of their environments including us. It’s not just thinking, though. I watch elephants and ask people about them. I try to test what the elephants are doing and why, and sometimes I sit in a hide and hope something will happen beyond my legs going numb. I do all of this to the point that I completely lose my sense of whether steamy balls of elephant dung are appropriate for conversation over dinner. I’m going to tell you they’re absolutely marvellous for me, but that for other people they might be best reserved for post-dinner drinks, particularly if anything spherical, brown or sticky is on the menu.

I don’t think we are very good judges of who we are, which is why I wish I could ask some elephants to introduce me. Unfortunately, I can’t adequately put into words all of what they express. For example, on one of my field trips a couple of years ago a young male African elephant stopped to dip his rounded head in the South African dust and then lifted it and shook it about, ears fanned. He was displaying how big he was and perhaps saying I needed to be shown my place. The older males who pointedly ignored me on the same day might have disagreed, ambling as they did past our vehicle in slow motion. To them, I was nothing more than background scenery. Failing elephant explanations, my human family would be the next best when it comes to providing an introduction. My parents would tell you that I was always an odd child. Big eyes, earnest, absorbent as a fancy cushioned loo-roll. I was at home in my head and stubbornly silent much of the time. Occasionally, I had a lot to say. They’d tell you about me asking my dad to film me on a bulky camcorder because I wanted to make a documentary. It was of me on the seashore giving a serious and detailed commentary on the real and imagined creatures I had found there. My parents would point to the flickering footage of that child prodding at the seaweed and they would say it was meant to be – I was always a field biologist.

I shy away from certainty, though. I don’t know if I was always meant to find elephants in order to find myself. I don’t know if I was meant to be a scientist, a professor, a teacher, a conduit through which a little bit of discovery and knowledge flows, an elephant person. But that is what happened. I think curiosity, luck and fearlessness (sometimes borne of naivety) brought me here. When I think of me, I see myself standing eye to eye with an elephant, then shaking my head, realising elephants aren’t great for eye contact and instead holding out my dirty laundry for them to sniff. And I mean my actual dirty laundry. It smells just like me (rather than what I want to smell like), and who better than an elephant, with its magnificent olfactory abilities, to distinguish every layer of the stench. If you are going to give yourself, your absolute on-the-nose flaws and ugliness and all, this is a comprehensive way to do it. And safe too. Elephants are keepers of secrets. A rather big secret being that if you can see past the grey skin and the bulk and the majesty and the fear of them, then sometimes, in some ways, they are just like you. So however I got here, to this place of fascination and science in a joyous positive feedback loop, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. And I’m going to keep on charging ahead.

Some elephant names have been changed in this text at the request of organisations involved in their care and/or conservation.