A man who has fought his whole life to save the elephants and the ivory trade has opened up about being the four legged giants biggest advocate – as well as why he thinks they are just like humans
He is the world’s real life Elephant Man who has spent the past 60 years battling to save the planet’s most delicate species of gentle giants from extinction.
During his long career, Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton has faced a range of mortal threats including full frontal assaults by the elephants themselves, being trampled by a rhinoceros, various plane crashes and even attacks from poachers’ bullets eager to cash in on the precious ivory trade.
But just two years ago, it was a much smaller creature than his beloved elephants which nearly cost him his life.
For the dedicated conservationist fought back from his own brink of extinction when he and his wife Oria were attacked by a swarm of African bees as they enjoyed an evening stroll around their farm on the shore of Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
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Douglas-Hamilton, now 82, tried in vain to protect his wife, who is 10 years his senior, but as he sought to shield her he was stung over and over and went into a life threatening anaphylactic shock.
The sudden attack left Douglas-Hamilton fighting for his life for three weeks in intensive care in a Nairobi hospital, where he slipped in and out of consciousness. Although he was finally discharged after six weeks in hospital, his heart had been seriously weakened.
Thankfully, today, he is back to his beloved Naivasha where he could enjoy the zebra, buffalo and giraffes roam.
But after six decades he’s now accepting his work with elephants is effectively over.
Instead, his daughters Dudu and Sabu are taking up the mantle – and they joke that their father’s dedication to the wild giants is a testament to his own tough outer skin.
Sabu says: “After the bee attack, he was fighting for his life. We very nearly lost him. But he’s a tough old Scot and my God he is hard to kill.
“Did he seek out danger in his life? I think dad has always been very adventurous, maybe occasionally reckless. I think he did what he felt had to be done to resolve what was a war against nature.”
Iain is to elephants what Jane Goodall is to chimps and Dian [CORR] Fossey is to gorillas. But while their legacies have long been celebrated, less is known about Scottish legend Iain – who founded Save The Elephants – and his desperate bid to conserve a dying breed of 415,000 African elephants.
Today [SAT] however everyone will finally learn about the Scot’s extraordinary career when his work is celebrated in a new hour-long feature film – A Life Among Elephants.
But if you think his life story is somewhat straight out of a children’s fairy-tale adventure, then think again.
Douglas-Hamilton’s story begins after being born in Wiltshire in 1942, grandson of the 13th Duke of Hamilton and the son of a celebrated Spitfire pilot who was killed during the Second World War, shortly before his second birthday.
His mother, a 1930s pin-up who pioneered women’s fitness programmes, subsequently married a South African surgeon – a decision that would change Iain’s life.
He loved the outdoor life in Cape Town – fishing, mountaineering, surfing. After boarding school at King Charles III’s alma mater Gordonstoun, in Scotland, he studied zoology at Oriel College, Oxford, primarily so he could return to Africa.
In 1966 he won a scholarship to study elephants in Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park, where the problem at that time was too many elephants, not too few.
The next four years were idyllic. He built himself a shelter near a waterfall in the bush, and pioneered the study of wild African elephants. He used the shape of their ears to tell them apart and tracked them over months to build up pictures of their personalities.he realised they all had unique personalities and adhered to complex social structures.
But when a devastating poaching crisis emerged in the 1970s, Douglas-Hamilton transformed from researcher to defender. He documented their decline – a fall of 50% between 1979 and 1989 – was instrumental in securing the 1989 global ivory trade ban.
Years later, when poaching resurged with an estimated 100,000 elephants killed between 2010 and 2012, he again led the charge, using scientific data to advocate for stronger protections, culminating in China’s 2018 ivory trade ban.
Today, Douglas-Hamilton, who founded Save the Elephants in 1993, still feels honoured to have lived side by side with the majestic animals.
He recalls: “For a while I gave them all numbers but then I found that names were much easier to remember. I think anyone who studies elephants, and certainly it happened to me, becomes intensely aware that you are dealing with a sentient species, that it’s a species where the individuals are thinking their own thoughts.”
Indeed, Douglas-Hamilton soon noticed the giant creatures started to respond to the names he called them and even called out to him in the wild. His new ‘friends’ included the memorable matriarch Boadicea and the gentle mother Virgo.
“There’s a mind there, behind that huge domed forehead. Getting to know them as individuals, I realised that their society was led by females, by matriarchs, and then the more I got into it, the more intricate I realised these relationships were,” he adds.
It soon became apparent they shared a lot of human traits. He says: “The thing about elephants is that they have a lot in common with human beings, they’ve got about the same lifespan, and they have a long childhood they learn from their elders.
“Their brain actually develops in that period of adolescence. So their social relations are very important. They get very upset when one of them is under stress. The reaction of elephants to the ailing or the dying or the dead is quite extraordinary.”
Wife Oria says she is staggered to be still here after witnessing her husband tackle the violent and gentle side of elephants during his life’s work.
She says: “Well you know Iain is an elephant, that is his legacy. And I married an elephant and the whole of our lives has been elephants.
“It has been interesting to see how Iain connects with elephants. He was not aggressive and didnt have a gun. The hunters have never connected with elephants as they just shot them. I have never understood that.
“I remember when we looked after the elephant Virgo in Manyara, she would come and take food out of his hand. We would call her and she would hear her name.
“That was the extraordinary thing. She wanted to make friends with Iain and eventually, they did. She got to know us so well.”
Despite witnessing the kind nature of elephants, Douglas-Hamilton’s family were forced to watch on in horror back in the 1970s when they saw an Africa – which they previously knew as a wildlife paradise – transformed by poaching cartels into a giant charnel house for elephants.
Douglas-Hamilton says he spent 20 years leading a lonely battle to save them from what he called an “elephant holocaust”.
He says: “Not in our wildest dreams did we ever imagine that armed men, sometimes in uniform, would come into the national parks, and start killing elephants, and yet it happened.
“The elephants began to be slaughtered. So I got swept up and changed from doing research as a scientist into trying to combat the illegal ivory trade. That took over my life and for almost the next 20 years I was looking at the survival of elephants right across Africa.”
Today, Douglas-Hamilton’s daughter Dudu says her father is as determined as ever to keep his fight against the ivory trade alive, despite being a little frail at the age of 82.
She says: “I am very sceptical these days when people tell me there is no elephant problem. I have a large part of me which tells me that it is too good to be true.”
While his daughters will be continuing his work, the new documentary – by award-winner Nigel Pope – follows Douglas-Hamilton on what his family believe will be his last trip to Kenya’s Samburu region – near his beloved Naivasha – where he could see some of its elephants once more.
“It was a big moment,” says daughter Dudu. “But but he will not visit again. Nor will he fly again.”
Saba is a wildlife filmmaker and runs a camp for elephant lovers. Dudu is the regional operations manager for African Parks in Ethiopia and South Sudan, and is working on one of Africa’s largest conservation projects, covering an area well over half the size of England.
Saba says: “He took us wherever his work went. It was a very interesting childhood, going to extraordinary places and meeting all these amazing conservationists, so it was deeply inspiring and absolutely fed into what we’re doing today.”
Whether he visits again or not, one thing’s for sure: It may have been a six decades-long sacrifice to save hundreds of thousands of elephants. But it’s a sacrifice the creatures will never forget.
A Life Among Elephants airs today(SAT) on Channel 4 at 4.25pm and on Channel 4 streaming services.
Visit www.savetheelephants.org or the Elephant Crisis Fund (www.elephantcrisisfund.org)