After a conversation with Parsons, our suspicions have been verified: There are many shades of gray in the situation; and Parsons is hardly the black-hearted, endangered-animal-killing nut that PETA and others have made him out to be.
"I’ve been going to Africa for six years," he told us, "and I progressively became aware of the elephant situation and what a problem it is for the locals."
The “elephant situation,” as it turns out, has been a complicated one for local governments and wildlife officials for years. As humans in Zimbabwe struggled to find room to live and farm, they have appropriated land previously inhabited only by wildlife. This has set up a natural struggle between human needs and animal habits, where subsistence farmers battle wildlife such as elephants to keep their crops from being destroyed.
The issue of human encroachment had driven several hundred of Zimbabwe’s 60,000 to 100,000 elephants out of the country by 2009, but Parsons says that in the country, elephants are still “very abundant” — at least according to the villagers whose livelihoods are threatened by elephant herds, which frequently come into a village and trample fields of corn and sorghum.
“In Zimbabwe, the people there are incredibly impoverished,” said Parsons. “They treasure an empty plastic water bottle. It’s heart-wrenching to watch … These people are all subsistence farmers, and if they don’t have a good harvest, they starve. That’s it — there’s no support, there’s no welfare, and if they starve, they will die.”
To keep elephants from trampling crops, villagers try building fi res, banging drums, cracking...
