(Photo credit: Dreamstime)
Elephants are among the world’s most fascinating creatures. Regardless of where they are born, most children will recognize their pictures from toddlerhood on. As the largest of living land animals (5-7 tons in weight full-grown), they impress everyone by their immense size, strength, and power. They are also quite intelligent. Their memories are proverbial. They have a powerful sense of community among themselves and cooperate in family and clan groups lifelong.
Elephants mate for life and mourn their dead. They have poor eyesight, but, as their appendages suggest, they have an incredibly delicate sense of smell and acutely good hearing. Despite their great size, there are quite crafty and can move in almost complete silence, even becoming all but invisible to predators (humans mainly) in their chosen terrain. They have been known to become the hunters themselves rather than remain the hunted when sufficiently provoked.
As a child, one of the books which most impressed me was written by an English big-game hunter and guide whose name I cannot recall. The book described his adventures in Africa and India in pre-World-One days when such activities and subjects were not despised as they are now. One of the tales in that book concerned a large bull elephant which had gone rogue after his family and clan had been totally killed off by poachers and trophy-hunters. This male was reputedly legendary for his wiliness and hatred of hunters of every description. He had killed a number of them, rather than falling victim to them. He had become a menace to the local populace, wreaking havoc upon their villages.
The local governor asked for a professional big-game hunter to be sent to deal with the beast. Enter the renowned British hunter.
The beast had a limp which could be seen by a heavier print of its left front foot, and a broken left tusk. It bore the scars of many battles, with other elephants, big cats, and human predators. Following the distinctive track, the hunter and his gun-bearer had no difficulty seeing where it had gone into its forest lair on one of the well-used elephant trails.
Elephants can blend into forest almost seamlessly, camouflaged by their grey-brown colour and the propensity to mistake their legs for tree-trunks when glimpsed through the foliage. Suddenly, the rogue surged upon them bellowing and in full battle-array. The hunter fired both barrels of his .577 calibre gun. The elephant was still coming. Blinded by rage, it headed for his bearer. The hunter managed to scramble up a large tree, adrenalin carrying him quickly aloft among its huge limbs.
The unfortunate native was caught in the elephant’s line of sight. The elephant knocked him down, then picked up his limp form in its trunk and began slamming him against the nearest tree-trunk. It then slammed him to the ground and sat on the now dead man, grinding his body into the earth till there was little but bloody pulp left. The bull then found the hunter’s scent and came to the base of his tree of refuge. He began pushing on it with all his might. Fortunately for the hunter, the tree was of such size and solid roots that the massive beast’s best efforts were of no avail. The wounded elephant brooded at the base of the tree till the next morning, then made off. The hunter survived to tell the tale.
Only poachers now hunt elephants, unless a local cull is necessary. The great beasts are protected. African elephants are symbolic of so much that has changed and is threatened in the 21st Century. Like so many things, it is a question whether they can survive anywhere but in protected areas and zoological parks.
Let us apply the lesson to two of our society’s rogue “elephants”, both in and outside the room. Presently, it seems the rogue elephant everyone wants to slay is climate change. it is now “out” so no longer hidden in plain sight.
This is the beast the climate activist hunters have set most clearly in their sights. We are told and lectured and cajoled constantly of its ravages, past, present, and future. But almost all activists are still missing the more massive rogue elephant hiding in plain sight among the great trees of our global village’s habitat.
Elephants only charge when forced out into the open. It is hard to charge inside the forest. Out in the open is also when we see them most clearly, no longer so well camouflaged by their great ability to hide or blend into the gullies and wadis of the veldt. But the signs of this even more treacherous rogue are everywhere, in all nations, regardless of their technological prowess and economic sophistication.
Its huge trail markers can be found in mountainous landfills and enormous floating islands in the ocean. All creatures great and small, from bacteria to whales, ingest this dung, willy-nilly, invisibly, despite best efforts avoid it. There is very little indication that real efforts are being considered to hunt down this beast, despite all the fine rhetoric about protecting and preserving and reversing the destruction of Gaia’s environment.
One of the most insidious and silent footprints of the more deadly rogue is found, at this moment, among the wealthiest tribes on the planet. It is the rapidly growing infertility among the hunters, who have almost completely missed the track of the rogue. If the hunters cease to propagate, as the rapid decline of their birth-rates suggest they will, the first rogue will die a natural death – at least as far as its being driven mad by the human elements of its destructiveness – the notorious artificial human carbon footprint.
Perhaps the reader of my parable has now deduced that the Great Rogue is the universal sterilization of the human race (and many other species) by the (not-so) slow poison of plasticization. As the present major narrative puts low value on human reproduction, its seems more important to chase the decoy rogue of climate change, which no one is really sure we can slay no matter how big the weapon we fire at it.
“Climate-deniers” are much ridiculed and despised, but the truth is that greatest “climate truth-tellers”, cannot or will not see and confess that (1) climate change is a fact on earth regardless of the presence of humans, and all the geological and climatological evidence demonstrates this has been so for billions of years, (2) the worst offender nations and individuals on the human side are not interested or willing to do anything about it, (3) the agenda is as much about punishment and retribution upon the wealthy nations and their frivolous denizens who still have a conscience that can be manipulated, and (4) the anointed enlightened can continue to enjoy most of the perks of being on top of the heap while the rest bear the burden and the cost of doing the marginal best they can be made to do, while achieving little real result on climate change for all the enormous energy and cost expended. All the screaming, marching, ranting, and yelling will not change any of this.
Meanwhile, the Great Rogue continues to roam freely, barely irritated by the pop-guns aimed at it. Soon, geologically speaking, the hunters will extinguish themselves as they cease having little-uns anyway.
World.V.You 