Patrick Freeman
A New Voice for Elephants
The sky was a characteristic pink-blue, the sun hanging low, accelerating toward the horizon. It was the last day of my first field season in Namibia and all I wanted to do was muster some kind of astronomical control over the ebb and flow of time, pin the sun just there above the horizon so that I could enjoy this moment forever. Reclining carefully on a ladder in a partially subterranean cement bunker, I closed my eyes briefly and took a deep breath. I was in the company of giants. Eight bull elephants milled around the water hole, their breathing slow, punctuated by the water dripping from their mouths and trunks as they took drink after drink. The musky odor of mud and wildness hung around me accented by a chorus of leathery skin swishing. Their amber eyes, framed by long, delicate lashes appraised each other, appraised me. The sun continued to sink, throwing their long shadows across the sand, making them seem even larger. I was losing my mental battle with time. Greg, the largest bull, turned to the northwest, took one step, two, then produced a characteristic rumble to gather his troops for the trek back to the bush. “Let’s go.” The sound rushed toward me, crashed into my sternum, filled my ear canals, set my bones to vibrating. I smiled. He had, in that moment, made time stand still, and it was a moment that would be frozen into my mind forever.
I’ve loved elephants for as long as I can remember. Neither I, nor my parents, can really determine when exactly my obsession with Earth’s largest extant land mammal began, and thus I like to believe that they’ve been with me since the very beginning. I spent countless hours of my childhood watching elephant documentaries; my grandparents taking time to record them on tape for me when they could so I could re-watch them again and again, never tiring of the stories they told or the facts that I then subjected my family to at the dinner table. For my seventh birthday, I didn’t ask for a party, I asked for a chance to go to a sanctuary near my home that rescues maltreated elephants. Several years later, the sanctuary moved just over the hill from my high school and I proceeded to volunteer there for several months, cleaning cages and making buckets and buckets of elephant food and enjoying the fact that I was making the lives of elephants who had been through hell and back in circuses and zoos more comfortable.
“What is it about elephants, exactly, that makes you like them?” so many people ask me. I struggle with this question every time it’s asked. I’ve gone through so many iterations of explanations, trying to put into words what I actually feel. I’ve settled on the following cascade of reasons:
1. They’re immense. I have always had a fascinated with the “large” and think there is something profoundly refreshing about the fact that there exists an animal that so completely dwarfs humans.
2. Elephants are so incredibly like us in some ways, but so incredibly different in stature.
• They live on similar timescales as we do, requiring long periods of mental and social development.
• On top of being extremely intelligent (studies have demonstrated that they have several of the same brain structures as great apes, cetaceans, and even humans), they possess a complex social biology and a highly sophisticated system of communication.
• And perhaps most striking for me at least is their capacity for emotion ranging from anecdotal accounts of unrestrained joy to empathy to profound grief.
It is this combination of traits that draws me to them holistically. Genuine wonder and a desire to know more about them drives me to read anything I can about them, to continue to watch documentaries, and now, finally at this exciting time of my life, to be actively engaged in research projects about them. But perhaps what has made me most committed to them; to make them an integral part of my life’s passion, is the injustice that they suffer at the hands of humans. Elephants in Africa are now facing unprecedented threats to their existence as a result of poaching for their ivory tusks to fuel rising demand for ivory goods in East Asia and even parts of the United States. The recent drastic declines in wild elephant populations It was this desire to find a way to get other people to care about elephants and the challenges that they face that inspired me to enroll in The Senior Reflection.
When I came to Stanford, I was fairly worried that I wouldn’t be able to work my love of animals, and specifically elephants, into my course of study. Considerably overwhelmed my freshman year by much of the introductory coursework for an Earth Systems degree, I desperately needed something to give me direction and fuel to get through much of the legwork required. Amidst feelings of self-doubt and worry that I wasn’t made of the right stuff to make it at Stanford, I began scrounging for opportunities to sink my teeth into. I knew I wanted to do something in the biological sciences but was dissatisfied with the options provided by Stanford’s biology department. Things on the micro scale never got me as jazzed as I wanted them to, and although I enjoyed ecology as a concept, community ecology projects didn’t light me up either. Perusing a copy of Stanford Magazine one day out of boredom, I scanned the table of contents to see if anything piqued my interest. About half-way down the page my eyes locked onto a byline: “What makes elephants tick?” I’d found my in.
Nearly ripping the pages of the magazine trying to flip to the page with the article, I quickly devoured the text feeling my heartbeat quicken. The article turned out to be about Stanford researcher, Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell and her work on elephant communication and behavior in Namibia. I had to pinch myself. There was someone at Stanford doing research, at a species level, focusing on behavior, on elephants, in Africa. Could this be any more perfect?! I immediately set to work finding out how to contact Caitlin using the all-powerful tool that is Stanford Who. Email in hand, I carefully drafted a message simultaneously trying to find out how to convey my earnest desire to work with her on her projects without sounding like too much of a naive undergrad. I sent off the email and hoped that I might be able to make doing elephant research a reality. About a week later, Caitlin replied and I set down my path that I’m still walking on today.
My elephant research started small: measuring hundreds of aerial photographs of elephant herds with a pair of digital calipers for demographic analyses. While a job essentially defined by tedium, I still found myself excited to be doing it as I was using to get me one step closer to Africa. Caitlin had suggested that I start working on these data entry jobs before considering going to the field with her just so I could get acquainted with what all this business was about. In retrospect, these highly repetitive but very detail-oriented projects actually equipped me with a large appreciation for precision required to make accurate behavioral observations in the field.
After continuing to foster my elephant skill set by working on an introductory behavior project on the captive population of elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, Caitlin offered me the chance to accompany her during her summer field season to Namibia. I don’t think I’d ever been more excited about something. My boyhood dreams of being a field biologist research elephants in the African bush were actually coming true! During the first field season, I had some of the most incredible elephant experiences. From my first time watching a herd thunder into the clearing for an evening drink to the beautiful capstone moment at the end of the season when Greg’s rumble shook my bones, it was obvious to me that this was what my life should include. I managed to return to Namibia for a second season the following summer and couldn’t be happier that I did. While both seasons were full of challenges, both personal and research-related, throughout the entire endeavor, the elephants that I came to know made all worth it. I threw every ounce of passion I had into learning how to tell individual elephant apart, tracking their relationships with others, and monitoring their health. This opportunity to completely immerse myself in the lives of elephants has rewarded me with so much. While I’ve learned an immense amount about elephant biology and I’m excited to continue to expand my knowledge of them in my academic career, I still feel like I learned more about how to live life from them than anything else. Being reminded of things as simple as living life to the fullest to appreciating the support of a close-knit family further reinforced my perception that elephants have so much left to teach us.
When discussing potential projects with Sue at the beginning of fall quarter, I found myself a bit lost as to what direction I wanted to funnel my energy down. I considered playing it safe and relying on my photography. Finally gaining some traction in that world of skill, I did sincerely want to use my photographs somehow in this creative adventure, seeing it as one of the most rudimentary ways that I could expose other people to some of the incredibly cool ways that I got to observe elephant behavior in the field. However, how did those images alone really convey the pressures that elephants suffered from, namely the astronomical poaching rates gripping populations throughout much of East and Central Africa? Sue pushed back. There were thousands of pictures of elephants out there, and while they were often powerful, they were somehow...silent. It was obvious that I had a lot of pent-up passion about protecting them, often to the point of tears. Two summer seasons of living surrounded by elephants had only made the feelings of loss more profound with each article that I read about another killing. Why was there nothing being done? Sue just let me talk all of this out, letting the stream of consciousness wind itself out into space. As I sat drawing circles with my finger on the metal table letting memories of elephant rumbles fill my head, the complicated lexicon of often subtle body language cues that I now found commonplace, the beautiful sunsets. Had I ever thought about pursuing something akin to spoken word, Sue suggested.
I had to sit and ponder that thought for a little bit. I’d written some poetry in the past, but had never been super comfortable with performing it in front of other people. But as I let my thoughts wrap around this medium, the more and more connections I started to draw between it and the elephant behavioral science that I’d steeped myself in for two summers. In spoken word performance I saw parallels with much of the elephant behavior that I have observed in the field. The emphasis on tact and controlled aggression coupled with body language cues that convey very specific messages between bull elephants very much mirror those that are present in powerful spoken word performances. However, as I also witnessed in the field, when social cues are not heeded and individual boundaries are crossed, outright aggression can ensue: a raw explosion of power as these massive animals come to blows. This kind of expression at the crescendo of many performances in which raw emotions are exposed and conveyed to audience members in hopes of soliciting emotive responses from them as well.
This year was incredibly stressful for me. I’d characteristically taken on far too much and at first, had a hard time carving out space to work on my project. Writing poetry takes time and a clear, creative mind. Although I’d engaged with our textbook on integrating creativity into my everyday life, thinking the ideas were good, I was simply too busy to add one more thing to my seemingly endless lists of things to do. My mind was busy constantly, my creative thoughts dammed up behind walls of stress. Attempts at jump-starting my internal poetry engine continued to falter. Thus, starting this whole process of writing a poem about something I cared deeply about and wanted to sound right was admittedly rough.
Laboring over strings of words, unhappy with most of them, I was nervous running up to my first workshop period. For all of my carefully cultivated confidence, I was actually very insecure about exposing this part of myself. I have no problem talking in front of a group of people, but performing my own poetry? That was a totally different ballgame. Staying up obnoxiously late the night before my first shot at workshop trying to wring words out of my brain, I was severely disappointed in my ability to perform on command. I resorted to watching YouTube videos of spoken word performances that I found particularly powerful and kept gravitating back to those by Sarah Kay. Her mastery of language and her ability to weave it together to make interesting, moving connections made me at once inspired and frustrated. I couldn’t make the words dance like that. My lines sounded clunky and forced. There is nothing worse than forced poetry. I needed something to unlock those capacities.
I had been holding onto a recent documentary on the poaching crisis and illegal ivory trade for the time to watch and thought that it might provide the impetus I needed to get emotional enough to write what I was actually feeling. Sitting through the entire thing, I found myself absolutely furious at the end. Furious enough to start writing.
I managed to put enough together to feel comfortable with my progress for workshop the next day, and still drawing on some of my own fury motivated by the documentary, did my first reading. While my voice was a bit shaky given my nerves about exposing this highly personal side of myself to people I knew fairly superficially, I was stunned that I actually had brought several people in the class to tears. Apparently I’d done something right.
Although I was a little taken aback at this first reaction, I was encouraged by the feedback that I received from my workshop group to continue down the path I was on. In the months running up to our exhibition I continued to massage my writing with the help of numerous rounds of workshop. In thinking about this process, I have to admit that it was definitely good for me. Going into this project, one of the biggest things I was nervous about was having my writing critiqued by other people, especially writing written for a performative piece. I had been in a few workshop-type courses previous to TSR, two of them creative writing courses, but I still was well-aware of my own ability to get defensive quickly when it came to my writing. Although I sometimes pushed back against some comments and feelings regarding that part of my project, I really do feel like the workshop process made my end-product much, much stronger given its purpose of getting other people to care about elephants. Making yourself vulnerable when it comes to art is perhaps one of the most difficult things to do, but it can also be that much more rewarding. By the end of the two quarters of workshopping, I started to feel like everyone else in my sections were just as committed to making this performance powerful as I was. By opening up to people and showing them what I was struggling with, what I thought was particularly special to me, and most importantly why elephants and their protection was so ingrained in my being, I feel that I was able to grow in my own mastery of both my knowledge of the topic I was exploring as well as the medium through which I was trying to convey it. Thinking back on the process, I’ve concluded that the only reason I could wrangle the moving parts of this very emotion-ridden, highly personal topic was through the workshop process and I look forward to continuing to pursue workshop opportunities for a variety of my academic and artistic endeavors in the future.
As my performance developed over the course of the year, Andrew and Sue consistently suggested that this might be something that went viral; something that could definitely get out into the elephant conservation community. They subtly suggested that I seriously think about trying to perform it at something like the Wildlife Conservation Network’s convention. I would usually reply with a smirk and a shake of the head. That was something out of my comfort zone. A nice thought, perhaps, but beyond my own ability. I wasn’t made of the right stuff.
On the day of the exhibition I applauded myself for maintaining my relative lack of nerves. My good friend, who happens to be the the director of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, had given me memorization and performance tips that I was running through in my head. Reciting my poem animatedly as I biked through campus got me several stares along the way. But I was excited. Four and a half months of work meant that I would finally be delivering my elephant crusader message to people outside of my sections. A recent poaching incident in a very special elephant haven in Central Africa and numerous reports of daily losses in East Africa continued to stoke my fires. The injustice of these murders was almost more than I could handle. There was a reason I was doing this. The elephants needed me.
I had made a relatively last-minute decision to incorporate some audio into my performance and had settled on a goosebump-inducing elephant rumble that took me back to my days at Mushara and to the elephants that I’d fallen in love with. Pulling off a surprisingly eloquent introductory speech on the spot, I played the rumble and found myself envisioning the evening when Greg had made time stand still. It was for moments like those that I was performing. Here we go.
from the audience indicated to me that I might have done something right again. After the exhibition was over, having several people come up to express their appreciation for my piece was an amazing feeling. However, what was the most inspiring was the number of people who were immediately concerned the well-being of elephants. I fielded questions on everything from research to how people could help. Goal: achieved.
I feel like tackling my fear of being vulnerable in front of a large group also helped me grow a lot in a very short amount of time. I pride myself on my ability to talk in front of people to begin with. I don’t mind speaking to large groups, and it was only the performance end of things that had rattled me to begin with. However, after completing this performance, I have a newfound sense of confidence in myself and my ability to take my voice for elephants and continue to trumpet it as loud as I can.
A recent opportunity to join Andrew at a TEDx conference in Livermore has me equally excited. Immediately scaling up my audience comfort level beyond the comparatively small TSR exhibition means that there will be that many more people aware of the pressures on elephants and hopefully that many more hearts engaged in this battle to save the giants I love. Sue’s Vimeo video of my performance has over 100 views already and I hope that more people will continue to watch it and be inspired to take action to end the exploitation of elephants. This newfound support for my work and the responses that I’ve been getting are now making my interest in taking this performance to the WCN’s conference, and opportunities like it, start to flare a bit. If continuing to lend my voice to elephants means that more of them might be able to live and grow up in peace, and more people can learn all the things they have left to tell us, then by all means, let’s go!