There are few men more knowledgeable about elephants and ivory than Ian Parker. Born in 1936, his 25 years in Kenya as hunter, game warden and wildlife management adviser have made him a legend.
In wildlife circles he is regarded as something of a maverick; a controversial figure whose name has become inextricably linked with the highly emotive business of game "cropping" - a practice which he soundly defends. He is also scathing in his attitude towards most conservationist, from the World Wildlife Fund downwards. Yet his views command immense respect, even among his fiercest critics.
Parker's book "Ivory Crisis" is bound to cause dismay in conservation circles, re-igniting the long-smouldering row over the ethics of elephant culling in national parks. But the most gripping chapters are those which describe one of the greatest tragedies in modern conservation, an episode with which Parker himself was closely involved - the Tsavo Problem.
Tsavo is Kenya's biggest national park, an arid wilderness the size of Wales. In the 1950s it was one of the three most important parks for elephant and black rhino in the whole of Africa. A land of immense horizons, red dusty plains, barren lava flows, anthills, grotesque baobab trees and thornbush, it is classic elephant country. Elephants had been a prime reason for its designation as a national park in 1948. But who could have then foreseen that this magnificent sanctuary was destined to become a killing ground for the irreconcilable hopes and dreams of hunters, ivory poachers, politicians and conservationists - and for the elephants themselves?
When the park was first set up, hunting was a way of life for the local tribesmen. Their impact on Tsavo's huge elephant population was minimal. At a stroke in 1948 their hunting was redefined as poaching, a serious crime, and vigorous efforts were made to stamp it out. The penalties were tough: one man was jailed for eight years for killing four elephants.
At that time the Tsavo poachers belonged almost exclusively to two tribes, the Kamba and Waliangulu or Wata. Elephant, black rhino and leopard were their main targets.
Unlike the Kamba, who were also cultivators and pastoralists, the Wata lived entirely by hunting. The land in which they lived was so dry that even if they turned to cultivation they could only expect a worthwhile harvest once every five years.
By the time Ian Parker first became involved with them in 1957, when he was appointed Game Ranger of Kilifi Range, he was already hooked on the mythology of ivory, and soon learned to respect the skills of his new adversaries in the bush.
Parker was sympathetic to their plight. If they could not hunt, they could not survive. But what could be done? Some could be employed as trackers and skinners. However, it was clear that something far more ambitious was necessary to tackle the problem. Parker was asked to investigate, and recommended that some 3,000 square miles along the Galana River should become a game management area in which the main form of land use would be hunting by the Wata. The plan was adopted.
With hindsight, it had serious flaws. Nevertheless, it was a courageous attempt to integrate a hunting people's interests with modern conservation.
The Wata were the bowmen of Kenya. Their longbows were among the most powerful known, with draw weights of anything up to 170lb. But even to such weapons only the soft parts of an elephant were vulnerable. They relied, therefore, on poison to kill quickly. This was derived most commonly from trees and shrubs called Acokanthera, which contain a range of toxins closely related to the heart stimulant, digitalis. The poison causes death through heart failure. A lethal dose for a man would be no more than 0.002 of a gramme, and there is no antidote.
The Wata arrow was a highly specialised weapon made in three sections. First, the broad, sharp arrowhead. Then the fore or poison shaft, made of hardwood, about half an inch in diameter, carved to produce a rough surface to which the poison would adhere - generally eight to 15gm, 70 times the lethal dose for a six-ton elephant. And finally there was the thicker main shaft, as long as the bowman's arm and fletched with the primary feathers of vultures or marabou storks.
In the hands of a skilled hunter, these were far from primitive weapons. Once the target was within range - ideally no more than 20 paces - the great bow would be drawn and the arrow loosed at the elephant's belly where, if it struck home, it worked like a lethal injection, bringing death within minutes.
The Wata wanted elephants for meat but also for ivory, which they assiduously collected and traded. Not all Wata ivory came from slain elephants. They were experts at finding animals which had died from natural causes and were actually able to recover more "collected" ivory than they did from their own kills.
When the anti-poaching programme started in the 1950s, there were perhaps ten Wata hunters whose names were legends from the Tana River to the Tanganyika border. Not many of them remain alive today. One of them is Boru Magonzi, who drew the heaviest bow known to the Wata of modern times. During his career, Boru killed 12 "ushos" - elephants with tusks weighing more than 100lb apiece.
Another well known Wata "ace" is Abakuna Gumundi. His most renowned feat was killing three "ushos" in one morning with three arrows. Among them was one of the biggest tuskers killed in living memory; each tusk weighed perhaps 180lb.
But the most famous Wata poacher is a reserved, shy man called Galogalo Kafonde. He was born around 1920, and from the outset gained a reputation as a loner and a natural hunter. He was the cat who walked by himself. His first three formal arrows made him famous - killing a kudu antelope, a giraffe and a male elephant with tusks weighing about 35lb apiece. It is a formidable feat of cunning and bushcraft to get close enough to these animals to kill - and a matter of good luck, too: three times in his career, Galogalo was charged by enraged cow elephants, and each time he was caught between the great stamping legs to be violently buffeted, escaping the crushing feet.
Over a quarter-century these three Wata "aces" probably killed 1,000 to 1,200 elephants apiece. Compared to the Somali poachers who were to usurp their hunting grounds, their effect on Tsavo's huge elephant population was almost negligible. But even the Somalis could not do as much damage as the elephants themselves.
In 1960, Ian Parker was posted to Galana to start the Game Management Scheme and from the outset noticed that the large numbers of elephants were rapidly thinning the woodlands; but this was nothing to what was happening in Tsavo itself. There, vast areas once covered with dense trees and thornbush were being stripped to bare earth.
Things began to go badly wrong for Tsavo. In 1960 and 1961 a severe drought gripped the region, bringing death by starvation to hundreds of rhinos. The elephants had destroyed so much vegetation that there was simply not enough browse for the rhinos to eat. At that time the whole region probably held more than 40,000 elephants. (Parker finds this ironic; only seven years earlier the anti-poaching campaign had been launched in the belief that Tsavo's elephant's were on the verge of extinction.)
What was happening to Tsavo was inevitable from the moment it had been declared a national park. The elephants, trapped within its boundaries by encroaching civilisation, multiplied within their sanctuary until it could no longer sustain them all. And in doing so, they presented the conservation movement with one of its most agonising dilemmas: to cull or not to cull.
There were two schools of thought. The first believed that since man had already interfered in the natural process by confining elephants within artificial boundaries, it was only right that their numbers should be controlled if they threatened to destroy the park.
The other view was that whenever man intervenes he upsets the balance of nature, that culling is abhorrent in a national park, and that if the animals were left alone, nature would eventually achieve the solution.
In 1964, Parker left the Game Department and set up his own company, Wildlife Service. More than anything else, this name has become associated with game cropping - and through this, with the growing row over elephant culling.
Parker strongly defends his views: "There is an ill-defined but widespread sentiment that to kill cannot be to conserve. In particular there is a horror of killing anything in a national park - the ultimate sanctuary. Closely allied to this is a strong public feeling that it is immoral to kill wild animals and make money from the act. In Wildlife Services we did not share these views."
In impoverished Africa the watchword was that the game would have to pay its way if it was to survive. Tourism was one way; but Parker argues that a far more general use for wildlife would be as a source of meat: "Thus, if a national park wished to reduce one species to favour others, this was quite acceptable, and we saw no reason why the animals killed should not be utilised to gain the greatest profits possible."
Meanwhile, Tsavo's elephants continued to multiply, and the destruction of the woodlands went on. Yet for all the obviousness of what was happening, the authorities in Kenya seemed unable to act. Eventually they asked a British scientist, Dr Richard Laws, to become the Director of a Tsavo Research Unit. At the same time, Wildlife Services was asked to take a sample cull of elephants in Tsavo East. Both requests were met.
Dr Laws and David Sheldrick, Warden of Tsavo, were both close friends of Parker's. At first there was abundant goodwill and mutual respect. It did not last. They clashed on a number of issues, but the main stumbling block was the question of whether to crop Tsavo's elephants or to leave things be. Laws advocated a cull of 2,400 elephants for scientific research as the basis for long-term management plans for the Tsavo parks. Sheldrick opposed it, believing that Kenya, with its poverty and corruption, was not a place in which cropping could be safely undertaken. He believed (correctly as it later transpired) that the value of ivory would lead to abuse.
Eventually the affair ended in acrimony. Laws resigned; the policy of laissez-faire remained, and the elephants continued to destroy the woodlands. Visitors to the parks were appalled. The acres of dead and battered treescapes were likened repeatedly to the Somme battlefields of the First World War. Cover and browse for all kinds of game from rhino to antelope disappeared; and so did the animals themselves.
In 1976 drought returned to eastern Kenya. Elephants died in their thousands. David Sheldrick put the toll at 9,000. Parker himself believes the figure was more like 15,000. For several years afterwards, much of Tsavo was a desert. Since then there have been better years and grass cover has increased. But Tsavo remains a barren landscape compared to what it once was.
Local tribes, desperate after crop failures and stock losses, sought sustenance from the bush. Word had spread of the massive die-off of elephants in Tsavo. The park had become an ivory Eldorado, with tusks galore to be picked up by the first who found them.
But as the supply of ivory from the die-off dwindled, the ivory searchers took to hunting. This rapidly developed into a mad free-for-all. The word spread beyond Kenya's remote northern border to Somalia, where the drought had devastated the arid lands and herds of the pastoral nomadic Somalis and left 250,000 destitute.
Many of them fled the stricken Horn of Africa and came south, lured by the prospect of easy ivory. These were the notorious "shifta": gangs of tough, skilled and heavily-armed bandits.
According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, it was an unprecedented leap in the price of ivory in the early 1970s that triggered the biggest wave of elephant killings the world has ever known. One reason was that many dealers had begun to salt away prime tusks as a gold substitute, a hedge against inflation. (Parker has seen a single trader's store rooms lined with tusks worth well over a million dollars.)
Not long before, it had been considered good fortune to clear ú120 from an elephant hunt. Suddenly, with a pair of 75lb tusks it was possible to profit by ú1,000. The ivory rush was on. The Tsavo story moved into its final tragic stages.
Carrying all kinds of weapons from old Lee-Enfield .303s to modern AK47s from the Ogaden war, the Somalis fell upon Tsavo in their hundreds, shooting not only every elephant and rhino they could find, but also the local Kamba poachers. By the end of 1978 there was so little game left in Tsavo that, for many of the poachers, it was no longer worth hunting, and they departed.
The disappearance of dense cover was disastrous for the elephants. A man unimpeded by bushes can run as fast as an elephant. The Somali poachers simply ran their victims down and gunned them down, whole herds at a time. In the circumstances, argues Parker, it might have been kinder to have killed some, preserving the trees and thereby saving many more of the elephants.
The agony of Tsavo was complete. The park's elephants, once more than 40,000 strong, now number fewer than 11,000. The park, created with such bright idealism less than four decades ago, has become a dustbowl, a graveyard not only for elephants but also for the Wata. The last of the legendary bowmen are old. Like the vanishing rhino (which suffered even more than the elephants at the hands of the poachers), they will soon be gone - although Galogalo Kafonde is still living in quiet retirement on the Sabaki River.
Given adequate protection the elephant population could breed back fairly rapidly, but the black rhino and the way of life of the Wata are doomed. The landscape of Tsavo is also probably irreversibly changed and it can no longer be considered an elephant sanctuary.
As for Parker himself, he has fond memories of his time in Tsavo's wild thornscapes. "For all its great flatness and aridity it is a magic land," he writes in "Ivory Crisis". "Yet whenever I look back I cannot but wonder about the Wata. What happened to the great programme that was to be their salvation?"
