A magnificent bull elephant with tusks so long he could rest them on the ground has been found dead in Kenya, his tusks hacked off and his face mutilated by poachers.
The Guardian and Outside Magazine called Satao the largest elephant in the world. He was one of just a handful of “tuskers” – elephants with giant tusks that each weigh more than a hundred pounds – left in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, a huge preserve in the southern part of the country.
The Tsavo Trust announced the death of the elephant on its Facebook page:
“Today it is with enormous regret that we confirm there is no doubt that Satao is dead, killed by an ivory poacher’s poisoned arrow to feed the seemingly insatiable demand for ivory in far off countries. A great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantelpiece. Rest in peace, old friend, you will be missed."
Mark Deeble, a British wildlife filmmaker, writes on his blog that he wanted very much to film a tusker but that he didn't want to risk searching for the animal and alerting poachers to its possible location. So instead, he set up a metal box at a watering hole and waited for the elephant to come to him. And it finally did.
He writes:
“I glimpsed something through the heat haze. Initially I thought the sun had reflected off the windscreen of a distant vehicle, but there were no tracks close by. Whatever it was disappeared, then glinted once more.
”Alert now, it was several minutes before I saw it again. I came to the slow realization that what I was looking at was sunlight reflecting off an elephant’s tusks. Gradually, like in the opening scene from ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, their owner materialized through the shimmering haze. A mirage from the Taru desert – a magnificent, dusty behemoth.”
Satao is thought to have been born in the 1960s, placing his age near 50 when the poachers took him. He was one of a dwindling group of elephants genetically disposed to grow enormous tusks.
Deeble believes that the old elephant knew his prodigious ivory could get him killed. The first time he saw Satao, he noticed that, en route to the watering hole, the elephant would move from bush to bush and hide his head, although the rest of his body was exposed.
“It dawned on me that he wasn’t trying to hide his body, he was hiding his tusks,” Deeble writes. “At once, I was incredibly impressed, and incredibly sad – impressed that he should have the understanding that his tusks could put him in danger, but so sad at what that meant.”
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