Elephants, Ivory, Africa and China #2

This posting may have better news on the ivory crisis. Hope so.

Let’s start with this from the online group One Green Planet. It opens with

Many never thought they’d see the day come, but it finally has – China, one of the world’s largest importers of ivory, has announced, that it, along with 29 other nations, will help protect the world’s elephants by criminalizing poaching.

Now, that’s something to celebrate.

A Space For Giants newsletter of December rejoices in the growing tide of goodwill and scale of responses to the elephant/ivory story.

Three days ago I posted on a small part of the ugly mess of the current ivory crisis (not the first) as this 1983 book title indicates. 

For good reviews of this very long-standing issue get hold of either this book by Ian Parker and the late Mohamend Amin  or Ian Parker’s more recent What I Tell You Three Times is True. The latter is a really in-depth examination of the subject.

There has been a considerable amount of social media traffic on many aspects of it. I have picked up some thirty postings in the last month alone. Like the two I opened with about half of them take a slightly different and hopefully more optimistic view of the situation, many of them reporting seizures of ivory, either as raw tusks or worked items. Others deal with criminal trials.

In South Africa, where rhino poaching is a major concern, they are preparing for the elephant war with publicity. This video is well worth the watching. Indeed if you have time for nothing else do spend the ten minutes with it.

Namibia is also being pro-active and investing in technology 

that includes drones, infra-red cameras, tagging with GPS, and the latest software.

There have been recent reports from other African countries such as Gabon, Kenya, Republic of Congo (2 reports) and Mozambique. 

Tanzania has a real battle on its hands, as indicated by the actions that have recently been taken. They include ivory seizures in Zanzibar and Dar esSalaam The dismissal of many allegedly corrupt wildlife department staff  and several other columns in the on-line allAfrica news that include a call to deal with the  so-called Poaching Barons as well as a call for tougher poaching laws.

Kenya also seems to be taking things more seriously, not only with the new laws I mentioned in the blog of Jan 7 but in catching offenders (again two reports.)

In that Jan 7 post I mentioned that a new law, if signed by President Uhuru Kenyatta, will make it possible to punish poachers with life sentences. A remarkable public admission was made on Jan 3 by a former employee of the Lewa Conservancy. Keleshi Parkusaa, 39, said he has been a poacher even when he was employed there for three years. He obviously admitted his crimes before the law comes into effect in order to avoid that sentence.

Other countries that have taken action are France where 3 tonnes of ivory are to be burned. This picture by Reuters/Keith Bedford shows some of the items. Also Vietnam, where a court has sentenced a company director and his deputy to 3 years in jail each for smuggling 158 pieces of ivory tusks weighing more than 2.4 tons.

And the USA where a  New York City antiques dealer who pleaded guilty to conspiracy for smuggling artifacts made from rhinoceros horns from the U.S. to China and Hong Kong has been sentenced to three years in prison, plus three years’ supervised release.

The key, as everyone realizes, is China.

Basket ball star Yao Ming has been actively campaigning about conservation issues for quite some time and his efforts to publicize the shark’s fin soup issue has yielded encouraging results. He has been similarly active on the ivory front and his and other peoples efforts may be changing the way that folks in China think about these issues.

This anti-elephant poaching story filed from Kenya and Mozambique by Yuan Duanduan titled The Blood Ivory: Behind the Largest Ivory Smuggling Cases in China has gone viral.

In it he wrote

China has become the largest illegal ivory consumer market in the world, but 2 /3 of the Chinese people do not know ivory is obtained through killing the elephant.
The ivory trade has become a source of capital for African terrorist groups, forming a tight secretive network of poachers, small and big middlemen.
In recent news on November 5, 2013, Xiamen Customs announced the largest ivory smuggling cases uncovered in recent years, two cases of which ivory added up to 11.88 tons, worth 603 million yuan. If it hadn’t been seized, the ivory from Africa would have infiltrated China ‘s secretive “black market”, to be eventually sold into private collections.

As of Dec 20 the story had over 10 million Tweets and Retweets on Weibo (China’s Twitter/Facebook hybrid) 

"The article was reposted on 24 online discussion forums or Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) including Mop and Tianya, two of the most popular in China. Thousands of comments were generated on the Tianya BBS forum alone. Overall over 5,000 comments on the article were posted on Weibo, BBS fora, and other websites."

A very clever ploy was to merge the image of China’s iconic panda with the shape of an elephant.  This poster, courtesy of WildAid reads: Protect the pandas of Africa - elephants. When the buying stops the killing can too.

Then came the Jan 6 report of the crushing of 6 tonnes of ivory in Guangzhou and on the same day a senior government administrator's answers to questions from reporters Liu Yang Yang, Wang Xi, Han Qiao about that destruction 

I fear that only very cautious optimism should be felt. One of the several concerned groups Elephant Advocacy had these thoughts about the ivory crush.

  

While it's encouraging to see China, the world's key consumer of ivory, taking such a step, there would be even more grounds for celebration if it didn't attempt to isolate 'illegal' ivory as the problem while actively promoting a deeply flawed parallel trade in 'legal' ivory which serves to confuse consumers, boost demand and provide a laundering mechanism for illegal ivory. It's difficult, too, to see beyond today's event as a PR exercise when considering that the 6.2 tonnes of ivory crushed represents a small fraction of what we know has been seized in China.

The future?

One of the problems is that nobody really knows the real number s of elephants in Africa. CITES reports probably give the most reliable figures, but even they are inevitably fraught with estimates and inaccuracies. The news that Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire has announced that he will fund a pan-African survey is a huge step in the right direction. The will aim to calculate how many actually remain, where they are found, what threats they face and whether their total population numbers are in fact increasing or decreasing.

Elephants, Ivory, Africa and China #1

Warning! This is not a good news posting.

Anyone who follows Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter links that cover wildlife issues cannot fail to have seen the remarkable number of posts since December 1^st about the utter disaster that is going on across all African states where elephants are found. Indeed, in some cases one can probably write where elephants used to roam. What a mess! 

The news has gone well beyond the social media scene and this scanned-in report in the Guardian, that I picked up in UK last week,  may have brought it to the attention of many others.  Sadly that is very unlikely to make a jot of difference to those who are engaged in the slaughter elephants and the use of their teeth for human pleasure.

A really authoritative 19-page report by a team from three main conservation groups (CITES Secretariat, IUCN / SSC African Elephant Specialist Group and TRAFFIC International sums it up nicely.

It is titled: Status of African elephant populations and levels of illegal killing and the illegal trade in ivory. 

The report deals with the 2012 situation and a few years prior.  A key sentence in the executive summary tells the sorry tale of the why?  

"Poverty and weak governance in elephant range States, together with demand for illegal ivory in consuming nations, are the three key factors identified by repeated MIKE analyses, including this one, as being most strongly associated with observed poaching trends."

Of the many reports in December 2013 that fit this picture I suppose the ones out of Tanzania are as good an example as any. The Prime Minister Jakaya Kikwete sacked four of his cabinet for what was reported as overzealous use of control measures in the so-called Operation Tokomeza.

Within two days the operation was restarted after a container load of ivory reputedly destined for China was seized at the Dar es Salaam port.

It may be that the situation in Tanzania is the worst in Africa. A posting by Richard Conniff of Dec 18 is titled Elephant Poaching: The Disaster in Tanzania says a lot.

Conniff’s post is either terrifying or beggars belief. He states that “Apparently, managing the media means keeping these results as quiet as possible.” So he quotes from none other than the National Geographic about the number of elephants in the Selous Game reserve alone. The latest, recently announced population estimate is 13,084. This indicates an unprecedented decline of nearly 80 percent over the last six years. For the mathematically disinclined that is a drop from 55,000 since 2007.

The numbers of elephants poached throughout Africa in 2012 are telling enough. The report, which is based on sound studies, gives an estimate of some 15,000 animals but acknowledges that:

Monitoring of elephant populations, apart from at a few well-monitored sites, is sporadic and inconsistent. The low precision of most estimates makes it difficult to detect any immediate repercussion on elephant numbers in the short-term but this does not mean there are no changes.

That is just 2012. There are no properly monitored figures for 2013, but none of the many claims gives a figure lower than 25K. The most dire claim comes from the International Fund for Animals Welfare who suggest that up to “50,000 elephants a year are now being slaughtered.”  In this post on Dec 20  they stated that more than 41 tonnes of elephant ivory have been seized in 2013, the largest quantity in 25 years.

Whether the situation has really “shocked world leaders out of their ennui and into action to halt poaching and ivory trafficking” is real or hoped for is more questionable.

Other postings mention numbers like 25 or 30,000 but all these numbers exceed any possible replacement numbers and all are horrific. Of course the use of cyanide at salt licks is nasty, but the wholesale mowing down of the sentient, intelligent creatures with automatic weapons is probably nastier. In the cyanide case, the affected animals will have died quickly and probably known little of what was happening to their herd mates. With a hail of bullets smashing into bone, lungs, hearts and brains many of the elephants will have been very well aware of what was happening.

Having written this last paragraph from the heart I am horrified to think that I could opine that cyanide was a better way to die than by gunfire. 

The Kenya government seems to have lifted themselves off their collective backsides and taken action. If the new Wildlife Conservation and Management Bill 2013 is signed into law by the president a life sentenced may be handed down for anyone convicted of rhino or elephant poaching.

 

At the other end of the trade chain a Dec 22 post from the South China Morning Post makes it clear that the Chinese do not seem to share the opinion of the Kenyans. 

Wildlife conservationists slammed a four-month jail term and fines of up to HK$80,000 for five ivory smugglers from the mainland as “too lenient”, saying it will do little to stop the illicit trade. (HK $  = 0.13 US$).

“It is way too lenient because Chinese people buying illicit ivory in Africa know that if they are caught, at most they will just lose the ivory and get a puny fine,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
“Tom Milliken, of the wildlife group TRAFFIC, said while he welcomed the jail term as a deterrent, fines could be written off as “the price of doing business”.”

He is probably right. Another post of Dec 22, this one by Simon Parry tells us that the price of ivory in Hong Kong has risen 50-fold in the last 10 years. Not surprisingly big tusks sell at a premium. Parry gives an example of a 65kg pair of mounted tusks is on sale for HK$15 million [almost US $ 2 million] at Chinese Arts and Crafts in Wan Chai.

As described in this post of Dec 13 by Emily Matchar what the rest of the world knows as illegal ivory is called white gold in Hong Kong. With an increasingly wealthy Chinese middle class seeking status symbols does the elephant have a chance? Then of course there are the 270 odd Chinese billionaires (that is not a typo; It is B, not M).

I could go on, as I have only mentioned a small proportion of the December posts, but this one should give some flavour to those who have not been following the situation closely. Anyway, I have just gone over my one thousand word limit.

New efforts to curb elephant poaching - before it is too late

There is a growing move to try and stop the shattering effect of massive elephant poaching to fuel the ivory carving industry (yes, industry) in China. At least 25,000 elephants were slaughtered last year and the rate has not diminished.

Many of the animals were very young. Some carried almost no visible ivory, but the price of the stuff is so high than even pieces a few centimetres long, and still invisible inside the mouths of the calves, are taken.  The western efforts may not have much effect on the government of a notoriously insular nation and their newish generation of ultra-wealthy businessmen.

After all, as I have reported before after following Bryan Christy’s tweets and FB reports about his work for National Geographic, the Chinese have built a large factory dedicated to this ancient art and there are at least a dozen master carvers at work creating stunningly beautiful works. In one of Christy’s most recent reports, the first installment of what promises to be a landmark story, he shows a set of empty benches in the factory that are waiting to be occupied by apprentices. Here is the trailer. The entire film, titled Battlefor the Elephants is due to be premiered on Feb 27 on PBS.

I have half a dozen blog posts over the last couple of years about this issue, and you can find them under the keyword ivory on this site. I doubt anyone in China either knows about them, or if they do, gives a tinker’s damn. 

One greatly respected man, Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, has visited Africa and made a real effort to curb the violence being perpetrated in the name of human greed. He opens with these words:

“After witnessing how illegal ivory was obtained, I really was speechless. After seeing these animals up close and watching them interact in loving and protective family groups, it was heart wrenching and deeply depressing to see them cruelly taken before their time.”

You can read his entire blog post, titled THE REALITY OF THE IVORY TRADE here.

A much less well-known elephant advocate is a 14 year-old Hong Kong Chinese girl named Celia Ho. Bryan Christy tweeted about her in these terms: This Might Be the Most Important Step Ever to Stop the Ivory Trade.

She may be the new bright spark that could ignite the sort of fire that is needed inside China. Christy has posted a tweet about Celia, who has has started a campaign to try and make more folks aware of the ivory trade and you see her work here.

Celia asks for suport and even supplies an email address. I wrote to her. Why don't you do the same?

This is what I wrote to celiaho.email@yahoo.com

 
Feb 22nd update. Celia now has a new email address. Use it as well if you can
It is: celiahotheelephantgirl@gmail.com

Dear Celia, 

Congratulations on your inspired efforts.

I have worked with elephant since 1970 and write about them, and other conservation issues, on my blog. I'm not sure that I have had much of an effect as my readers are from the west. What you are doing is much more likely to be successful. China's government-sponsored huge ivory carving industry is one of the main problems. 

In my blog of Oct 2 2012 http://jerryhaigh.blogspot.ca/2012/10/elephant-poaching-in-africa.html I quoted J. Michael Fay's National Geographic news watch page titled (Elephant Guards Murdered in Chad)

He wrote: 

“In China if you somehow managed to convince 99.9 percent of the population not to buy ivory, that 0.1 percent who remain unconvinced represents 1.3 million people still wanting to buy ivory.” 

That is a lot more people in China alone than there are elephants in all of Africa.

Good luck with your efforts. I will spread the word about your endeavours when I tell stories to schoolchildren here in Canada.
Sincerely,
Jerry

Will anyone reading this post please do the same to their own friends, FB friends, other social media contacts, teachers and colleagues? Let everyone you know, know.

The sooner the better.

Rhino Poaching Update

There has been quite a lot of interest in the rhino poaching situation in the last three weeks. There was a recent NBC TV news report that I have linked to lowder down, and then the report in National Geographic magazine that really caught my eye for two reasons.

You can find the article, by staff writer Peter Gwin, on line here. If you only have access through the web you will miss some of Brent Stirton's remrakable photos. A double spread of a rhino suspended upside down under a helicopter is very striking, especially as the helicopter is out of shot. All you can see is the cable and a wide swatch of Africa. If you do not subscribe to the magazine, take a trip to your local library.

The first nice surprise was to see, on the editorial page, Peter Beard’s iconic 1968 photo of a black rhino coming straight for the camera. There are four men who seem to be standing on something behind the rhino. The man at the extreme left of the picture looks so much like me, with his bald head and face shape, that many folks are convinced it is me.

This is because Peter Beard was kind enough to allow me to use the picture on the front cover of my first book Wrestling with Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya. (ECW Press 2002) Peter’s wife, and agent, Nejma has just told me that the man is Ken Randall, a friend of theirs.

The second excellent element was that the article not only told how modern poaching is done, but also gave an excellent update on the HOW of the use of rhino horn in Vietnam, not to mention the extraordinary prices now being paid. Not only is there a remarkable photo by Brent Stirton of a woman pseudo-named “Ms Thien” preparing a dose of “medication” but there is a link to a short video of that process.

I did write to the magazine’s editors. Of course there is not much chance of the letter being published, but I thought I’d share part of it with you.

"I write to congratulate writer Peter Gwin and photographer Brent Stirton on the excellent article about the resurgence of rhino wars in Africa. I have been involved with rhino since the late 1960s and treated my first two cases in Kenya’s Meru National Park during the late Peter Jenkins’s tenure as chief warden.

Although Gwin refers to the 2000-year history of rhino horn in TCM it might be interesting to give your readers some other elements of that history, which goes back quite a way. One of the most interesting comes from a 4^th century Chinese pharmacist who wrote: “The horn is a safe guide to the presence of poison; when poisonous medicines of liquid form are stirred with the horn, a white foam will bubble up and no further test is necessary.”  This effervescing property may have saved the lives of many potentates. Among those who are known to have use cups made from rhino horn were England’s Queen Elizabeth I, France’s Louis XIV, and Rudolph II of Germany, who was the Holy Roman Emperor from 1552 to 1612.  All of these people lived in an age when poisoning was a popular way of getting rid of unwanted rivals and enemies.

In was glad to note that Gwin did not perpetuate one urban myth. Many print media have played upon the fact that sex sells papers, and have claimed that rhino horn is used as an aphrodisiac. I quote from the text of The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa:

“There are two small tribal groups who believe that horn has this property. In India’s state of Gujarat, men use it by applying some ground powder to the penis just before intercourse, and in the Nakasongola region of Uganda, just south of Murchison Falls National Park, it is believed by some that rhino horn ash helps stimulate sexual desire.  Perhaps the shape of the horn, and the prolonged courtship and copulation (up to an hour has been recorded) engaged in by rhinos, are what leads to the misconception (to coin a pun).  Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame, with typical throwaway humour, suggested that the aphrodisiac myth might be simply related to the fact that rhino horn is a “big sticky-up hard thing.”

One other note of interest is that Peter Beard allowed me the use of his iconic rhino photo, the one you used alongside your editorial, for the cover of Wrestling With Rhinos. It was fun to see it again in the original."

That disturbing NBC TV report can be found here.

Talking books on TV

Link
For a change I'm uploading a video of a TV show I did with Saskatoon author and host Wes Funk who hosts a show about books and writing. It is called Lit Happens and is shown on the local Shaw TV station. Wes and I talk about two of my books. Mainly about The Trouble With Lions, but also about Of Moose and Men. I'm stil struggling with a possible subtitle of the latter. Right now I favour A Glasgow Vet's Journey With The Moose, The Whole Moose and Nearly Nothing but The Moose. Hope you enjoy the video. You can find it here on Youtube.

Giraffes in Niger

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8349712.stm, http://www.wcs.org/

Wildlife in Niger has been in serious trouble form poachers and hungry people for many years. One species that has been extirpated from the region is the scimitar-horned oryx, seen here in Texas and most of the world’s remaining members of this species now reside in North America. Indeed several exist on private game ranches. In the late 1980s I visited one such ranch in Texas where a philanthropic oil man had give over a large chunk of his land to their propagation. One of our party asked him “Why don’t you send some back to Niger?"

His reply – “Why would I? Everyone and his brother has an AK47. The animals would not last a month.”

So, the recent story from the BBC webs site about the resurgence of the West African giraffe in Niger is all the more remarkable.

As the reporter Martin Plaut writes

“From a herd of 50 animals, careful conservation supported by Niger's government has seen their numbers rise to around 200.”

Mind you this is still only a fraction of what once was an enormous number of these remarkable animals that roamed right across the region all the way to the Atlantic coast.

As I wrote in my blog of December 31, 2008 there are now five recognized species of giraffe. You can see four of them in that blog, but I have never seen the West African species, the rarest of all. My only chance to do so would have been in northern Cameroon in 1996, but I was fully engaged in an elephant collaring project with New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. If you would like to read how very difficult this project was you can do in chapters 10 & 11 of The Trouble With Lions.

The good news in this BBC story is that the giraffes have been seen within 60 km of the country’s capital city Niamey and the government has banned all hunting in the hope that the animals will help with the tourist trade.

Wildlife smuggling

Linkhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6204087/South-African-caught-at-airport-with-crocodiles-in-luggage.html,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090911-pythons-florida-giant-snakes.html

In The Trouble With Lions I wrote:

There seems to be some debate about which illegal trade generates the most income, but the top four are drugs, arms, people (mainly women as sex workers) and animals. All are worth billions of dollars a year and the animal trade involves the death of a vast proportion of its victims even while in transit.

It now seems as if wildlife smuggling has leapt into second place behind drugs in South Africa and overtaken arms.

The latest report of a bizarre case comes from the Wildlife Disease News Digest listserv of Sept 21st to which I subscribe. They provided a link to a story from Britain’s Telegraph online news outlet. The headline reads

South African caught at airport with crocodiles in luggage

It was not only crocodiles that he had tried to smuggle in his luggage, but a real mix that included snakes, a turtle, spiders, scorpions and frogs. In all some seventy animals were involved.

The man had flown in from Thailand and many, if not all (the article in not clear about this) of the animals were non-native and came from the Far East. There were at least three endangered species.

There are several issues to think about. First, and obvious, is the drain on species in the countries from which the animals came. Then comes the other big question. What happens when the smuggled animals arrive at destination; will they bring foreign diseases; what impact will they have on native wildlife?

The most recent and well-publicised example of a bad news answer to this question comes from Florida in the USA. Two species of non-native python have been found in the state. They are the Burmese Python and the African Rock Python. No doubt so-called “pet” owners released them when they got too big to handle. What is alarming about the rock python story came in a Sept 14th report by Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News who wrote:

“Six African rock pythons have been found in Florida since 2002. More troubling, a pregnant female and two hatchlings have been found, which means the aggressive reptiles have set up house.”

The smuggling continues and will no doubt do so as long as bad people want to make money. Maybe scanners like the one I wrote about in the blog on bushmeat need to be used in all airports.

Rinderpest in Victorian Britain

Been researching a new book on a topic that fascinates me. Know today as Rinderpest, it was the scourge of cattle owners for centuries. Former names included The Steppe Murrain, The Asian Murrain, Cattle Plague, and Cattle Typhus. If susceptible cattle became infected by this highly contagious disease then almost 100% of them would die. It swept across Asia in wave after wave of pandemics, wiping out millions of cattle every time. It got into Africa when traders brought cattle across through the Horn of Africa and then swept down and across the continent over a few years, leaving utter devastation in its wake, killing not only cattle but a host of other cloven-hoofed animals like buffalo and many antelopes.

My working title is The Virus and the Vaccine: How Cattle Plague Changed World History.

I could not have come to a better place for my research of the history of the disease in UK because the entire collection of James Beart Simonds writings, and all the material he collected. This portrait is the frontispiece of his very brief and modest autobiography. The staff at the College library have been brilliant, and I have had access to then entire collection of material that Simonds gathered during his very distinguished career. He led the charge on Rinderpest control in the mid-1800s, speaking to veterinary, agricultural and government groups all over Britain.

I was allowed to scan all of this collection – which ran to over 90 volumes of material – and it will take a long time to digest. Here is just one example of the many of the sort of thing I found. As the saying goes “watch this space”

The launch in Saskatoon

Refinery Launch of The Trouble With Lions

What a turnout! Thanks so much for everyone who came along, we had about ninety folks take a big slice out of their evenings and come to join Jo and me at Saskatoon’s Refinery for the public launch. The intimate space of the basement gave everyone a chance to mix and mingle and lots of folks purchased copies of the book. My hand got a bit tired signing and also making sure that every single copy had the typo on page 237 corrected. More of this below.

After a glass of what-you-fancy we headed upstairs to the theatre where Cynthia and Jim had laid out the chairs on three sides of the room and set up a couple of tables for my toys – a computer and projector, as well as the sound system for Brother Kurt, who would play some music in the “intermission”.

Jim McCrory, well known broadcaster in the Saskatchewan scene led the event of with an intro, and then I told a few stories about some of the work in the early days, when I was translocating rhino. I ran an old two minute movie clip, shot on Super 8, of the actual techniques of rhino capture and with the technical revolution this has been digitized for use on PowerPoint. I also related the account of how a San man (used to be called Bushman, but that is no longer appropriate) captured ostriches with a small snare and a piece of ostrich shell. Ostriches are fatally attracted to anything white, so Anton, which was the man’s Westernized name, gave us a dramatic demo of how a bird will dip its head into the trap and end up with the snare around its neck. As the snare, made of very strong natural fibre, is tied to a stout tree the ostrich is doomed and the man and his family have a nice pile of meat. Of course this is just one example of how humans have acquired their meat from wild animals since time immemorial. This leads into a discussion of the wider subject of what is now dubbed “Bushmeat”, an emotional subject that has become a high-profile issue in many forums.

From there we listened to Kurt, who is a member of my writers group, as he played a couple of well-known tunes for us – Wimoweh, and She’s Got Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Feet.

After that break I headed into the newer territory of our work in Uganda, and this occupies the last six chapters of the book, covering conservation, human tragedies, teaching, humour and the very complicated human x livestock x wildlife interface. One of the humorous events occurred when a female member of the party, standing in what passed for a shower, sluicing herself off with water from a cup repeatedly dipped into a plastic bowl, became convinced that a Peeping Tom was giving her the once over. It was a local member of a wildlife troop.

And the typo? The caption of the photo of the hyaena on page 237 has one crucial word missing. Here is the photo, and anyone not in the know would at once recognize it as being of the groin region of a male. It is not. The caption reads “External genitalia of a juvenile spotted hyaena.” One crucial word is missing. Between juvenile and spotted should come the word “female”. For a fuller explanation you can take a look at the text, or for the real detail buffs go to the actual science references in the bibliography. The ultra short version is that early in the life of the fetus the chemical events that lead to either testosterone or oestrogen being the major sex hormone are not the same in hyaenas as they are in other mammals.

It seems as if no book is ever published without a typo or two. Peter Midgley, the managing editor on this project, himself a published author, told me that Persian rug makers would always insert a deliberate error so that their work would not rival the perfection of Allah.

Memoir as Storytelling

As a wildlife veterinarian I have worked with Canadian species such as polar bears and moose. Many years of African work experience in several countries has included work with elephants, eagles, rhinos and lions.

I enjoy relating stories about my work, which range from having soldier ants up my shorts to giving an enema to a rhino. My first book was Wrestling With Rhinos (ECW 2002). Look for my second book of African memoir in April 2007, The Trouble with Lions (University of Alberta Press).