Elephant in the room

“Elephants share many of our traits. They have the ability to use sounds to communicate in what can only be called a language and show signs of empathy and altruism. Most animals live in the present, but elephants have memory, and use it to forecast where they will go in the future just like we do. What they don’t have is our special capacity to kill for fun, to be cruel or evil,” says 60-year-old Dereck, who lives with with Beverly, 59, in Duba Plains, Okavango Delta. They made the documentary over a period of two years.

The struggle of a calf to stand moments after its birth while its mother encourages it, the panic which the elephant herd goes through when a little one is lost in the overflowing river and the sadness when a herd encounters the skull of a matriarch are some moments captured by the conservationist duo in their camera.

Capturing these moments, however, wasn’t an easy task. The couple had to stay out in the wild for weeks, managing their supplies on their own. Also, initially the elephants would charge at them around every bend in the river. However, by constantly following the herds, they were finally able to win their trust and shoot the documentary.

The couple, winners of eight Emmy awards, also made the film because they wanted people to understand what exactly they were losing when an elephant is poached for ivory. “To understand the value of elephants alive rather than dead is our job,” says Dereck, who feels that destruction of ivory by burning it sends out a strong message to the ivory dealers that tusks are not commodities for sale. He also stresses on the importance of the community to understand the need to connect and protect these creatures.

For their next, the duo is working on the film Soul of the Cat with National Geographic, which is based on the evolution of the domestic cat.