KRUGER NATIONAL PARK—Hemingway, furious, would have shot me in the head. Orwell would have offered dignified applause, acknowledging my restraint and humanity.

Here we were, nine of us—including two of us brandishing powerful .458 calibre hunting rifles—tracking a herd of elephants on the southern edge of South Africa’s immense Kruger National Park. One of our guides, Lourens Botha, had spotted the herd in a nearby valley. Marching quickly across the African forest, we scaled a hill next to the valley and descended onto a rocky ledge. Beneath us, a mere twenty metres away, were elephants—lots of elephants. They were enjoying a substantial breakfast, ripping large branches off the trees with their powerful trunks. And they were standing right out in the open.

Lourens and his partner, Obakeng, both young guides from the park’s Berg-en-Dal lodge, confirmed the elephants hadn’t noticed us. They put down their rifles, rather than passing them along to one of us to line up a shot. They unpacked some juiceboxes and cheese and crackers, and we enjoyed a light breakfast alongside eighteen pachyderms doing the same.

No, we didn’t shoot the elephants. The .458s that Lourens and Obi carried were for protection only—a required precaution for a walking tour in the park. And watching these creatures tear up the forest floor in impressive fashion, and trample large swaths of bush in their wake, I never once felt the impulse to fix them in the cross-hairs of the rifle and pull the trigger. Nothing about that hypothetical encounter struck me as sporting.

The “is-it-sport?” question is one that I generally find rather uninteresting (unless of course it involves jousting and a jacked dude in spandex named Titan). It’s like the childhood debate over whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. It’s a dull, semantic argument—a tomato is what it is (a vegetable because you eat it for dinner, not for dessert), and so is ballroom dancing (an art, and I have no idea how you could ever devise a reliable scoring system for it). Still, the idea of big-game hunting for sport, despite opinions to the contrary expressed by writers in the previous century and beyond, seems to me sad and inhumane. I’m like Smokey—a pacifist.

As I mentioned, Hemingway and Orwell, two of my Big Five literary influences, both had strong opinions on the morality of shooting and killing large animals. (For the record, the official Sportstrotter fiancée and I spotted four of the “Big Five” African safari animals on our trip—elephant, rhino, buffalo and lion. Sadly, no leopards.)

Hemingway, that great bastion of machismo and virility, made his first African safari from November 1933 to March 1934. He recounted the experience in his non-fiction work The Green Hills of Africa. In June 1934, Esquire published “Shootism Versus Sport,” Hemingway’s essay on hunters’ ethics. Courage, precision and patience were among the virtues Hemingway identified.

Many biographers included hunting in the portfolio that revealed Hem’s “sportsman’s” passion, along with fishing and bullfighting, all of which I’d argue straddle the thin line of what we consider sport, mostly due to the notion that a competition between equals isn’t really feasible when one of the parties doesn’t get to carry a gun or a sword or a hook while the other does. They all carry the ignoble stench of a Red Sox–Devil Rays three-game series. Er…

In his African safari career, Hemingway bagged such trophies as rhinos, zebras, lions (of which he ate a chunk of raw flesh immediately following the kill), buffalo, leopards, hyena, antelope, and surely more. One thing he apparently never did, though, was kill an elephant. In a 1986 interview his son Patrick said, “It may come as a surprise, but Hemingway never shot an elephant …. He thought it wrong—he felt that elephants are our equals.”

George Orwell, on the other hand, did shoot an elephant. Not because he considered it particularly sporting—in fact, he was haunted by the experience throughout his life. The incident was recorded in his 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant.”

My favourite bit from the story—in which a throng of Burmese look on as Orwell, a twenty-three-year-old colonial policeman, shoots a domesticated elephant that had gone into “must” and killed a local man—is this:

“To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.”

And so it seemed to me, since the thought of shooting the elephants had, yes, I’ll admit it, crossed my mind after all. It may have been due to a little early-morning Groucho Marx on the brain (”One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know”).

It may have even been due to the fact that, as we’d learned from the locals, the park is currently reviewing strategies for controlling the population of elephants, which has reached problematic levels (since adult elephants have no natural predators). Concerns over deforestation, stemming from both the animals’ voracious appetites and squashing of other creatures’ habitats via their less-than-delicate trail-blazing, have led park officials to contemplate a cull if current efforts to curb elephant population growth through contraceptive methods prove unsuccessful (insert joke here about the difficulty of convincing the animals to practice safe sex with elephant-sized condoms). And in that case, shooting the elephants would seem more humane than other historical methods of euthanizing the immense creatures.

Watching the elephants for an hour over breakfast, their noble, grandmotherly sagacity certainly comes across. And they weren’t the least bit aggressive towards us, either—that is, until one of them caught our scent as we left and moved up the hill. She sounded a trumpet and the grazing females quickly sprang to action, forming tusked sentries surrounding the three or four babies in the herd. The military precision of the manoeuvre was impressive and a tad intimidating, so we continued up the hill quietly, Lourens and Obi with their rifles at the ready.

Later that morning we tracked an adult black rhino and her baby. That was more frightening because we were on level ground with the rhinos, a mere fifteen metres away. Lourens kept pointing out bushes that we might jump behind should the mother decide to charge us, none of which seemed large enough to provide the least bit of protection against a charging fucking rhino! Still, any instinct to run had been beaten out of us repeatedly by an instruction our guides gave us several times that morning, a sentiment that I think reflects a changed attitude in the continent’s safari culture from the brash Papa Hemingway days of the last century: “Whatever you do, do not run. If you run, you act as prey and you’ll initiate a chase impulse in the animal. And there is no way I’m going to shoot one of these beautiful animals, so I WILL shoot YOU if you run.”

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Posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 8:59 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.