Last of the Big Tuskers (2018)

59min

Last of the Big Tuskers is an Umboko Productions documentary film about the role of dominant elephant bulls in elephant social structures. For a documentary that looks at the lives of elephants, the film focuses uniquely less on the matriarchal herds, telling a story of elephant conservation instead in the context of the other elephant groups: askari bachelor herds.

These elephant bulls, called askaris, follow in the footsteps of a patriarch—a biggest bull elephant, likely with the biggest tusks, in the area. The increasingly few elephants with tusks estimated in excess of one-hundred pounds per tusk are known as super-tuskers. This film explains that the tusks of bull elephants grow at an accelerated rate when the bull is coming of age. When an elephant with the genetic makeup for big tusks has just reached the physical maturity of a super-tusker, that elephant becomes a prime target for poaching at the same time as that same elephant has just reached prime age for breeding. In the populations that remain of elephants in the wild, the result is that the genetic makeup for big tusks is artificially devolved.

The ivory trade remains a reality that is impossible to ignore when addressing a future for elephants.

Tusks are more than an indication of social stature for elephants. Elephants need their tusks to survive: to forage, to dig for roots, to dig for water, to strip bark from trees, to topple trees, to defend themselves. Elephant bulls use their tusks in combat for access to females in estrus. The film emphasizes the role of older bull elephants, who have become the father figures that young askaris have not had in the matriarchal herd. Old bulls show the ways to water and to survive the challenging landscapes, as well as teach discipline to the young bachelors.

Far too often, and for too long, elephants have been poached for their ivory tusks. For the few years leading up to this film, on average, almost one hundred elephants have been killed every day. Every dead elephant is a tragedy for a family-based herd and increasingly for the survival of the highly-intelligent species. The hope for this project is to share the value in keeping elephants alive, in particular big tuskers.

Every now and then… Everyday, people become evermore desensitized to the ways in which we take advantage of nature, wild or otherwise. This is known as a baseline shift—a baseline that represents what we think of as normal, which changes with every generation. Enter: director and on-camera co-host of Last of the Big Tuskers, James Currie, who grew up in South Africa, and who returns in this film to see the last big tuskers in Tembe Elephant Park.

Tembe Elephant Park, South Africa, has a unique topography: sandforest. This special sandforest shares a border with Mozambique and holds an elephant population with very special characteristics, as Alois Haberhauer, Elephant Geneticist at the University of Kriel, described in the film: “a special genetic makeup to produce strong tuskers.” Leonard Muller, Elephant Monitor at Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, also in the film explained the special circumstances for the elephants in Tembe:

James Currie and co-host Tom Mahamba, then a senior ranger at Tembe Elephant Park, travel to Kruger National Park in South Africa and then on to Kenya to compare the elephants of other national parks: Amboseli, Chyulu Hills, Tsavo, to the last big tuskers of Tembe. The direction of the film remains centred on challenges facing elephant conservation today, pointing to tourism as a solution: managing the revenue from tourism to support the national parks as well as the communities who continue to co-exist on the front lines of a conflict with elephants. The same elephants that people all over the world – everyone, everywhere – so clearly uphold in story and in art.