Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
they get confused. One night a few years ago we were out on a night drive and spotted an old
elephant bull. I said to my brother “let's see if it is true that elephants at night charge lights.”
We turned on a powerful spotlight and he immediately charged us. People may have different
opinions, but I think it is wrong to turn banks of battery driven spotlights onto animals at night
to photograph them being attacked by predators, just for the sake of getting the movie clip.
Ironically these are often people who are ardent anti-hunters in Botswana but do not see the
paradox. Aiding predators killing herbivores using blinding lights seems hardly different to
using a gun, and indeed, it is more cruel and drawn out. This is not nature taking its course. As
John Hunter pointed out in East Africa, sometimes the most unethical were the photographers
who insisted on wounding an animal so that then a charge could be induced for filming. As a
photographer, such behavior is clearly embarrassing and reprehensible. Hence, the filming of
elephants being attacked at night by lions, confused by powerful spot lights, is in my estimation
not ethical photography either. Indeed, it hardly seems different from the descriptions by J.A.
Hunter for early photographers going to photograph and film the mega herbivores and lions in
East Africa. He relates how initially the cameramen would film the animals but soon they
would want to film a charge and so a charge was induced, but of course the animal would then
have to be killed before the cameraman was killed. The photographers ended up having to pay
as hunters, including trophy fees. Similarly, the patching together of movies to make a story
when the vegetation, seasons and animals are also different is hardly ethical unless reported
and disclosed. The same applies to doctoring photographs by adding more animals, for
example in East African migrations of zebras or positioning the pyramids of Giza together in
angles that cannot be achieved; this misleads viewers. Some tourists went to Egypt after seeing
the photographs on a well-known magazine's cover, expecting to find a similar view of the
pyramids to photograph, and it did not exist. I have been to the pyramids of Giza, riding a
white Arabian stallion when the pyramids were still out in the sandy desert and the air was
crystal clean, just before the six day war in 1967. I could not remember such an angle where
they could be seen all together.
Moose:
Just as with other wildlife, seemingly innocent species can become malicious. My cousin-
in-law was once charged by a moose in Kamchatka and barely escaped. We used to see a fair
number of moose when we used to hike up in Maine's Baxter Park, particularly at Sandy Pond.
One October when we hadn't seen any moose at Sandy Pond, my wife, who can imitate moose
fairly well, started calling and a short time thereafter a big bull moose appeared out of the
woods on the shores. We suddenly found ourselves sitting on some stones out in the lake with
ice around us and no means of escape if he turned nasty. I immediately signaled her to stop
making the call, since she is very short sighted and had not seen the moose who was now
looking around for the moose he had heard. Since he had cut off any potential retreat for us
back to shore, we sat there on the stones very quiet and made ourselves look as much as
possible like blue rocks in our windbreakers. After he had looked around for a while he
disappeared.
One of my scrub nurses at Lahey Clinic outside of Boston related how once she and her
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