Last update - 11:47 13/03/2008


By Ofri Ilani

Tags: Jeheskel Shoshani

A few months ago, when he was traveling in the border region between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Prof. Jeheskel Shoshani found the corpse of a large elephant that had been shot by hunters.
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"I thought about the last moments in the life of this elephant. Elephants have language - they talk to one another with sounds that we can't hear. I asked myself what sound he made a moment before he died."

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"I have studied the elephant brain, and there are many similarities between it and the human brain. It's possible that they remember more than we do. But because of one bullet, all these memories disappeared. It made me so sad. And the fact of the matter is, the poacher himself doesn't even get much money for it."

Shoshani, 65, has been studying elephants for about 35 years. This week he was in Israel, but over the past 10 years he has been living in Africa and studying elephant migrations and the effect of ecological changes on elephant lifestyles and genetics. In addition, he is working to preserve the shrinking elephant population in Ethiopia's Kafta-Shiraro Park - a national park that was established a few months ago in order to protect the elephants.

The park lies on the border between Ethiopia and its neighbor and enemy, Eritrea. This is a politically tense and sensitive area, which in recent years has seen several wars that sowed destruction and caused many casualties.

"It's more or less like the border between Syria and Israel. At the moment there is no war going on, but there is tension. Instead of war, there's a war between the poachers and the elephants," Shoshani says.

"People living near the park enter with their sheep and cows, and its area is gradually shrinking. The farmers say the elephant entered their field, but in fact the elephant learned to pass through this place when it was still young, and his father and grandfather also passed through there."

In order to protect the elephants, Shoshani meets with representatives of the local community and explains the importance of preserving the animals. In addition, the preservation project seeks to find jobs for the residents of the region.

"We believe they can serve as game wardens, catch poachers and arrest them. It's important to motivate them by giving them a good salary," he explains. "The local community's cooperation in decision-making is very important. After all, some of them are themselves poachers. We are trying to explain to them why it's important for the elephants to live."

Shoshani speaks Tigrin - the language of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia - and says he has good relations with residents there.

"They're surprised that a professor from the university comes and sits down to eat with them. But it's easy for me to identify with them, because I myself grew up in poverty," he says.

A boy and an elephant

Shoshani grew up in the Hatikva neighborhood in South Tel Aviv. When he was young, he began to take an interest in elephants after reading a book about a boy and an elephant.

"That book changed my life," he says. "Although it's a children's book, today I know that the author had a very great understanding of elephants."

He went to the United States and studied zoology in Michigan, and researched elephants in Sri Lanka and Kenya. He became one of the world's leading elephant researchers, and even established an American elephant lovers association. He studied the anatomy and the evolutionary development of elephants, and examined the link between the elephant and the animals closest to it - the rock hyrax and the manatee. Since he could not raise an elephant at home, he raised a rock hyrax.

"I raised the hyrax at home for nine years. A hyrax can be quite dangerous. It bit my wife when it tried to mate with her hand. She still has a scar," he says.

Shoshani has been living in Ethiopia and teaching at Addis Ababa University for a year. Before that, he spent eight years in Eritrea, and studied the elephants in a region adjacent to where he is now, on the other side of the border.

"Because of the war, the Eritrean government forbade access to the border area, where the elephants are located. That's one of the reasons why I moved to Ethiopia," he says.

Ethiopia is not the most convenient place in the world for studying elephants. There used to be tens of thousand of elephants in the country, living even in the relatively high hilly regions, up to 2,500 meters above sea level. In past decades, the elephants' territory has shrunk substantially, and many of the animals have been poached. Ethiopia has lost 90 percent of its elephant population since the 1980s. Shoshani estimates it has about 1,200 elephants left. For the sake of comparison, South Africa is home to more than 200,000 elephants.

Shoshani says he chose to study elephants in Ethiopia because almost no researcher does so. "In South Africa and in Kenya there are lots of elephant researchers. But nobody dared to go to Eritrea and Ethiopia, because scientists don't like places where there are wars. Nobody dares to go near the border."

Shoshani has found that elephants pay no attention to political borders: They cross into Eritrea, an enemy country, and perhaps Sudan as well. "The big question that I'm trying to answer is why elephants migrate," he says. "Some researchers think that they're trying to find grazing land in other regions. But I think that's not the reason. I believe elephants migrate in order to find partners as far from the family as possible. That ensures great genetic variety. The group that I'm studying is isolated, and it can't meet any other elephants. But I think they have a built-in mechanism that tells them to migrate."

In addition to their small numbers, the elephants in Ethiopia are separated into nine isolated populations.

"There is almost no transition among the populations because of roads and agricultural areas. These small groups have endogamy, and they are liable to have defective descendants. I have seen elephants that are shorter than the norm. It's possible that the reason for that is that the populations are small. That's what I'm investigating now, by means of DNA I send to the U.S. for testing. I don't know whether I'll have time to collect enough material during my lifetime, but others will continue the work."

Poachers all over Africa prefer large elephants with long tusks. Shoshani says that in the long run, this is liable to cause an evolutionary change in the elephant population. "I'm afraid that if they continue hunting the elephants with the large tusks, all the elephants that survive will have small tusks," he says. "In effect, that will lead to the disappearance of all the elephant's strength."

When Shoshani looks at the gradual extinction of the elephants in East Africa, he is filled with sadness. "An elephant is an important component of the ecological system. This is a large animal, and all the systems rely on them. Without elephants, all the systems are liable to collapse. When a poacher kills an elephant, he is killing a tradition of generations. They store a great deal of knowledge during their lives, and transmit it from one generation to the next. The moment they are killed all that is lost. That's why it hurts me so much."

Wayne State professor, elephant expert killed in Ethiopian blast

Mike Martindale / The Detroit News

BLOOMFIELD HILLS -- A former Wayne State University professor and internationally renowned elephant expert was killed in Ethiopia this week in what is believed to be a terrorist bombing, several international publications are reporting.

Jeheskel "Hezy" Shoshani, 65, was among several people killed following an explosion in a public minibus in downtown Addis Ababa on Tuesday, Israeli media reported.

Shoshani's wife Sandra, who lives in Bloomfield Hills, declined to be interviewed Thursday.

"I really don't feel like talking to reporters right now," she said.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said it is unclear whether the blast was terror-related or whether Shoshani was even on the bus when the blast occurred. An Israeli Web site reported three people had been killed and nine injured in the explosion.

Shoshani was reportedly returning to his home from Addis Ababa University at the time. The minibus was traveling on a road that runs between the Hilton Hotel and the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry.

Arrangements were reportedly being made for a funeral service in Israel. Shoshani, a U.S. citizen born in Tel Aviv, has been teaching in Addis Ababa for a year and a half and doing elephant research. Before that he spent eight years studying elephant communities in the east African state of Eritrea. In an interview he said he moved to Ethiopia to teach because of volatile politics along the Eritrea-Ethiopian border.

Shoshani became interested in elephants after reading "Burma Boy" by Willis Lindquist, and devoted years of study researching the evolutionary behavior of elephants, along with their anatomy and physiology. During nearly 25 years of teaching biology at Wayne State, he contributed a skeleton of a famous circus elephant to Wayne State and one of a mastodon to Oakland Community College.

Wayne State University records indicate in 1977 he established the Elephant Research Foundation, edited a publication called "Elephant" and published about 200 scientific articles and books on elephants.

In 2003 Shoshani was nearly killed on an expedition in search of elephants when one of his beloved subjects charged him. Somehow, he escaped with only minor injuries.

Shoshani dedicated his final years to improving the plight of elephants in Ethiopia and the Jerusalem Post reported how in a recent interview he reflected on finding the corpse of a large elephant shot by hunters.

"It was a large male, and the poachers wanted its ivory, so they sawed off its head. "When I saw that, I thought about the last moments in the life of this elephant. Elephants have language -- they talk to one another with sounds that we can't hear. I asked myself what sound he made a moment before he died."

You can reach Mike Martindale at               (248) 647-7226        or mmartindale@detnews.com.