Elephant Trophy Imports Soar in Trump’s Second Term - Center for Biological Diversity

Amara: Welcome back to The Long Memory — I'm Amara, elephant biologist, science communicator, and someone who has spent more years than I can count watching elephants and feeling quietly convinced that they understand the world in ways we're only beginning to fathom. I'm so glad you're here. A warm thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. You all make this show possible, and I'm genuinely grateful. Today we've got a lot to get into — we're going to talk about what's happening inside an elephant's mind, about the grief and memory that holds a herd together, and about the very real and very urgent crossroads that elephants and people are navigating right now, from South Africa to Indonesia to a protest in the streets of India. Let's go. Amara: So — the mind of the elephant. I want to start here because I think everything else flows from it. When you understand how an elephant thinks, how she remembers, how she makes decisions — then everything else about her life clicks into place. And one of the places where that's been made most beautifully visible in recent years is at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, where they've just opened something called Elephant Valley. I want to talk about this because it's not just a new exhibit — it's a genuinely different philosophy about how humans and elephants share space. The design is built around the idea that visitors aren't spectators looking in through glass. They're guests in a landscape that belongs to the elephants. You're walking through terrain that's been shaped for elephant movement, elephant choice, elephant decision-making. And that matters, because elephants are not passive creatures who exist to be observed. They are active, strategic thinkers. Amara: Here's what I mean. In the wild, an African elephant matriarch is essentially a walking archive. She holds in her memory the locations of water sources she may not have visited in a decade. She recognizes the calls of individual elephants she hasn't seen in years. Research from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project — one of the longest-running wildlife studies on Earth, going back to the 1970s — has shown that older matriarchs have a measurably superior ability to identify threats and make sound decisions for the herd. When researchers played recordings of lion roars, herds led by older matriarchs responded faster, more cohesively, and more appropriately to the level of danger. The matriarch wasn't just reacting. She was cross-referencing. She was consulting her memory. Amara: And that memory is spatial, social, and emotional all at once. Elephants in the wild navigate home ranges that can stretch hundreds of miles. They remember not just where things are, but what happened there — where they found food in a drought year, where they lost a family member, where a human with a gun once appeared. This is memory with stakes. Memory that keeps you alive. So when you're standing in a space like Elephant Valley and you watch an elephant pause, lift her trunk, scan the air — she's not just smelling. She's thinking. She's deciding. And I find that extraordinary. Amara: There's a concept in cognitive science called episodic-like memory — the ability to recall not just facts, but events. What happened, where it happened, when it happened. For a long time, scientists thought this was uniquely human. Then we found it in birds. Then in great apes. And the behavioral evidence in elephants — particularly studies involving tool use, problem-solving, and the way they respond to the remains of their dead — suggests very strongly that elephants have it too. This is a mind that doesn't just learn. It remembers. And it carries that memory forward, into every choice it makes. Amara: Now let's move into the heart of the herd — because you can't talk about elephant memory without talking about what they remember, and so much of what they carry is about each other. I want to tell you about Chanchal. Chanchal was a captive elephant in India, and she became the focal point of a campaign that reached its peak around Save The Elephant Day this year. PETA India staged a protest in her memory — activists dressed as pink elephants in chains, calling for an end to elephant rides and captive elephant tourism. And the image is striking, right? Pink elephants in chains. But behind the image is a real animal and a real story. Amara: Chanchal's life was one that many captive elephants share — constrained movement, physical discomfort, isolation from the social bonds that elephants depend on with the same urgency that we depend on family. And here's the science behind why that matters so much. Elephants are one of the most socially complex mammals on the planet. A female elephant in the wild typically spends her entire life within a few meters of her mother, her sisters, her aunts. The herd is not just a group — it's a cognitive and emotional support system. Young elephants learn from watching elders. They absorb knowledge about food, about danger, about how to give birth, about how to grieve. Amara: And grief is real. We have documented evidence — from Cynthia Moss's decades of work in Amboseli, from Karen McComb's research, from field observations across Africa and Asia — of elephants returning to the bones of their dead, handling them gently with their trunks, going still and quiet in a way that is unmistakably different from their ordinary behavior. Elephants have been observed returning to the same spot year after year. They touch the skulls of family members with particular attention, as if recognizing them. This is not anthropomorphism. This is behavioral data, observed, recorded, replicated. These are animals that mourn. Amara: And so when you isolate an elephant — when you remove her from her herd, chain her, put her to work giving rides — you are not just inconveniencing her physically. You are severing her from the social and emotional architecture of her entire existence. The research is consistent on this: captive elephants show elevated stress hormones, repetitive stereotypic behaviors, and signs of psychological distress that parallel what we see in traumatized humans. Chanchal's story is a window into that truth. And the people marching in her memory are saying: we know what you feel. We see you. That is a profound thing for one species to say to another. Amara: Okay. Let's go to the people-and-elephants story for today, and I want to hold a few things together here, because the news this week gives us a complicated picture — and I think complicated is honest. On one side, we have the Trump administration seeing a significant rise in elephant trophy imports. Data from the Center for Biological Diversity shows that permits allowing hunters to bring elephant parts — tusks, feet, ears — back into the United States have increased in the current term. This is not an abstract policy debate. Each trophy represents an animal removed from a population that is already under pressure. And African elephant populations, while variable by region, have faced devastating declines over the past century — largely driven by habitat loss and the ivory trade, with trophy hunting a persistent additional pressure. Amara: And then on the other side of the coin, South Africa this week published its National Elephant Heritage Strategy. A government-level framework for elephant conservation that acknowledges elephants as a national heritage — not just a resource, not just a tourist attraction, but a heritage. That word matters. Heritage implies something inherited, something owed to future generations, something that belongs to a place and a people in a deep and lasting way. The strategy is designed to guide management of South Africa's elephant populations, which are actually growing in some regions — a conservation success in one sense, and a genuine management challenge in another, because elephants need space, and space is finite. Amara: Meanwhile, researchers at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia have published findings that I think deserve a lot of attention. Their work focuses on Sumatran elephants — a critically endangered subspecies — and makes a clear argument that elephant conservation forests must remain free of human activities. Not reduced human activity. Not managed human activity. Free. Because the data shows that even low-level human disturbance — logging, agricultural encroachment, settlements — fundamentally disrupts elephant movement patterns, breaks up critical habitat corridors, and increases the probability of human-elephant conflict, which is dangerous for both sides. Amara: Sumatran elephants have lost more than two-thirds of their habitat in the last twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. That's within many of your lifetimes. And what makes this especially poignant to me is what I know about elephant memory. An elephant alive today in Sumatra may carry in her memory landscapes that no longer exist. She may be navigating toward water sources that have been replaced by palm oil plantations. She may be leading her herd along a corridor that has been fenced. And she keeps going, because her memory tells her to. Because generations of knowledge encoded in her brain say: this is the way. And then she hits a wall. Amara: That's the grief of this moment. Not just the numbers, not just the policy — but the individual animals trying to live by the maps their mothers gave them, in a world that has changed faster than memory can adapt. And the research from Gadjah Mada is essentially saying: stop changing the map. Give them back the forest. Let the knowledge they carry still be true. Amara: I want to end there — with the map. With the idea that an elephant carries her world inside her. That she moves through the landscape guided by memory laid down across years, decades, generations. That her herd is her archive, and her matriarch is her compass. We talk a lot about what we owe elephants in terms of policy, in terms of conservation dollars, in terms of legal protections. And all of that matters enormously. But underneath all of it is something simpler — a recognition that these are beings with inner lives. With memories that shape who they are. With bonds they would grieve to lose. With a kind of wisdom that has been built across millions of years and that we are only just beginning to understand. That's worth protecting. That's worth fighting for. That's worth remembering. Amara: This has been The Long Memory, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you, or taught you something, or made you think differently about the animals we share this planet with — please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you love. The more people who carry these stories, the better. Check the link in show notes for sources, further reading, and ways to support elephant conservation. Until next time — stay curious, stay kind, and keep the long memory alive.