1938 National Geographic #4

1938-4, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. In Gangara na Bodio, the Thaw safari stopped off at one of the stations run by the Belgian Government where African elephants were trained to do useful work. (At the time the Thaws were there, the facility had more than 60 trained elephants available for rent or purchase by Congo farmers.) According to the article, about 12 to 14 half-grown elephants about 10 to 15 years old were being captured each year for training purposes. Arriving in the middle of the hunting season, the Thaws and their cameraman accompanied Captain Pierre Offerman, the Belgian Army officer in charge, to film the capture of an elephant. Unlike the Frank Buck method of herding the wild elephants into a stockade, the Belgians slip a rope around the leg of the elephant they have selected and then hang on until they can snub it around a tree trunk. Meanwhile, the rest of the herd is stampeded. Eventually the crew gets a rope around a second leg and snub that to a tree as well. The movie footage that the Thaws obtained of an elephant being captured using this method might very well be the same footage that was later released by Castle Films in the early 1940s as WILD ELEPHANT ROUNDUP. This turns up on eBay every so often and can probably be downloaded from U-tube or some similar site. It cotains some of the most exciting action footage you’ll ever see!