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Silent Thunder, Katy
Payne Long before Katy Payne’s powerful book, Silent Thunder, In the Presence of Elephants, was published, she told us about her experience with elephants in the Portland, Oregon, Washington Park Zoo. She felt, rather than heard, what she later found were sounds — actually infrasound. She remembered feeling the same kind of vibrations from the lowest notes of an organ in the church she attended as a child. Katy and Roger Payne had recorded “The Songs of the Humpback Whale” from hydrophones in the sea. These marvelous songs by the huge humpback whales were a prelude to Katy Payne’s inspired understanding of the secret communications of the largest land animals: the Asian elephants. She explains, “We ran the tape recorder at its slowest speed so that in playing back the tapes we could speed them up, raising the pitch of all recorded sounds and bringing the lowest sounds into the range of human hearing.” Katy Payne has deep empathy for animals in general, and for elephants in particular, and interprets their actions and their feelings and their communication techniques. She had grown to know them so well while in Zimbabwe, that she even dreams about them. The deep attachment formed for the elephants Katy studied during her five separate scientific expeditions in Zimbabwe make the tragedy of the cull of these elephants especially powerful and shocking. Silent Thunder makes no mention of the major human struggle which took place at the 1989 meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) at which the member countries decided to place all elephants on the Treaty’s Appendix I (endangered). African elephant populations were heading for extinction as gangs of poachers decimated them for the ivory trade at the behest of Asian ivory dealers. Zimbabwe fiercely resisted the endangered listing which was so valiantly fought for by Constance Harriman, head of the U.S. Delegation to CITES. At the 1997 CITES meeting Zimbabwe fought back, winning the vote to sell its ivory stockpile to Japan, which effectively started a wave of poaching for ivory all over again. The book ends sorrowfully with human deaths and elephant deaths and even the seeming death of a river. But there is still hope because in the river’s new channel, the elephants have dug wells, and when they have been counted, the total is 1,000 wells for all animals in the vicinity to drink from! Katy Payne’s list of acknowledgments finishes with the following words: “Finally, I wish to acknowledge the compassionate animals in whose remembrance I have written all these words. All these greeting rumbles, and all these cries for help.” - Christine Stevens
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