Pole Pole - Our Inspiration

The film that you're going to watch in a moment was shown two years ago and this is like a little new introduction to that. It's the story of a young elephant that my husband Bill and I knew very well. She appeared in a film called An Elephant Called Slowly, which we made in Kenya in 1968, a very long time ago. We were looking for a little elephant, a young elephant, and we were told that in the trapeze yard in Nairobi there was a little two-year-old elephant, just captured from the wild as a gift to London Zoo. So we went to see her in the compound with a wonderful man called David Sheldrick, the husband of Daphne Sheldrick, who was famous for her work looking after and saving orphaned elephants. And we saw her, this terrified little animal, rushing up and down the stockade, and David, seeing our concern, reassured us that he would be able to calm her and she would be able to be in the film, and that's what happened. She was, for me, the ultimate symbol of what we feel we can do and are allowed to do, by whom I do not know, to wild creatures who've done us no harm. This beautiful, sweet little animal torn from her family, never to see them again, and who eventually was put down at London Zoo aged 17. We had campaigned to be able to take her back to South Africa, to South Africa to be released into a reserve and taught her how to become a wild elephant again, which I don't think would have taken very long. They refused, the zoo refused, but said they would move her to their country zoo, Whipsnade. Tragically, she didn't survive the move because she was left standing in her crate for such a long time. Poli Poli was her name, and that means slowly, slowly in Swahili. She became the star of our film, an elephant called Slowly. Come the end of filming, we asked if we could buy her and give her to the Sheldricks so that she could join the little group, and they said, yes, yes, you can buy her, but we'll have to catch her in another way. The thought of this little friend being betrayed, as we felt, by us and being sent to London Zoo was just the worst thing in the world. Twelve years later, we had a letter from Daphne Sheldrick saying she'd heard that something might happen to Poli Poli, and we went up and we watched her. She was walking up and down and up and down with this one broken little stump of tusk and nothing on the other side. And we called her, and she stopped, and she came, and she stretched out her trunk, she's stretching out her trunk, as we stretch out our hands to her across the boat. As I say, we hadn't seen her for all those years. It's our voices, and it was her death that began our campaign called Zoo Check 1984. She died in 83, and we launched in March 84.