DOMESTICATION, DEGENERATION, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ADDO ELEPHANT NATIONAL PARK IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1910s–1930s

Abstract This article examines conflict between farmers and elephants in the Addo region in 1910s–1930s South Africa to explore the porosity of the concepts ‘wild’, ‘tame’, and ‘domestic’, and their relationship to race, degeneration, nature conservation, and colonialism. In the 1910s, settler farmers indicted the ‘Addo Elephants’, as ‘vicious’ thieves who raided crops and ‘hunted’ farmers. This view conflicted with a widespread perception of elephants as docile, sagacious, and worthy of protection. Seeking to reconcile these views, bureaucrats were divided between exterminating the animals, creating a game reserve, and drawing upon the expertise of Indian mahouts to domesticate them. Ultimately, all three options were attempted: the population was decimated by hunter Phillip Jacobus Pretorius, an elephant reserve was created, the animals were tamed to ‘lose their fear of man’ and fed oranges. Despite the presence of tame elephants and artificial feeding, the reserve was publicized as a natural habitat, and a window onto the prehistoric. This was not paradoxical but provokes a need to rethink the relationship between wildness, tameness, and domesticity. These concepts were not implicitly opposed but existed on a spectrum paralleling imperialist hierarchies of civilization, race, and evolution, upon which tame elephants could still be considered wild.

Scientists were at times actively opposed to African parks on the grounds that they were vast reservoirs of livestock diseases.  As Carruthers has noted, the 'historiography of nature conservation as science in South Africa…has hardly been touched upon by professional historians'.  This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that the Addo Elephant National Park was founded with explicit scientific racist intentions.
Peder Anker has observed close links between politics and ecology in South Africa in relation to evolutionary theories and the perceived place of human 'races' in society.  Saul Dubow, similarly, has investigated how fears of African 'racial deterioration'  in cities shaped apartheid policies of creating rural 'native reserves'.  In these spaces, the pastoral African 'veneer of civilization'  could be 'protected' from 'the urban environment'.  In the s-s, Prime Minister Jan Smuts argued that Africa was a 'human laboratory' in which racial evolution was an 'experiment'.  In South Africa, Smuts thought that multiple stages of human 'evolution' were preserved and ready for study: from 'living fossil'  hunter-gatherers, to the developing 'Transvaal Boer… type'.  Although such racist evolutionary and ecological thinking was typically associated with humans, elephants were also subjected to it.  Racial taxonomy, neo-Lamarckian interpretations of evolution, and fears of degeneration shaped every elephant-management policy taken by the Cape Province. Concepts of racial degeneration justified brutal violence against the animals, and preservationist thinking was mobilized to argue for the creation of the park in ways paralleling the development of segregation legislature and 'native reserves'.  My second aim is to bring the history of the wild/domestic border into greater conversation with the history of national parks, and the intellectual history of race.  Environmental historians have devoted considerable attention to problematizing the perceived 'wildness' of African parks. These spaces were not 'untouched' windows onto the prehistoric, but constructed landscapes, deeply entangled with colonial attempts to 'civilize' nature, biopolitics, and racism.  Created initially to preserve animals for hunters, and later to entertain tourists, national parks were often established at the expense of indigenous Africans who were forcibly removed from their lands.  Nevertheless, such work has largely operated according to the idea that conservationists predicated the park ideal as a 'fundamental separation of nature, usually understood as wilderness, from society and culture'.  Animals living within parks have been treated as necessarily 'wild', rather than as 'domestic', or 'tame'. Yet the historicization of these actors' categories reveals that not all advocates of national parks were thinking within these binaries. Parks were not always constructed as wild places in which the domestic was excluded, nor were their animal inhabitants necessarily considered wild.
The Addo Elephant National Park was publicized a 'wild' space, but also one where 'tame' animals could be viewed in their 'natural state', bathing in borehole water and feasting upon cultivated oranges. This does not mean that conservationists placed a veil of wilderness over a constructed landscape,  but that tame, domestic, and wild were not neatly bifurcated actors' categories, and could co-exist within early twentieth-century parks. Paying closer attention to these categories, along with their inextricably linked concepts of degeneration, race, and evolution, can potentially transform how we think about animalprotection in this period.
But where does the agency of the elephants fit into a story of colonial discourse and environmental alteration?  Farmers, bureaucrats, and zoologists were aware of the capacity of elephants to shape Addo, the danger they posed to humans, and were hesitant to enrage them for fear of retaliation.  For settlers and bureaucrats in the region who struggled to contain their movements, elephant agency was self-evident and limiting it was their primary aim.  The difficulty here is not allowing elephants to 'speak', but considering how they trumpeted louder than colonial representations of their behaviour.  Rather than utilizing neo-materialist theory or modern science to ascribe agency to the elephants, I treat agency as an exercise of writing.  Here, I am inspired by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga's use of the term 'mobility' in interpreting the actions of tsetse flies and the knowledge produced in response to their movements.  A key motif in this article is boundary crossing, and I demonstrate how the physical mobility of elephants (roaming, trampling, wallowing) upset colonial understandings of elephant behaviour and transformed 'Addo Elephant' into a conceptually mobile category. Not only did it render the Addo region a 'beastly place',  but the mobilities of the elephants shaped processes of knowledge production. The animals repeatedly undermined official representations of their behaviour, creating moments of  For a problematization of this, see William Adams, Against extinction (London, ), pp. -.   controversy and forcing officials to rethink their categorization as noble beasts, domestic labourers, wild animals, or ferocious rogues. I In the s, the area known as the 'Addo Bush' was a region of approximately forty-two square kilometres, characterized by dense bush and low rainfall. In the early twentieth century, the bush was thought to be uninhabited by humans and impenetrable: it could only be traversed by cutting it down to clear a path ( Figure ).  Despite this, the bush and its surrounds had a long history of amaXhosa, amaFengu and Khoekhoe occupation and dispossession. The bush itself was a site in which the first major conflicts of the fourth Xhosa frontier war took place.  Xhosa leader Ndlambe had a stronghold within the bush, and between  and , a series of skirmishes between his forces and those of Colonel John Graham took place.  By , the colonial government had firm control over the area, and divided the bush into two forest reserves in an attempt to 'protect' it from human use.  At the end of the century, although the bush was thought to be unoccupied, between  and , indigenous Africans were still farming in the surrounding valley.  In the s, their independence was steadily eroded: a succession of companies purchased large tracts of land for development, and in , the Strathsomers Estate Company passed a motion forbidding all but white settlers from purchasing their estates. This, according to Jane Meiring, reduced the 'status of the native' to 'that of a labourer entirely dependent upon the European farmer for his living'.  By the s, indigenous Africans had largely been dispossessed of their lands, and were living primarily as tenants on white farms, or as labourers. This longer history of dispossession in the Addo region wrote African land-ownership out of the history of the bush.  Bureaucrats, zoologists, and other white civilians in the s assumed that the bush was a primordial landscape and the home of the elephants 'from time immemorial'.  Because of its density and the presence of wild elephants, the bush was thought to be extremely dangerous. Even Frederick Selous, the most famous African big-game hunter of the nineteenth century, feared for his safety in the region, and declined the opportunity to shoot an Addo Elephant.  Some African labourers outright refused to enter the bush, while others would only do so if armed.  Surrounding the bush was the Sundays River Valley, a farming district situated between two major cities, Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown (now Makhanda). Unlike the protected bush, the valley had a relatively long history of colonial agriculture. White settlers had been farming in the region from at least ,  and since the late nineteenth century, the Cape government and several private developers had attempted to convert the region into a citrus, lucerne, and grain-farmer's paradise. These schemes brought more settlers into the area, and as agriculturalists encroached upon the borders of the bush, farmers encountered herds of aggressive, highly mobile elephants.  In , these farmers complained about the elephants to the Alexandria and Uitenhage magistrates, as well as the Cape provincial administration. These great beasts were crossing boundaries between bushveld and farm, drinking borehole water, trampling fences that impeded their path, and occasionally attacking humans. The four government bureaucrats adjudicating farmers' complaints, Lewis Mansergh and Don Janisch of the Cape provincial administrator's office, C. W. Chabaud, the magistrate of Uitenhage, and the magistrate of Alexandria, were sceptical of such claims. The idea that elephants were terrorizing the countryside contradicted a widespread perception of elephants amongst metropolitan elites. These great pachyderms were considered docile, intelligent, and co-operative with humans.  From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, elephants were not thought to be typical pests in the Anglo-world. Elephants fascinated artists, writers, and scientists alike. Wise, compassionate, noble, and humane were some of the adjectives used to describe these great beasts. In Britain and India, as Sujit Sivasundaram has shown, elephants were considered to possess near-human intelligence, human-hand-like trunks, and a penchant for working with humans.  According to Harriet Ritvo, the elephant was often considered one of the most intelligent of all animal species.  This animal, wrote Harvard geology professor Nathaniel Shaler, is 'innately domesticable, and best fitted by nature for companionship with man, of all our great quadrupeds'.  Being 'innately domesticable' was unique: in all other domestic animals except the dog, obedience had been 'slowly developed by thousands of years of selection'.  Elephants, on the other hand, could supposedly be caught in the wild and easily domesticated.  Despite their putative partiality to humans, elephants were also thought capable of treachery. The noble elephant could transform into a ferocious and pathological 'rogue'. According to the Oxford English dictionary, this term first entered British naturalists' vocabularies in traveller James Holman's A voyage around the world (). Holman defined the 'rogue' as 'a large male who has been driven from the herd, after losing a contest for mastery of the whole; or a female wandering from it in quest of her calf'.  Unlike other elephants in Ceylon, rogues were 'cunning and daring', and 'a plague and a terror to the neighbourhood in which they prowl'.  By the s, this concept had been directly linked to agricultural depredations. In the  edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, rogues were defined as 'solitary bulls…of a spiteful disposition' that were 'permanently separated from their kind', due to 'their partiality for cultivated crops'.  As Chris Roche has argued, settlers living alongside elephants in Knysna, South Africa, had a similarly dynamic opinion of the beasts. From the s to the s, the settlers' conceptions of the elephants shifted between culturally valued animals and pests as economic systems changed. By the s, government bureaucrats thought that the Knysna herd, along with the Addo Elephants, were the last remnants of a population of elephants that once abounded the Cape. Settlers in Knysna who encountered them rejected the idea of elephant sagacity. The Knysna Elephants destroyed their crops and harassed people, and were viewed as vermin that 'infested' the forest in the mid-to late nineteenth century.  Despite their protests, Roche argues, as the wildlifeprotection movement grew, well-funded game-protection lobbies were founded, and in  elephants were legally classified as 'Royal Game'.  Under this classification, they could only be hunted with a Royal Game licence and permission from the governor.  Like the Knysna Elephants, as the Addo Elephants crossed the physical borders between farm and veld, they crossed the conceptual margins between Royal Game and vermin. White farmers bitterly resented their classification as Royal Game: the elephants could only legally be shot if they destroyed crops or injured livestock. Yet in this case, the onus of proof lay upon the farmers, and action against an elephant could only be taken after the damage had been done.  Elephant depredations were so severe that farmers insisted that the animals be exterminated.  Yet government officials were unwilling to sanction the death of Royal Game based on this testimony alone. Information was needed from an 'experienced man' as to why the Addo Elephants were behaving in ways that undermined existing knowledge of elephant behaviour.

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In , Chabaud, the magistrate of Uitenhage, suggested that domestication might prove a means of reconciling the human and elephant conflict. Although African elephants were not usually domesticated, he insisted that this was possible, and worth attempting.  Seeking to confirm his views, he contacted Captain James MacQueen, 'a gentleman who has done a lot of exploration work in Central Africa and who is well acquainted with the habits of elephants'.  In his initial conversation with Chabaud, MacQueen connected the concept of a rogue elephant with ideas about degeneration. MacQueen was 'surprised to hear that they are said to be dangerous, as the elephant is inoffensive by nature' and thought that there 'must be some "rogue" elephantsdegeneratesamong them', who were corrupting the herds.  According to British zoologist Edwin Lankester, degeneration constituted a 'gradual change of the structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life'.  This left the 'whole animal in a lower con-dition…than was the ancestral form with which we are comparing it'.  By raiding farms, the Addo Elephants were placed in a 'lower condition' by comparison with the sagacious elephants that MacQueen had encountered in Central Africa. According to Daniel Pick, in Britain, France, and Italy, degeneration in humans was a symptom of advancing civilization and social 'progress' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through alienation from nature, processes of elaboration were being reversed, producing 'degenerate' people.  Animals could also fall prey to degeneration. In his  monograph, Degeneration, Lankester argued that any 'new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration…as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world'.  Evidently convinced by such ideas, MacQueen speculated that the cause of roguery was the combination of advancing civilization upon the bush, and a very poor diet (rather than a lavish Roman one).  In his opinion, one means of resolving the conflict would be to plough up the bush, and cultivate 'sweet potatoes and bananas, of which elephants are very fond'.  If this was done, they would 'become docile and almost domesticated in time'.  Impressed by his knowledge, Chabaud hired MacQueen to visit Addo and assess the situation.  In August , MacQueen surveyed the bush with two white farmers, and a 'native guide called Bartman', and his observations confirmed his speculations.  The Addo Elephants' mischief was the result of 'rogue' elephants who had become 'vicious' by exposure to 'civilization', and farmers who shot indiscriminately, inevitably wounding them.  Bullet-wounds, he speculated, were key in turning an elephant from sagacious to rogue, because wounded elephants 'cannot keep pace with the herd, and will end up taking the vagrant occupation of a rogue'.  Human violence had caused the elephant-degeneracy problem. Addo Elephants were not malicious and destructive agents: their mobility was a response to human brutality. They were forced to cross the line between peaceful and pest, as farmers unjustly extended the boundaries between their farms and the bush.  This said, MacQueen acknowledged that elephant mobility needed to be curtailed and thought that benevolent elephant management provided the solution. Like Chabaud, he suggested that the province create an elephant 'paddock', and 'reclaim' the animals from the wilddomesticate them as had been the norm in India for centuries. MacQueen's 'reclaiming project', which may seem antithetical to nature conservation, has a long history in Anglo-imperial thought.  It was posed in an intellectual milieu which bifurcated the sagacious elephant from the rogue and correlated the degeneration of the African elephant with the putative decadence of the African continent from its 'heights' of Roman and Carthaginian antiquity.
Although Asian elephants had long been utilized by humans in war and forestry, African elephants had not. In the nineteenth century, naturalists from Georges Cuvier to William Jardine, to Francis Galton had speculated whether the African elephant could be 'domesticated', and why no domestication had taken place in Africa for centuries.  As early as , travellers to South Africa such as missionary Henry Methuen had commented on why African elephants had never been 'tame'. For Methuen, the reasons were cultural: the Africans he encountered (amaXhosa) hunted elephants rather than training them.  Methuen thought elephant hunting was cruel and insisted that the animal 'be enlisted in the service of man'.  Not only did Indian elephant trainers (mahouts) provide a model of expertise here, but in antiquity, this feat had been accomplished by Hannibal of Carthage, who trained African elephants for warfare.  Like the Carthaginians, settlers could utilize elephants in conquering the environment and its inhabitants, by employing elephants to eat and trample the 'Fish river bush', a stronghold of the amaXhosa.  In the mid-to late nineteenth century, such discussions became less about cultural difference, and more about hierarchies of race.  In , president of the Royal Geographical Society, Clements Markham, argued that 'The inferiority of the African, as compared with the Hindu, is demonstrated by the latter having domesticated the elephant…while the former…has merely destroyed the elephant for the sake of his ivory tusks.'  This view seems to have been widespread, and excolonial administrator of Singapore John Crawfurd (),  as well as James Tennent ()  offered near identical arguments. Others, such as big-game hunter Charles Andersson (), and veterinarian John Steel (), thought the lack of African elephant domestication was connected with the 'decline' of the continent from its 'heights' of Roman and Carthaginian civilization.  During and after the Berlin Conference of -, the African elephant became captive to British developmentalist rhetoric: a symbol of, and a tool for, 'civilizing' the continent. Numerous British scholars saw the domestication of the elephant as a means of reclaiming the putative glory of North African antiquity. The new 'superior' race in British Africathe Anglo-Saxonscould 'civilize' the beast. According to such thinkers, if domesticated, elephants, like Africans, would not degenerate as a result of advancing civilization but stood to benefit: domestication would accelerate their mental evolution. In , Scottish zoologist Andrew Wilson suggested elephants were 'susceptible of higher development, through domestication'.  Domesticated elephants would benefit colonial survey-teams by serving as steeds that could traverse impenetrable jungles without fear of predators.  These animals could even assist in securing Rhodes's vision of Cape-to-Cairo: British imperialists could train elephants to construct railway lines across the continent ( Figure  For these British imperialists, as well as Chabaud and MacQueen in the Cape Province, the African elephant was thus not a naturally 'wild' species that should be left undisturbed. Elephants were powerful imperial agents, who wanted the benefits of 'civilized life and employment'.  Domestication represented the apex of elephant evolution, and their 'decline' in Africa was a result of continental degeneration. While Hindus had successfully domesticated the animals, indigenous Africans had not. This 'inability' to master a docile animal that was naturally predisposed to co-operating with humans was taken as evidence of biological African inability to manage nature. To address this, a multispecies civilizing mission was needed: both African humans and elephants could be 'civilized' through employment. MacQueen's domestication proposal needs to be viewed within this intellectual landscapelike much of Africa, the Addo Bush was constructed as a backward, wild, and violent space from which the noble and 'innately domesticable' elephant could be uplifted.

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Unlike MacQueen and Chabaud, other Cape provincial bureaucrats were less convinced by nineteenth-century literature on elephant domestication. In May , MacQueen's domestication proposal was debated. Secretary of the Cape provincial administration J. Warrington-Smyth made enquiries into whether the animals could 'be kraaled and tamed' by mahouts.  In the course of his enquiries, he realized that this was not economically feasible. Capturing the animals would be difficult because of the dense bush, and the elephants were too expensive as labourers, given their voracious appetite.  Lewis Mansergh, a bureaucrat in the Cape provincial administrator's office drew upon racial science to dismiss the proposal. Economic issues aside, although he recognized that the 'taming and employment of the elephants for services such as they render to man in India…might open a new era', there was insufficient Indian labour to perform 'such an experiment'.  Perhaps concerned about growing anti-Indian sentiment amongst whites, Gandhi's political activism in Natal, and the recent Natal Indian Strike of November ,  he also felt it was not a 'suitable time to import men from India', but was willing to employ a 'trustworthy European'.  However, the issue was complicated by a greater labour problem: in the absence of Indian labourers, indigenous South Africans would be required to direct the elephants. Such labourers, in Mansergh's view, were unsuitable for this task: Handling the animals is not natural to the Native of South Africa, and in his present stage of development it is unlikely that he would readily adapt himself to a calling which, to be successfully proceeded with, one would think would involve some hereditary qualities or, at least traditional if not some natural or national characteristics.  Mansergh's ideas were presented as common-sense but require further analysis. Drawing upon Anglo-imperialist rhetoric which had correlated elephant domestication with hierarchies of civilization, Mansergh suggested that over centuries of co-evolution elephants had learned to respect Indians, and such characteristics were passed down generations in elephant populations. Indigenous South Africans, contrastingly, had never domesticated elephants, and thus were not naturally predisposed to this task. Even if they learned from mahouts, the  In , evidence to the contrary of Mansergh's view already existed. In the s, the Belgian Congo government, with the assistance of Indian mahouts, had established a keddah (elephant training establishment) and trained elephants for timber hauling. Zande peoples were employed as mahouts.  Yet this could also be explained in terms of racial difference: the Azande had 'Hamatic and Berberine ancestry', which rendered them 'natural born mahouts of Africa, the lineal descendants of Hannibal's Nubians', who had domesticated African elephants in antiquity.  Without any South African 'natives' sharing such ancestry, the domestication proposal was discarded by the Cape provincial government. On  April , the provincial council of the Cape met to formulate an alternative. Politician Mr Ross was anxious to preserve the elephants, because they were 'the last surviving remnant in the Southern portion of the Continent of the great African fauna'.  In an attempt to stabilize the status of the Addo Elephants as a protected species, and not a pest, the council resolved to create an elephant reserve. This would allow them to curtail elephant mobility, regulate livestock, and prevent cattle from wandering into the area and 'possibly irritate the elephants'.  By mid-, this proposal had irritated farmers, who complained that the elephants continued to lay waste to their properties. They claimed to be defenceless against the 'wily brutes' who had already killed and 'shockingly mutilated' several farmers in the area.  If the Cape provincial administration insisted on protecting the Addo Elephants, argued farmer Louis Walton, they should compensate the farmers financially.  In September, thirteen farmers signed a petition demanding the extermination of the elephants.   There are parallels in British Burma in this period. Burmese elephant trainers were considered racially suited to the task on account of their skin which could supposedly withstand exposure to rough elephant hair without causing rashes.

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As the elephants continued to trample crops and fences while moving between bush and farm, this physical mobility forced state officials to reconsider MacQueen's categorization of the species as naturally peaceful. The 'degenerate' rogue elephants were too dangerous to be allowed to live, but killing any elephant, they feared, would enrage the other elephants, and drive the entire population to roguery. Wholesale extermination was the only safe course of action.  More importantly, in , the Sundays River Settlement Scheme, an irrigation and town-building project, began attracting farmers from across the world.  The Sundays River settlements could not afford to be destroyed by elephant mobility, and the enclosure of the bush was too expensive to entertain.  Given these new economic constrains, elephant 'civilization' was no longer a possibility. Unable to prevent the elephants from crossing physical boundaries between bush and farm, the provincial government could not prevent them from crossing conceptual margins between 'Royal Game' and 'vermin'. On  April , the provincial government under Frederic de Waal resolved to exterminate the animals.  One month later, the task was given to famed elephant hunter Phillip Jacobus Pretorius.  Pretorius came at a price but managed to convince the administration that the operation would be profitable. The sale of elephant skeletons and skins for museums, ivory and meat for the market, and the capture of calves for zoos would fetch a total of £,.  At the end of May, the hunt began. This was the first step towards physically (but not conceptually) transforming the bush from a wasteland into a semi-domestic space and involved carving roads in a four-by-four grid, and erecting shooting platforms.  Pretorius's hunt was mired with difficulties. He battled to recruit African labourwith an abundance of agricultural jobs in the region, few labourers were willing to risk their lives hunting elephantsand only a group of desperate ex-convicts agreed to work for him.  Although it had been intended as a quick and profitable hunt, the operation dragged on for more than a year, and by mid-, zoologists in South Africa, Britain, and the USA began campaigning for the cessation of the slaughter. While some of these scientists made economic arguments for elephant domestication, most mobilized racial science to articulate their value to zoology. This ultimately became the primary argument for elephant-protection and is directly correlated with the foundation of the park. The South African Association for the Advancement of Science (SA)the largest science society of the countrybegan pushing a taxonomic argument in favour of their preservation.  In , Paul Matschie, a German zoologist, had compared eighteen elephant specimens, and suggested that African elephants exhibited considerable skull and ear variation relative to their environments.  In his view, they needed to be divided into four regional races.  In , British zoologist Richard Lydekker suggested that further sub-races should be created on the basis of ear-comparison. One of these was what he referred to as the 'Addo Bush, or East Cape Elephant'.  The Addo Bush elephant was categorized as a unique type ( Figure ).
In August , SA issued a statement, drawing upon this taxonomic argument and infusing it with eugenic tropes of 'dying races' that were already in circulation across South Africa, but typically applied to humans.  At a meeting in July, J. R. L. Kingon proposed that SA adopt a resolution that 'this Association views with great regret the decision…to exterminate the herd of Cape elephants, relics of a dying race, now preserved in the Addo Bush'.  Subsequently, SA circulated a memorandum, suggesting that the remaining elephants be preserved in the interests of science, and the 'young animals…be trained for labour', while the 'rogues, should, of course be shot'.  SA suggested that the elephants were not all 'degenerates', but a unique race of importance to zoology that could be preserved in peace.
One month later, the Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth farmers associations met to discuss this, and other protests against the slaughter of the elephants. In this meeting, the status of the Addo Elephants as a unique racial type did little to change the farmers' perspectives. They insisted that the elephants were naturally violent, and that it was a choice between 'protecting human life or protecting animal life'.  They were also declared to be prone to criminality: farmer Jack Harvey insisted that the elephant was 'always a thief, and a thief of the worst nature'.  Another farmer, C. H. Mackay, rose in support of Harvey, claiming that the elephants 'played football' with his pumpkins.  In his opinion, the 'scientific value' of the herd could be preserved by the supply of 'representative specimens free of cost' to the Port Elizabeth Museum.  Despite such arguments, the operation was becoming costly. In order to sell the specimens to zoologists, Pretorius agreed to skin the animals, collect their bones and ivory, and make measurements of their morphology. This was time consuming, and nearing the end of October, Pretorius had killed only thirteen elephants.  Although the government had assumed the elephant remains would be valuable, insects and carnivores feasted upon them in the field, and few museums were willing to pay for those that survived. Ivory sales were negligible: almost all the elephants had minute or absent tusks. A mere £ of £, expenditure was recovered ( Figure ).  By this point, SA's resolution that the elephants were a 'dying race' had found traction in North America and Britain, and the government was under pressure to prevent what Science called a 'zoological calamity'.  Directors of three major South African Natural History Museums, Louis Peringuey (South African Museum), Frederick FitzSimons (Port Elizabeth Museum), and Ernest Warren (Natal Museum), were all vocally opposed to the hunt.  Alwin Karl Haagner, of the National Zoological Gardens, also condemned it as a 'calamity' and propagated a plea for the government to reconsider domestication ( Figure ).  With the elephants worthless as dead specimens, their living value to science provided a new rationale for their preservation. Under pressure from zoologists, the expense of the hunt did not seem justified. Seeking to 'pocket' their losses,  the administration renegotiated with Pretorius. The ultimate outcome of the negotiations was that Pretorius would stop collecting specimens, and kill all but sixteen elephants, at a rate of £ per elephant.  In December , an elephant reserve for the remaining sixteen was created in an attempt to stabilize their categorization as a scientifically valuable species. Under the ward of the province, no humans nor livestock could enter the reserve.  Human and elephant spaces were thoroughly segregatedany human entering the reserve was to be prosecuted, and any elephants leaving their 'sanctuary' could be shot.  From  to , although economic concerns were of importance, every decision was justified by recourse to interlinked ideas about race, evolution, civilization, and degeneration. Because indigenous South Africans were considered incapable of domesticating the elephants, the provincial government attempted to segregate the animals in a 'wild' space. Facing opposition from farmers, officials subsequently resolved to eliminate the population to protect humans from 'degenerate' rogues. Now, protecting the elephants against the wishes of the farmers had been justified according to eugenic concerns about the elephants' distinct character as a 'dying race' (Figure ).

I I I
By the time the reserve was created, the Addo Bush had been physically pacified. The elephant population was a fraction of its former size, a section of the bush had been cut into a grid, and its boundaries were delineated. Yet the monthly reports of elephant caretaker J. J. Millard suggest that the Addo Elephants wanted nothing to do with the reserve.  This, most commentators thought, was the result of a lack of water in the region.  Others offered psychological interpretations. Zoologist Frederick FitzSimons thought the animals were traumatized by Pretorius's devastation of their friends, and no longer wished to reside in a space violated by memories of terror.  Bureaucrats began to recognize that the area designated as wild (the Addo Bush) would never be appealing to animals accustomed to drinking farmers' water supplies and eating their crops. Throughout the s, the administration continued transforming the bush into a semi-domestic space by erecting boreholes and reservoirs, in the hope that elephants would utilize these water supplies, rather than those belonging to farmers.  Once sufficient water was provided, in , Harold Trollope, a game ranger from the Kruger National Park, and a team of African labourers drove the elephants into the reserve.  Shortly after the drive was complete, the area was declared a national park, with Trollope as its warden.  The elephants, who had once freely roamed the Sundays River Valley, were now to be confined in a small reserve. At this point, seeking to capitalize upon the zoological curiosity of the elephants, and their close proximity to Port Elizabeth, the Port Elizabeth Publicity Board attempted to transform the park into a tourist spectacle.  The near-impenetrable bush rendered this difficult: nobody could see the elephants, and the animals dared not approach humans. In order to solve this problem, attempts were made to tame the elephants. Between  and , Trollope commenced a 'feeding experiment',  in which he tried to train the animals to venture into the open by feeding them oranges, in the hope that they might 'lose their fear of man'.  Between  and , elephant management in the Addo Bush followed MacQueen's original suggestion for rendering the elephants 'docile and almost domesticated in time':  in order to regain their trust, they were given a paddock and offered sustenance. Yet this was never referred to as a domestication project. Instead, the word 'tame', once interchangeable with 'domesticated', was used exclusively and began to take on a new meaning: the