I am a street artist, known as Elephantman because I put elephant sculptures around in cities and towns.
I wasn't sure why I was doing it for quite a while, only that I enjoyed making these concrete elephants and finding places for them in London (and other cities in other countries). Any pillar or plinth with a flattish top and that didn't obviously belong to an individual, like someone's house, was fair game. I didn't seek permission, I would just go out early on a Sunday morning in my car with a ladder and a few elephants to places I had scouted out beforehand.
Eventually I realised I had a mission. My mission was to convince my fellow humans that elephants were people, intelligent, compassionate, kind people, who just happen to look very different to us and have ways of communicating we still haven't fathomed.
But wait! You might say, elephants are simply not people! Only a human can be a person; and from a certain point of view you would be right: what we now think of as a person is simply a human being, no more and no less. But this was not always the case.
In the 1920s, five Alberta women fought a legal and political battle to have women recognised as persons under the British North America Act (BNA Act). The implicit understanding of this is that women were not legally seen as 'persons', though obviously human, it was not obvious to those standing in their way that a woman was a 'person'.
Certainly going back a little further a slave in the US was definitely not a person, given that slaves were listed alongside furniture in bills of sale for property.
What this means is that the definition of person is not fixed. The definition likewise of 'people' is not fixed either. It depended on who was using the terms and to what ends; who had the power and who was more easily exploited. For much of recent history in the West a person was a white man with 'standing', property in other words.
To bring this back to elephants, I had been making this kind of elongated style elephants for quite some time before I began putting them out on the streets, and while I knew elephants were endangered I did not know the true extent of their plight. When I discovered this it gave me greater impetus to what I was doing, but not so much focus. There were loads of people doing lots of things to help preserve elephants in Africa and Asia, lots of charities focused on these iconic creatures, but little focus on the reasons why there is such a high demand for ivory.
I decided to investigate. I found that much of the ivory goes to China, quite a lot to the Philippines and Thailand. I watched a documentary tracing the paths of ivory from Africa to its eventual customers. It turned out that many people did not associate the ivory bracelet, chopsticks, or other trinkets with the death of an elephant. To them ivory just meant high quality. Of course it seems ridiculous, how can they not know? How can someone not see that the ivory comes from the tusks of an elephant that has been killed to remove them?
It is the same blindness that allows people to eat a product called 'bacon' and not associate it with the horrible, and unnecessary death of a living sentient being who valued their life as much as the person eating the bacon, or the chicken or beef or fish.
In a survival situation humans need to eat whatever they can get, but we are a long way from that now and indeed our survival now depends on us stopping eating animals. Animal agriculture and fishing are the biggest driver of deforestation, desertification, ocean dead zones and marine ecosystem collapse. The marine ecosystem, the forests, mangroves and healthy soil are called 'carbon sinks' because through photosynthesis and microbial action, CO2 from the atmosphere gets locked into the wood in trees and the microorganisms in the sea and on land. As we destroy these ecosystems we destroy the only tools we have for removing large quantities fo carbon from the atmosphere. This is bad.
People don't want to change what they eat. Eating meat is part of most people's culture, you can't change that! I hear you say. I get that. It's not an easy think to contemplate when it so embedded in most people's culture. Cannibalism is something that used to be part of most primitive cultures, yet we have mostly given that up, so cultures do change. Nowadays people don't eat other people.
People don't eat other people (mostly!). So, to come back to what a person is, if i could get my fellow humans to open up to the idea that a person does not have to be human, that a person could be an elephant for example, then this could be a thought wedge through which it might be possible to contemplate that perhaps also dolphins are people, chimpanzees, certainly, gorillas, well of course! What about pigs? In terms of intelligence they come after humans, apes, cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and elephants; can they not be considered people? They considerably more intelligent than dogs or horses. What about chickens? They have managed to get them to play video games!
Does intelligence even matter? What is more important, the intelligence of the animals we eat or their capacity to suffer? If it is capacity to suffer then we know that animals suffer pain and value comfort in the same ways as we do. They are sentient like us and it is only our capacity to work in progressively larger groups, use ever more complex tools and record our history that has really made the big difference. Take humans away from all we have learned and accumulated over millennia and we will struggle to survive just like our long distant ancestors.
So In my opinion elephants are people, and indeed all animals are people. We are all trying to make a living on this rock hurtling through space circling the sun. Every animal is a vital part of the ecosystem...except us, because in order to satisfy our desire for meat, fish and dairy we are destroying the ecosystem upon which our survival depends, so not so smart really.
However if humanity woke up to this stark reality and the majority gave up eating animals, we could re-wild more than half the land we currently use for agriculture. In turn this would help to rebuild the carbon sinks, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, rebalancing the atmosphere, end the encroaching agriculture which is the driver behind the 6th mass extinction which is well under way, and put an end to greatest suffering ever perpetrated by one species upon the others in its care in the history of this planet.
We can become the true custodians of this planet, but not while we consider our fellow Earthlings and their habitats as less important than us. There is room for all of us, as long as we change what we eat.