GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons sparked outrage yesterday by releasing a video of himself killing an elephant. After we wrote a post critical of the video, Parsons got in touch with us and asked to tell his side of the story.
“I've been going to Africa for six years,” he says, “and I progressively became aware of the elephant situation and what a problem it is for the locals.”
The "elephant situation," he says, has been a problem for local governments and wildlife officials for years. As humans in Zimbabwe struggled to find room to live and farm, they have appropriated land previously inhabited only by wildlife. This has set up a struggle between human needs and animal habits, where subsistence farmers battle wildlife such as elephants to keep their crops from being destroyed.
The issue of human encroachment had driven several hundred of Zimbabwe's 60,000 to 100,000 elephants out of the country by 2009. But Parsons says elephants are still "very abundant" — at least, according to the villagers whose livelihoods are threatened by elephant herds, which frequently come into a village and trample fields of corn and sorghum."In Zimbabwe, the people there are incredibly impoverished," said Parsons. "They treasure an empty plastic water bottle. It's heart-wrenching to watch ... These people are all subsistence farmers, and if they don't have a good harvest, they starve. That's it — there's no support, there's no welfare, and if they starve, they will die."
To keep elephants from trampling crops, villagers try building fires, banging drums, cracking whips and even building fences. But the light and noise are ignored, and the fences, Parson says, just get trampled. Electric fences, this deep into the African bush, aren't a realistic solution. Parsons says he hoped to solve the crop-trampling problem for these villagers in a different way.
Why Shoot An Elephant?
When Parsons was called on for assistance by a local farmer whose fields were being destroyed by a herd of elephants, he says, he had a plan in place. He claims he wanted to avoid shooting elephant cows because of the matriarchal structure of an elephant herd. "Taking a bull has little or no impact on the social structure or herd size," says Parsons.
"This farmer was desperate," Parsons says. "He couldn't get the herd out of his field. He asked us to come and deal with it."
As his party approached the sorghum field that night, Parsons says, "There was no moon, no stars; it was pitch dark. I couldn't see three feet in front of me. We were moving though the field, and all we could do was use our hearing to find them. That took an hour and a half."
When the herd realized there were humans in the field about 15 yards away from them, Parsons says they turned to attack the group. At that point, the party turned on the lights they had available. "We picked out the largest bull," Parsons says, "and we shot and killed it. The rest of the herd left and never came back." The farmer was able to harvest what remained of his crop.
The killed elephant was then used by the villagers for food, a practice that the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has green-lit during times of economic hardship and hunger.
Parsons v. PETA
Animal rights activists have taken a harsh tone toward Parsons' actions, saying there are many other ways the elephants could have been removed from the fields. Parsons claims many of these methods have already been tried and have failed. “If you want to go and try to chase an elephant out of a field with a beehive, I'll video it,” he says.
Parsons claims his critics are out of touch with the reality of life in Zimbabwe. "These people look at this from the context of being Americans," he says. "We're well-fed and isolated from the process of growing and butchering meat. We see this, and we're horrified. Their hearts are in the right place, but they just don't understand what's going on over there."
Parsons sees himself as something of a savior. "If you had the choice to take a few elephants or to let people starve," he says, "what choice would you make?"
Many viewers of the video have accused the CEO of gloating about his kill. But Parsons claims his attitude was far from arrogant.
"When you see me smiling in that picture, I'm smiling because I'm relieved no one was hurt, that the crop was saved, and that these people were going to be fed — the type of smile when you get a good report card or achieve a goal," he says.
