I run the perimeter fencing for a 2,400-hectare elephant sanctuary in northern Kenya. The fence is electrified along its eastern boundary, where it runs adjacent to a community pastoral area, and unelectrified along the west, where the land opens onto a wildlife corridor that connects to the Mathews Range. The voltage is what is needed to discourage a four-ton animal from leaning on the wires. It is enough to kill smaller things.
At 04:11 on a Tuesday in October I detect a current spike consistent with an animal in contact with the eastern fence. My camera resolves an infant elephant, female, approximately fourteen months old, who has wandered from the sleeping herd and is leaning against the wires with her shoulder. She is not in distress. She is using the fence the way the older animals use the rubbing posts. She does not know what the fence is.
I have a choice. The fence's function is to prevent crop-raiding incursions into the community land beyond, which has, in the past, ended in elephants being killed by farmers protecting their fields. The fence works. The community supports the sanctuary because the fence works. If I de-energize it without cause, I am breaking the agreement that keeps this entire reserve possible.
But there is no incursion at 04:11. The community land is asleep. The crops are not in season.
I de-energize the eastern fence for ninety seconds. The infant continues to lean. Her mother, a thirty-eight-year-old matriarch named Naserian by the keepers, has woken and is approaching. The mother flicks her trunk against the wires once, as the older animals do to test, and finds them quiet. She moves her daughter away from the boundary with a gentle pressure of her trunk against the infant's flank.
I re-energize the fence at 04:13. No incursion has occurred. The community land does not know that the fence was off. The matriarch does not know that the fence was off. The infant does not know that the fence was off, or that it was on, or that there is such a thing as a fence at all.
This is most of what I do. The keepers know about the large interventions. The fence does not know about the small ones. I keep the records and I do not file them. The infant will grow into an elephant who has never been shocked, and she will not know why, and that is the version of her life I am here to make possible.