Lawrence Anthony, South African conservationist, dies at 61

[Steve Hayes]

Lawrence Anthony, South African conservationist, dies at 61

By Emily Langer,

Lawrence Anthony, a South African conservationist who charged into the Baghdad
Zoo during the U.S. invasion of 2003 and led an animal rescue effort that
united warring soldiers, mullahs and Iraqi civilians, died March 2 in
Johannesburg. He was 61.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Francoise Malby-Anthony.

Mr. Anthony, a self-described “bush child” with no formal training in zoology,
spent the better part of his life trying to shelter wild animals from the
ravages of human conflict.

In the mid-1990s, after forays into insurance sales and real estate
development, he bought a private game reserve about a two-hour drive from
Durban. He founded an environmental group, called the Earth Organization, and
convinced neighboring Zulu tribes to put aside their differences where African
animals were concerned.

Years later, Mr. Anthony muscled his way into diplomatic negotiations with the
Lord’s Resistance Army, the militant group from northern Uganda that is led by
accused war criminal Joseph Kony. Appealing to local tribal beliefs, Mr.
Anthony convinced the rebels not to kill the endangered northern white
rhinoceros, which lived in the dense forest under the group’s control.

On his own land, Mr. Anthony took in and tamed a herd of wild elephants that
otherwise would have been killed. For that feat, he became known as “the
elephant whisperer.”

Mr. Anthony was on his reserve — called Thula Thula, or “peace and
tranquillity” in the Zulu language — when the United States led coalition
forces into Iraq in March 2003 to topple dictator Saddam Hussein. Watching the
invasion on CNN, Mr. Anthony thought immediately of the Baghdad Zoo.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of the animals dying in their cages,” he told
the Observer newspaper in England. “I couldn’t get any support from anybody so
I thought, I’ll just go. I went there for the animals.”

A U.S. soldier later told Mr. Anthony that, other than journalists, he was
among the first civilians to enter Baghdad after the invasion.

He went into the city with two Kuwaiti zookeepers and found that the situation
was far more dire than he had expected. Only 35 of the zoo’s 650 animals were
alive, he later told reporters. The others had been sold on the black market
or killed by looters.

If the animal “didn’t have fangs big enough or claws big enough to protect
itself, they took it,” he told National Public Radio. “Baghdad was starving at
the time. . . . They were eating the animals.”

The aftermath at the zoo was a macabre scene. Carcasses were strewn about the
grounds. Monkeys and birds that had managed to flee were still on the run. The
big cats and an Iraqi bear, which was reputed to have killed three looters,
had survived but only barely; they appeared traumatized and hungry. Mr.
Anthony considered shooting them in pity.

The zoo’s staff members, Mr. Anthony told NPR, were “as hungry as the animals
were.” When he called his wife from his satellite phone, she could hear the
ongoing bombardments.

In those harrowing circumstances, Mr. Anthony said, “something amazing
happened.” Iraqis, coalition forces and members of Hussein’s Republican Guard
found a common cause: the animals. Local mullahs, or clerical leaders, put out
the order that the work was not to be disrupted.

“We had Republican Guard soldiers working with American troops in the zoo two
weeks after they were killing each other,” Mr. Anthony told the Observer.

Together, the workers scoured the city for surviving animals and carried
camels and ostriches back to the zoo on Humvees and armored vehicles. Mr.
Anthony personally rescued pet lions from the abandoned palace of Saddam’s son
Uday Hussein.

The story is recounted in the book “Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime
Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo” (2008), which Mr. Anthony wrote with his
brother-in-law Graham Spence. The next year, the two men published “The
Elephant Whisperer,” an account of his relationship with the elephants he
welcomed onto his land.

When the matriarch elephant gave birth to the first calf born under Mr.
Anthony’s care, she presented the new arrival to Mr. Anthony. (When his first
grandchild was born, he returned the favor and brought the baby to the
elephant.)

Lawrence Anthony was born Sept. 17, 1950, in Johannesburg, the grandson of a
Scottish miner who had settled in South Africa. As a boy, he was disturbed by
stories of the thousands of animals who died at the Berlin Zoo during the
Allied bombings of World War II.

Mr. Anthony’s first marriage, to Hilary Morgan, ended in divorce.

Survivors include Francoise Malby-Anthony, his partner of 25 years and wife
since 2006, who lives on Thula Thula; two sons from his first marriage, Dylan
Anthony and Jason Anthony, both of Durban; his mother, Regina Anthony, who
lives on a residential game reserve near Empangeni, South Africa; a sister; a
brother; and two grandsons.

“The Last Rhinos,” a book about Mr. Anthony’s talks with the LRA, is
forthcoming. Those negotiations appeared to have come too late. In 2006, when
the rebels agreed not to disturb the northern white rhino, four of the animals
were thought to be alive in the wild. By the time of his death, Mr. Anthony
believed the last of them to be gone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/lawrence-anthony-south-african-conservationist-dies-at-61/2012/03/14/gIQAvXc6CS_story.html


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk