On the women guarding Zimbabwe’s elephants.
In 2017, sixteen women walked into the Zimbabwean bush to stop poachers.
Some had survived domestic violence.
Some had survived sexual assault.
Some were raising children alone, with almost nothing.
Nobody had ever trusted them with anything worth protecting.
Now they were protecting elephants.
They became Akashinga. In Shona, the brave ones.
National Geographic followed them as they trained, patrolled and confronted the people killing wildlife for profit.
Akashinga was founded by Damien Mander, a former Australian special forces soldier. He recruited women from poor rural communities and gave them training, a salary and a role in protecting the land they grew up on.
That last part matters.
Conservation loves a story in which wildlife only became valuable once outsiders arrived to protect it.
Zimbabwe never needed that lesson.
Shona communities lived by totems, ancestral beliefs and customary rules that governed which animals could be hunted and which resources could be taken. Nature wasn’t a wilderness behind a fence. It was law, family and memory.
What changed wasn’t how much people valued wildlife.
It was who got to decide what happened to it.
Akashinga puts local women on the front line. For decades, conservation treated the communities living beside parks as the problem to keep out.
Now those communities are the ones keeping watch.
The program also breaks the idea that conservation is something wealthy Westerners do on vacation.
And there’s one more detail that’s easy to skim past.
The rangers eat a plant-based diet.
They patrol the bush and face down poachers on it.
Mander himself is vegan.
So much for plant-based food being a soft, urban luxury for people with yoga mats and oat milk.
That detail brings me to the question I can’t put down.
We fly across continents to see elephants.
We donate to save them.
We mourn when they’re killed.
Then we grill a pig and call it Sunday.
Why?
Not because we’ve weighed what each animal does for the planet.
We protect the animals that move us. Researchers who tracked thousands of zoo donors found people backed the species they found charismatic, not the ones closest to extinction.
Even people who share their land with elephants think this way. In northeast India, tea-estate communities support elephant conservation out of cultural reverence and a belief in the animal’s right to exist, not for anything it does for the ecosystem.
And we eat the animals we were raised to eat. When people defend meat, nearly every justification falls into four buckets: natural, normal, necessary and nice.
Tradition and taste, dressed up as reasons.
None of them has anything to say about a pig’s suffering.
We inherit categories. Companion. Food. Sacred. Pest. Every culture draws those lines differently, and every culture believes its own lines are obvious.
Then the food system finishes the job. By the time a pig reaches the supermarket shelf, there’s no pig left. Just a product, packaged so nobody has to wonder where it came from.
Familiarity isn’t an argument.
And the contradiction isn’t only moral.
Livestock and the crops grown to feed them swallow enormous amounts of land. Cattle ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Globally, livestock produce a sixth of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.
So we pay rangers to defend wildlife while our plates finance the destruction of the places wildlife lives.
Yes, subsidies, trade rules and corporations shape the system far more than any single shopper.
That’s a reason to demand better policy.
It’s not an excuse to eat as if nothing is connected.
I wrote recently that conservation is usually the bill we pay after treating the natural world like a warehouse.
This is the same bill.
We just pay it at dinner.
I can’t think about any of this without thinking about Islam.
It gives me three words for our place in creation.
Khalifah, or stewardship.
Amanah, or trust.
Mizan, or balance.
None of them mean ownership. Power over other creatures isn’t a license. It’s a debt.
The Quran permits eating certain animals. It doesn’t command veganism, and I won’t pretend it does.
But permission isn’t obligation.
Halal tells us what we’re allowed to eat.
Tayyib asks whether it’s good. Pure. Wholesome.
Was the animal raised, killed and brought to our table in a way we could defend?
Most of us stop at the first question.
I can’t stop at the second.
If I’m a steward, that animal’s safety was entrusted to me.
So the real question isn’t whether I’m allowed to eat it.
It’s whether I should cowardly pay someone else to kill an innocent, sentient being I’m meant to protect, when my plate has countless options that don’t require a death.
For me, the answer is obviously no.
That’s where faith stops being a rulebook and becomes a conscience.
The women of Akashinga know what it means to live at the mercy of someone stronger.
Today, they stand between the strong and the defenseless.
They protect elephants from people who look at a living animal and see only what it’s worth to them.
That’s the habit they fight every day.
I find the same habit on my plate.
Teekay
