It is a sobering thought to think that Maggie survived a similar scene to the following description of an elephant cull in Zimbabwe observed and recorded by Oria Douglas-Hamilton.

Already the spotter plane was up. The guns were gathered, the men were dressed for action; yellow overalls for the meat cutters, blue for the scouts in their sinister black trucks. The capture cars with their creates were waiting. So were the hunting cars in which the gun-bearers lounged, cartridge pouches strapped around their chests; and the hunters, swashbuckling figures weighted down with ammunition belts and holstered knives ...

We crept downwind to where the elephants were feeding. Unaware of our presence, they ambled along, plucking at leaves ... The killing team fanned out, guns at the ready ... Then all hell exploded ... dust rising, branches breaking, elephants falling everywhere.

One bull screamed in pain. He had been hit in the spine which immobilized his hind legs. On the right flank a cow ran straight into a lethal fusillade and went down as if pole-axed ... There was no escape. The gunmen moved fast now, jumping onto the quivering corpses to deliver rapid brain shots for any that were not quite dead, running over the warm, soft, yielding bodies...

The stricken bull instantly collapsed onto his sternum, and from his head a wine-red jet of blood pumped onto the dry ground. His amber eyes were open and seemed to be watching everyone ... The only survivors were two small babies. One was pushing into his mother as if trying to raise her to her feet ... Five men pounced on him. A rope was slung around his leg while they tied him to his dead mother's foot ...

Hardly had the last shots died away than the men in blue were running in to cut the throats. The researcher, with his chalk, carefully wrote numbers in a white circle on each gray forehead. Then the men in yellow arrived with meat hooks and knives. Each group chose an elephant. A slit down the middle of the back, and with rapid flicks of the knife they pulled off the heavy gray slabs of skin. Then the cutters set to work, hacking and chopping. Ears were peeled off, tusks wrenched out and trunks rolled away until one by one the massive bodies were reduced to nothing but a bloody wreckage of bones.

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The intense mayhem of a culling operation not only traumatizes the orphaned youngsters leaving an indelible mark on their psyche, we now know that these "killing fields" can be alerted to elephants for miles around by means of infra-sonic distress calls.