As Baghdad burnt in April 2003 Lawrence Anthony, a noted wildlife conservationist from South Africa, drove to the city’s zoo. The air was thick with flies. Many of the hundreds of animals were dead and decomposing. Monkeys roamed among the rubbish and escaped falcons circled above. Other animals, giraffes, antelopes and camels, unable to defend themselves, had been looted and sold on the black market or killed for food.
“Lovebirds and macaws were eaten like chickens,” Anthony said. American soldiers shot four lions that had escaped through holes blown in the zoo’s walls by shells. The 35 animals that remained — a few lions, tigers, wild boar, a porcupine and brown bears, were starving and ill. Some survived by scavenging on United States ration packs. With the city still in chaos, Anthony considered that simply shooting them might be kindest.
Only a few weeks earlier he had been at home on his sprawling game reserve in South Africa watching the bombardment of Baghdad on television. Having heard of the terrible fate of many animals in German zoos during the Second World War and knowing that Baghdad had one of the largest zoos in the Middle East, he asked the US and British authorities if there were any plans to protect its occupants. “Nobody was interested,” he said. “I couldn’t get any support from anybody so I thought, I’ll just go.”
He arrived at the Kuwait-Iraq border in a hired car carrying veterinary supplies. US tanks were crossing into Iraq but he was barred from following them until he got permission to enter the country from the Kuwaitis. With two guides he drove in convoy with the Americans to the capital. Later he said it was naivety, not bravery, that kept him driving on to the zoo, as he realised that the city was still in bloody turmoil and the scenes of cheering, liberated Iraqis that he had seen in the media were only a small part of the story. Anthony was met at the ruins of the zoo by its weeping deputy director.
Over the next few months, with its director, a handful of staff, his Kuwaiti guides and the manager from his game reserve, Anthony set about restoring and sanitising the zoo. Wads of dollars were exchanged for donkeys to feed the carnivores and, with no electricity or running water, filthy water was carried through the heat by bucket from a nearby canal.
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Anthony organised an operation to rescue six young lions and two cheetahs from the private zoo of Uday Hussein, the brutal son of the fleeing dictator Saddam. Having no tranquillisers, the team had to lure the creatures into vehicles with raw meat. Soon Anthony was joined at the zoo by South African special forces soldiers, who guarded the animals against looters, and off-duty US troops who welded together broken bars, and even members of the Iraqi Republican Guard who cleaned and dug alongside the Americans with whom only a short time before they had been fighting.
With a group of GIs Anthony launched a successful rescue of some of Saddam Hussein’s Arabian horses that had been looted from his palace. As the situation in Baghdad improved, aid from conservation agencies began to reach the zoo. Six months later it was in working order and was reopened. Anthony returned to South Africa.
The zoo continued to recover despite the continuing unrest. Money poured in to restore the surrounding gardens, and in 2008 a US animal sanctuary donated two tiger cubs. Anthony’s efforts in Baghdad earned him the US 3rd Infantry Division regimental medal for bravery and the UN Earth Day Medal.
It was perhaps the most remarkable story in a career littered with unusual conservation achievements, at the heart of which lay his work with African elephants on his beloved reserve.
Lawrence Anthony was born in 1950 in Johannesburg. His grandfather, a miner, had emigrated to South Africa from Scotland. His father set up an insurance business which involved moving his family around southern Africa. Anthony followed his father into insurance and then property.
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His childhood love of nature, rather than any scientific background, drove him in the 1990s to buy 5,000 acres of bushland — the Thula Thula game reserve in KwaZulu-Natal — which was to become his family’s home and a safari lodge. His enduring work there was to involve rural people in projects on their land and to encourage them to see the benefits of conservation.
One day Anthony was asked if he would look after a herd of troublesome elephants that had escaped from all their previous enclosures and were at risk of being shot. The elephants arrived angry and traumatised, but Anthony was determined to earn their trust, gradually getting them used to his presence in a Land Rover, coaxing them not to break their fences and forming a bond with the matriarch, Nana. This feat earned him the nickname of “elephant whisperer”. He successfully adopted other rogue elephants into the herd, and was always overwhelmed when he found them waiting for him after a trip away.
Anthony often found himself in intimidating situations and was more than once threatened by poachers and kidnappers. In 2006 he began making expeditions deep into the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the secret camps of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to negotiate with its leaders — many of whom were wanted for war crimes after years of brutality in Uganda — for the protection of the northern white rhino.
The LRA had killed several rangers in the Garamba National Park in the DRC where the last of these rhinos had been sighted, along with the rare pygmy Congo giraffe, and it was feared they were also killing the animals for their meat and horns. On hearing that the LRA political leaders would be at peace talks in Juba in South Sudan, Anthony arrived uninvited and, after meeting a group of rebels on the banks of the Nile, was led into their jungle camps. It was a direct approach to conservation that caused some controversy.
Many were shocked when he told them that there were thought to be only four surviving wild rhinos. They claimed that the creature was spiritually close to them and agreed to stop attacking the park’s rangers and rhinos. Anthony was told that Joseph Kony, the LRA’s head, had spread his message among his generals.
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Back at Thula Thula, Anthony focused on building up eco-tourism and working on conservation projects. He helped to establish two important game reserves: the Royal Zulu Biosphere and the Mayibuye community game reserve. After his time in Iraq Anthony also founded a charity, the Earth Organisation, to protect the environment through practical methods such as education and jobs, and in 2008 it submitted a draft UN resolution, “Wildlife in War Zones”, which would oblige member states to protect wildlife during times of conflict.
Anthony wrote several books about his exploits, including The Elephant Whisperer, and had just completed a book about the rhino. A Hollywood film company has bought the rights to his story of rescuing Baghdad zoo, Babylon’s Ark.
He is survived by his wife, Françoise, and their two sons.
Lawrence Anthony, conservationist, was born on September 17, 1950. He died in his sleep on March 2, 2012, aged 61