Aging & Wisdom Quote by Richard Leakey

Leakey’s voice here is doing a quiet but devastating reframing: what we call “human-wildlife conflict” often begins as wildlife persistence. By leading with elephant longevity and memory, he nudges us away from the cartoon version of animals as instinct-only and toward something closer to history-bearing beings. An elephant doesn’t just wander; it remembers routes, waterholes, past droughts, old landscapes that may no longer exist. That memory is adaptive intelligence - and it becomes tragic when the world those memories map onto has been rearranged by climate stress and human expansion.

The line “it could be” is doing strategic work. Leakey isn’t sermonizing; he’s modeling ecological humility. Drought is presented as the initiating force, not elephant aggression. The sentence then turns, almost casually, into the punch: “Then they continue on their path and run into people.” The phrasing makes the collision feel inevitable, like two lines on a map crossing. People aren’t framed as villains, elephants aren’t framed as monsters; the system is.

Context matters: Leakey spent decades in East African conservation, watching protected areas become islands and migration corridors get pinched by farms, fences, and settlement. In that world, an elephant’s “good memory” is no longer just a charming factoid; it’s an argument against short-term thinking. If elephants plan across decades, Leakey implies, then our conservation policies - and our land-use choices - can’t be quarterly, reactive, or built on surprise when animals do what they’ve always done: keep moving to survive.