- Our next guests are a married couple
who have devoted their lives to protecting animals.
Their latest documentary is called "Soul of the Elephant."
And I loved it. It is amazing.
Please welcome Dereck and Beverly Joubert.
People always ask me when I'm interviewed
who I admire and who are my heroes,
and it's people like you who devote their lives
to doing something that is trying to protect
endangered animals, so thank you for what you do.
Thank you so much. both: Thank you.
- So I'm watching this documentary,
and you have to see this documentary,
it's fascinating, especially since I've been on a safari,
I'm even more fascinated by it.
You live in Botswana in a--
let's show a picture of the house that they live in.
I guess it's called a house. Is that a house?
It's like a-- - It's a tent.
It's under canvas. - Okay, it's a tent.
There's no doors to lock or anything like that or--
and it's in the middle of nowhere.
Like, the closest thing is, like, six hours away?
- Six hours away, and most of the time,
the roof blows off as well, so yeah, it's hectic.
- I think there was an elephant just passing through, like,
in front of your house.
How is that not dangerous?
- You know, that is what's liberating.
We're actually living out in true wilderness.
So we have animals walking through our camp all the time.
We have animals coming into our tent.
But tiny little critters quite a lot of the time.
We live under the stars, and we cook on an open fire.
And it's not dangerous because we're very aware
and very alert, but we also respect the animals,
and I think that's what it is.
You know, we give them total respect.
We don't try and challenge them at all.
- I guess they know that.
So "Soul of the Elephant" is--
I want to show some B-roll and we'll talk about
why you wanted to do it.
Here's some elephants that are charging you.
You're in a boat, and if anybody's ever seen
the power they have, that you weren't scared.
You just stayed completely still,
and that elephant was--
you just thought he was posturing.
- Well, elephants, when they seriously
are going to charge you, they put their heads way down.
And there's no mock charge at all.
And that was posturing.
That is an incredible mock charge.
She was going a little beyond what just a mock charge is,
but we could do nothing. We had to stay our ground.
We were right in the canoe, right up against the water,
and if we had started backing up fast,
she would have come right in.
She would have took, you know, toppled us over.
- But there is something beautiful
about being on that knife edge.
You know, when something's charging you
and getting up really up close and in your face.
There's something sort of meditative
and magical about that, so...
- I don't think everybody would feel that way.
I think that's a very--
few people that would feel that it's meditative
because Portia and I went on safari as I said,
and, you know, the power of elephants are just
more incredible than the lions or anything else
that we came across.
Elephants-- well, I'll let you--
how many elephants do we have today?
- So when Beverly and I were born,
there were about 1 1/2 million elephants,
and now there are 1/2 million elephants.
And so these animals are really disappearing.
We're losing them at a rate of five an hour.
- Five elephants an hour? - That's nearly 100 a day.
- Yeah. - Because of their tusks?
For the ivory. - Poaching because of the ivory.
And very few people realize, in fact,
that to get ivory and to use it at all,
you have to kill an elephant.
Doesn't just drop out. - Yeah. The don't--
they can't just cut the tusks off.
The elephant must die in order to get the--
and ivory now is illegal, isn't it?
- Ivory is illegal.
In fact, it's very hard to say
ivory is illegal completely because it's, you know,
it's still being traded with,
but ivory is illegal now in the States.
Although you have--
you can still bring ivory into almost every state
except three,
so that is the problem.
We would love ivory to be not used at all
and only left on elephants.
84% of the Asians believe that ivory just drops off,
and so they don't realize it's blood ivory.
- Yeah. So, the "Soul of the Elephant,"
you call it that because...
- Well, because I think that we wanted to--
to state the numbers, these falling numbers,
but we also wanted to point out to people
what we would be losing.
So it's not just numbers and graphs going down.
And we wanted to get into the very soul of the elephant.
And quite often we've been asked
if elephants do have souls.
And I usually counter and say,
"If we do, then why shouldn't elephants?"
- Yeah. And if you watch this documentary,
if you've seen anything on elephants at all,
they are incredible creatures,
and they have, you know, these emotions
when they come across other elephants,
other bones of elephants.
There's like a funeral procession that--
- It truly is. It's almost like a ritual.
And it's an investigation at the same time,
but it's remarkable.
I think we've had great experiences with this.
And one was that we collected ivory
off a carcass that we found
and we put it in the back of the vehicle,
but we couldn't make it back to the nearest ranger station,
so we had to sleep out in the middle of the bush.
And at about midnight,
all of a sudden our vehicle was rocking from side to side.
And we woke up and we realized that it was an elephant bull.
And he was rocking us, so Dereck clapped his hands,
and off the bull went,
but about an hour later, the bull was back again,
and just rocking the car.
And that's when we realized they could smell that ivory.
We threw it out, and he just picked it up
and they fondled it--there were two of them by that stage.
And they fondled it, and in the morning when we woke up,
they had taken the ivory away.
- Wow. - You see how meditative it is?
- Yeah. That really is special. - Yeah, truly.
- That really is amazing. Incredible.
All right, we have to take a break,
and we'll find out how we can help these animals
and others, because it's not just elephants.
It's lions and it's-- it's everything.
and we need to stop this.
It's poaching and it's big game hunters
who think it's fun to go shoot something
that's so beautiful and magnificent,
which I will never understand. We'll be back.
So how can people help?
What can we do to save these animals?
Because they're also finding out that elephants
could actually save us, right?
- Right. There's a very interesting study just out
and that we found out that certain cells
within elephant's blood
that stopped them from getting cancer.
So we might be able to learn more about that,
and stop ourselves from getting cancer.
We don't know what we don't yet know
about these animals, and I think that's fantastic.
- Absolutely. - So we encourage people
to get ahold of our foundation, the Great Plains Foundation.
We started the Big Cats Initiative
with "National Geographic" and that's one way
to getting behind the Cecil the lion stories.
And, of course, rhinos. so that's a big thing for us.
- Absolutely. We have a project right now
that's called Rhinos Without Borders.
And that's really about protecting rhinos
that are being poached in the highest poaching zones
in South Africa and then relocating them to Botswana,
and to, you know, to secret locations.
And our goal is to move 100. We've already moved 25.
One female has already had a baby,
so we're feeling like proud grandparents right now.
- Right. - That's right.
But it's the only way right now.
If we can't stop the senseless killing,
we could lose rhinos in the next five to ten years,
and that's almost every animal is in that same situation.
- Yeah. It's horrible, and that's why I say
I love what you do.
And if you want to help, go to our website.
You can find out where you can see
nature's "Soul of the Elephant" and their foundation,
and anything you can do. Every little bit helps.
So, thank you so much.