A farmer from a north-western communal area in Namibia is struggling to provide enough water and food for the livestock he has left after the devastating prolonged drought experienced in the country. To keep his flock watered he needs to buy diesel for the pump that fills the water trough; to prevent further livestock losses from the drought, he has bought some fodder for his animals. Once the animals are fed and watered he turns off the pump and stores the remaining fodder in a room attached to his hut. That night the elephants arrive. These elephants, as stressed by the drought as the farmer, are desperate for water and always on the lookout for food. They arrive at the livestock trough to find that it is empty – the little ones cannot go much further without water, so the matriarch takes matters into her own trunk. She smells the water in the pipes that feed the trough and pulls one of these pipes right out of the ground, effortlessly. Fresh, clean water gushes out of the broken pipe, and the herd gathers around to drink to their hearts’ content. Later that evening, one of the herd smells something delicious emanating from a nearby hut – lucerne! He approaches the hut and finds it to be a makeshift structure of iron sheets and hardened earth – it is a simple matter for him to break down one of the walls and access bales of nutritious lucerne. The farmer comes out of his hut the next day, having not slept a wink the entire night. He was angry when he first heard the pipes break, but that soon changed to terror when his house shook as the elephants broke the wall down. His wife and children were with him in the hut – the children nearly cried out, but they couldn’t risk drawing the elephant’s attention. Just the other day, an elephant killed their neighbour who was walking home at night. They were terrified. Further to the north of this area, on a fenced commercial farm, another farmer is facing a different problem caused by the same great, grey beasts. An entire section of farm fence has been flattened: a sure sign that a breeding herd passed through here recently. Baby elephants cannot walk over fences, so the adults flatten large sections to let the babies through. As the farmer surveys the damage, he realises that this story is not over yet. These elephants will break out of this camp again soon, using a different route and destroying yet more fences. Besides the cost of repairing the fence, this farmer is deeply concerned about the animals he may lose before he can make sufficient repairs. He tries to calculate the financial cost of this incursion, but stops when it makes his head hurt.