Beverly Joubert: You have to understand the life and death struggle that is happening globally, and it’s happening not only to the furry creatures out there, but it’s happening to the humans. I think it’s important for us to see similarities. We are just another animal species, and I believe if you understand the wilderness, and you try and emulate what is happening in nature, I think we would have a more peaceful world. I think we would get on with each other, and probably wouldn’t have such extreme xenophobia. We would accept cultures, we would accept each other.
Dereck Joubert: I think of the lessons as well beyond simply death, so there are many lessons from the animal world that we can draw on, that I think we lose the opportunity of if we just paint the glorified version. So I think that, for instance, we should be learning from elephants about empathy and trust and respect and intelligence and caring, and even the ritualization of death, and draw that into our lives. In fact, if we look at what elephants represent and what humans represent, they’re very, very similar. We have language, we have concepts of past, present, future, all of these things. The one thing that we don’t have — or that we do have, sorry — that elephants don’t, is the capacity for cruelty.