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Pioneer elephant conservationist dies in Nairobi
10th December, 2025 10:45 AM
The Prince of Wales has paid tribute to pioneering elephant conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who died aged 83 at his home in Nairobi on Monday.
Douglas-Hamilton spent his life studying and campaigning to protect African elephants, becoming a world-leading expert on their behaviour in the wild.
His groundbreaking research exposed the devastating effects of poaching – often at great risk to his own safety – and was instrumental in the banning of the international ivory trade.
Prince William praised the zoologist as “a man who dedicated his life to conservation and whose life’s work leaves a lasting impact on our appreciation for, and understanding of, elephants”.
“The memories of spending time in Africa with him will remain with me forever,” added Prince William, who is a royal patron for the African wildlife conservation charity, Tusk, of which Douglas-Hamilton was an ambassador.
“The world has lost a true conservation legend today, but his extraordinary legacy will continue,” the charity’s founder, Charles Mayhew, said in a statement.
Born in 1942 to an aristocratic British family in Dorset, England, Douglas-Hamilton studied biology and zoology in Scotland and Oxford before moving to Tanzania to research elephant social behaviour.
It was there at Lake Manyara National Park that he began documenting every elephant he encountered, eventually becoming so familiar with the herds he could recognise them by the unique shapes of their ears and wrinkles on their skin.
“The thing about elephants is that they have a lot in common with human beings,” he said in a 2024 documentary about his work, A Life Among Elephants.
Friend and fellow conservationist Jane Goodall, who died in October 2025, was featured in the documentary and said he had shown the world that elephants are capable of feeling just like humans.
“I think his legacy will be one of a man who did so much to help people understand how majestic, how wonderful elephants are, and to learn more about their way of life,” Goodall said.
But that work did not always come easily: he was charged at by elephants, almost killed by a swarm of bees and shot at by poachers. In 2010, a flood destroyed his research facility in Kenya, and years of work were lost.
Despite the hardships, Douglas-Hamilton remained steadfast in his mission to raise awareness of the plight of African elephants, becoming one of the leading voices to alert the world of the ivory poaching crisis, which he described as “an elephant holocaust”.
He later campaigned for an international ban on the commercial ivory trade, and in 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was signed, an international agreement between governments.
After the agreement failed to wipe out the trade completely, Douglas-Hamilton turned his attention to China and the US, the two main markets for ivory. Chinese President Xi Jinping and then-US President Barack Obama agreed to a near-total ban on its import and export in 2015.
Douglas-Hamilton established Save the Elephants in 1993, a charity dedicated to safeguarding the animals and deepening human understanding of their behaviour.
