Talk about David beating Goliath.
Or, in this case, John beating Goliath.
Norman resident John Warren recently took down a 5½-ton elephant during a trip to the southern African country of Nambia. He and his wife visits Namibia three months each year as John serves as a volunteer manager on a game ranch there.
The funny thing is, he didn’t intend to hunt for one.
“I never had interest hunting an elephant, and this one was causing so much trouble, I decided to hunt it,” Warren said Friday. “It was exciting.”
But he couldn’t without permission from the Namibian government, he said.
“The landowner in the area had to get permission from the government to hunt it and declare it a problem animal,” Warren said. “He put my name on (the request).”
Warren’s weapon was a custom-built, .458 Magnum rifle by Bruce Brummer of B&J Gunsmithing in Davis. Warren owns a cabin near Lake of the Arbuckles.
“It made me proud,” Brummer said Thursday. “It’s been going on for hundreds of years. There are countless, documented stories of elephant hunting in the world.”
But none that involved Warren or one of Brummer’s guns until this hunt.
The elephant broke out of Etosha Pan National Park and started to cause trouble, according to Warren. A professional hunter from the area called him about the elephant and asked if he’d try to take it down.
This wasn’t some animal one can just focus on and fire toward. Warren spent 2-3 days studying the elephant anatomy.
“One that big, you can be in trouble real quick if something goes wrong,” Warren said. He added hunters who lived at the ranch helped him with the hunt.
The biggest animal Warren previously took down was a 1,600-pound Eland bull, and his most dangerous was a leopard. He made both kills in Africa.
Warren needed two days to look for fresh tracks of the elephant (the animal’s feet measured 22 inches wide). After it rained the first night, he and his crew checked for waterholes, and they found a track they followed for 2 ½ hours before getting to the elephant.
“It took 10 guys to cut a road through a bush to get to the elephant,” Warren said. “It took the same guys 10 hours to cut up the meat.”
The meat was enough to feed the whole village, Warren said.
Experts in the area determined the animal was at least 40 years old, Warren said. But the hunter has a story to last generations.
I.C. Murrell,
(580) 221-6527
ic.murrell@ardmoreite.com
