He flew into Uganda during the chaos that followed the collapse of the government of the time and saw the bodies of slaughtered elephants all over the national parks. "It was a dreadful time. I really spent a terrible 20 years doing that," he says now. However, his work helped greatly to support the 1989 decision under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to abolish the international sale of ivory.
In 1997, Douglas-Hamilton came to Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. By that time, he had established his own research and conservation organization, Save the Elephants. Today, he divides his time between teaching
a new generation of elephantologists and studying the movement of elephants global positioning system (GPS) technology. The data he acquires from elephants wearing GPS collars is used by the Kenya Wildlife Service to provide better wildlife-management and land-protection advice to the government. Save the Elephants now has GPS tracking projects not just in Kenya but also in Mali, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Following the attack outside his camp, Douglas Hamilton was able, using his equipment, to identify the elephant that threatened him as Diana, one of the females from a herd he had been tracking for some time. Diana was just like any other elephant sensitive, unpredictable, and complex. Although her behaviour on that afternoon had been violent, at the last moment she had made a choice. And not even Ian Douglas Hamilton, with all his modern equipment and years of experience, can know exactly why she attacked him- or why she let him live.