Following the highest concentration of wildlife fatalities in southern Kenya in decades, authorities promised Tuesday to leave no stone unturned in ensuring the incident remains completely inexplicable.
NAIROBI — The Kenya Wildlife Service announced Tuesday it has deployed an elite task force to the nation's southern borders with strict orders to officially classify the deaths of 14 elephants as a profound and permanent enigma.
At a press briefing outside the agency’s sun-bleached concrete headquarters, where the low hum of a struggling window air conditioner competed with the smell of diesel exhaust, Director General Erastus Kanga confirmed the investigation was already yielding a highly successful lack of answers. The carcasses, discovered near the Tsavo conservation area, represent the highest number of unexplained wildlife fatalities the region has seen since the last time a major agricultural dispute was politely ignored.
We are working around the clock to carefully rule out obvious, politically inconvenient causes like agricultural runoff or retaliatory poisoning by local farmers. If we deploy our resources correctly, we should be able to look the international conservation community in the eye by Friday and say we have absolutely no idea what happened here.
Field investigators have reportedly cordoned off a three-mile stretch of savannah to prevent rogue ecologists from accidentally discovering a straightforward answer. According to a senior aide familiar with the operation, preliminary soil samples and water toxicity tests have already been securely misplaced in a basement filing cabinet at the Ministry of Tourism.
By late afternoon, the investigative team had leveraged the tragedy to secure a $400,000 grant from a Geneva-based conservation charity, ensuring the department possesses the necessary funding to remain completely stumped through the upcoming dry season.