Elephant: Encyclopedia II - Elephant - Man and Elephants

Elephant - Man and Elephants

Elephant - Harvest from the Wild

The harvest of elephants, both legal and illegal, has had some unexpected consequences on elephant anatomy as well. African ivory hunters, by killing only tusked elephants, have given a much larger chance of mating to elephants with small tusks or no tusks at all. The propagation of the absent-tusk gene has resulted in the birth of large numbers of tuskless elephants, now approaching 30% in some populations (compare with a rate of about 1% in 1930). Tusklessness, once a very rare genetic abnormality, has become a widespread hereditary trait. [1] It is possible, if unlikely, that continued selection pressure could bring about a complete absence of tusks in African elephants, a development normally requiring thousands of years of evolution. The effect of tuskless elephants on the environment, and on the elephants themselves, could be dramatic. Elephants use their tusks to root around in the ground for necessary minerals, tear apart vegetation, and spar with one another for mating rights. Without tusks, elephant behavior could change dramatically. [2]

Elephant - Domestication and use

Elephants have been working animals used in various capacities by humans. Seals found in the Indus Valley suggest that the elephant was first domesticated in ancient India. However, elephants have never been truly domesticated: the male elephant in his periodic condition of musth is dangerous and difficult to control. Therefore elephants used by humans have typically been female, war elephants being an exception, however: as female elephants in battle will run from a male, only males could be used in war. It is generally more economical to capture wild young elephants and tame them than breeding them in captivity.

War elephants were used by armies in the Indian sub-continent, and later by the Persian empire. This use was adopted by Hellenistic armies after Alexander the Great experienced their worth against king Poros, notably in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid diadoch empires. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps when he was fighting the Romans, but brought too few elephants to be of much military use, although his horse cavalry was quite successful; he probably used a now-extinct third African (sub)species, the North African (Forest) elephant, smaller than its two southern cousins, and presumably easier to domesticate. A large elephant in full charge could cause tremendous damage to infantry, and cavalry horses would be afraid of them (see Battle of Hydaspes).

Throughout Siam, India, and most of South Asia elephants were used in the military for heavy labor, especially for uprooting trees and moving logs, and were also commonly used as executioners to crush the condemned underfoot.

Elephants have also been used as mounts for safari-type hunting, especially Indian shikar (mainly on tigers), and as ceremonial mounts for royal and religious occasions, whilst Asian elephants have been used for transport and entertainment, and are common to circuses around the world.

African elephants have long been reputed to not be domesticable, but some entrepreneurs have succeeded by bringing Asian mahouts from Sri Lanka to Africa. In Botswana, Uttum Corea has been working with African elephants and has several young tame elephants near Gaborone. African elephants are more temperamental than Asian elephants, but are easier to train. Because of their more sensitive temperaments, they require different training methods than Asian elephants and must be trained from infancy hence Corea worked with orphaned elephants. African elephants are now being used for (photo) safaris. Corea's elephants are also used to entertain tourists and haul logs.

Elephant - The Elephant Trap

Another more effective method is practiced in the Indian Subcontinent which is far less physical and brutal and more mental. It is called the "elephant trap". The following is taken from a newsletter. "From when an elephant is a baby they tie him for certain periods with a rope to a tree. The young elephant tries his hardest to escape, he pulls and wriggles and jumps and crawls yet the rope just tightens and to the tree it remains tied. Learning that, the elephant doesn’t try to escape and accepts his confinement. A couple of years pass and the elephant is now an adult weighing several tons. Yet the trainer continues to tie the elephant to the tree with the same rope he’s always used, for the simple reason that the elephant has the concept in his mind that the rope is stronger than him. Abiding to this conditioning the elephant is trapped for life. To break free all the elephant has to do is erase that limiting thought for in fact he is free to go."

Elephant - Elephants in Culture

• Jumbo, a circus elephant, has entered the English language as a synonym for "large";
• Dumbo, the flying elephant in Disney movie;
• The French children's storybook character Babar the Elephant (an elephant king) created by Jean de Brunhoff and also an animated TV series;
• The Elephant's Child is one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories;
• The Thai Elephant Orchestra, a musical instrument playing group of Elephants from the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang;
• Joseph Merrick, a British man in Victorian England, who suffered from substantial deformities, and was nicknamed "The Elephant Man" due to the nature and extent of his condition;
• The fictional planet in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels consists of a flat disc-shaped world carried on the backs of four elephants who ride through space on a space turtle, Great A'Tuin.

A common adage is that "Elephants never forget", and later scientific evidence seems to support they have good memories.

• A white elephant is considered holy in Thailand.
• Ganesh, the Hindu god of wisdom, has an elephant's head.
• Elephants used for festival, south India

• The elephant, and the white elephant in particular, has often been used a symbol of royal power and prestige in Asia;
• The elephant is also the symbol for the Republican Party of the United States, originating in an 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly (Nast also originated the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party);
• See also the Danish royal Order of the Elephant.

Elephant - Elephant rage

The National Geographic Society¹ aired a program describing a disturbing trend of elephants killing humans on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday, June 5, 2005. To sum up the episode, scientists discover that elephants kill 300-400 humans per year, and they set out to find why. In the last ten minutes of the episode Explorer: Elephant Rage, the scientists formed this theory:

So many elephants have been killed just because of human cruelty and greed. Humans have mistreated elephants for the past century, and they are suffering Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (the first time this mental illness has been "diagnosed" in an animal other than a human). They cite the following reasons:

• Humans "cull" elephant herds when they become too big for nature to contain, and the babies are sold to circuses.
  • In the episode, a female elephant, while in a circus, killed two people and terrorized a crowd. After digging into her past, it was found that she was the only survivor of one of these "cullings", and at the time of the attack, she relived the nightmare.
• Humans kill elephants for game and food.
  • In the episode, we see a baby elephant accidentally killed by humans, which triggers an entire herd to attack a town without provocation because that town had the baby elephant's scent, and they were looking for their "kinsman".
  • If an orphaned baby elephant or several orphaned young are left to fend for themselves, as they grow up, they have no older members to keep their hormones in check and to teach them how to be an elephant, so they gang up and act on their unrestrained aggressiveness.
• Humans are slowly destroying the food source of elephants by human development.
  • When a herd was found eating crops from the farmers crop field, they attempted to drive them away by shooting above their heads and tossing sticks that they lit on fire.
• Elephants used for work can be pushed too far, and they lash out from the stress at their handlers.
• Tuskless elephants are becoming increasingly more common, particularly in Asia where they may rank as high as 40%. As a defense against their tusked counterparts, these elephants typically learn to be far more aggressive and sometimes willing to attack unprovoked.

There is also one other cause of elephant rage that is not the result of human activity. Since male elephants are "kicked out" of their herds when they become sexually mature, their "sex hormones" kick in and anything that stands in their way becomes an unfortunate victim.

At least a few elephants have been suspected to be drunk during their attacks. In December 1998, a herd of elephants overran a village in India. Although locals reported that nearby elephants had recently been observed drinking beer which rendered them "unpredictable", officials considered it the least likely explanation for the attack [3]. An attack on another Indian village occurred in October 1999, and again locals believed the reason was drunkenness, but the theory was not widely accepted [4]. Purportedly drunk elephants raided yet another Indian village again on December 2002 [5].

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Man and Elephants", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki