There are few sights in the world more immediately guaranteed to stop the heart than that of an adult African elephant when it is surprised or threatened. The flapping ears, resembling freehand maps of Africa, may measure six feet from top to bottom. Extended in fear or anger, their total spread can be greater than the animal's height, some 10 to 20 feet. The nervously tensing trunk may be seven feet long: the forelegs, churning dust, look like structural columns. The whole impression is of sheer, powerful mass.
Of all mammals that have survived since the end of the Ice Age, only whales are larger than elephants. The largest elephant killed in modern times stood more than 13 feet high at the shoulders and weighed almost 12 tons. Although many kinds of elephants existed in past eras, today there are only two-the African and the Asiatic.
Next to its size, the most arresting feature of any elephant is its trunk. To support its massive head the animal has a muscular neck, which is too short to allow its mouth to reach the ground. As compensation, the elephant's snout and upper lips have evolved into a wondrous appendage three feet in circumference at the base, which serves as combination nose, hand, tool, food-and-water gatherer and auxiliary arm. When the wind is right the trunk can detect scents as far away as two miles. It tests unfamiliar terrain, touching each spot before the elephant moves. Equipped with an estimated 40,000 muscles, it can be formidable weapon. But it is in obtaining food and water that it demonstrates its real versatility. It is sensitive and agile enough to pick up a single leaf or berry, and it can also suck up as much as a gallon and a half of water at a time.
Because the trunk is so essential to its survival, an elephant sensing danger will reflexively protect it by curling it inward into a tight spiral close to its body. A severe injury to its trunk can be tantamount to death by starvation. Even with a damaged trunk, however, elephants have shown themselves remarkably adaptable. Some feed only on reeds in the water: others kneel or tilt forward with one knee bent to browse on bushes. One case has been reported of an elephant dragging grass to itself with one foot, working it up onto a tusk and then using the damaged upper part of the trunk to push the food into its mouth.
Left undisturbed, the African elephant has the life expectancy, similar to man's, of 60 years or more. It is well equipped by nature to defend itself. In addition to being large and strong, it can attain speeds up to 20 to 25 miles per hour over short distances. When a threat disappears, an elephant family forms a protective defense circle. A naturalist reported, for example, that once when he shot an elephant calf with a tranquilizing dart in order to attach a radio tracking device, a total of 67 elephant quickly massed protectively around the fallen animal and prevented the naturalist from continuing with this experiment.
But the elephant has not been left undisturbed. And its defenses have been of little value when arrayed against the devices of man, who since the days of Egypt's pharaohs has prized the elephant's tusks. Even before the turn of the century elephants have been eliminated from many parts of Africa and were heading steadily toward extinction. A strong demand for ivory from manufacturers of billiard balls and piano keys coincided with the spread of powerful rifles, and the result was carnage. Some naturalists estimate that in the early 1900s as many as 100,000 elephants were slaughtered each year. Most of the commercial pressure for ivory decreased in the 1940s with the appearance of plastics, only to revive in recent years, particularly in the Far East. There ivory is thought, like gold and previous gems, to provide insurance against week currencies. And the developing countries of the African continent have been taming more and more land-and pushing the remaining elephants into game parks and preserves, some of which are so crowded that rangers must periodically kill some animals so the rest may survive.
The African elephant is still not on the official endangered-species list, partly because of the overcrowding in the preserves and partly because nobody really has the remotest idea how many there are left. Most African countries now have anti-poaching laws, but enforcement is spotty at best. In Kenya, for example, some 10,000 to 20,000 elephants are being killed every year. Experts say it is difficult to get exact figures, but it appears that elephants are being killed faster than they can reproduce themselves.
Family Bonds
Elephants are social animals. The basic unit in their social organization is the tightly knit affectionate family. Composed of several cows and their offspring, the family ranges in age from newborn babes to grandmothers. The young calves play constantly under the protective eyes of the cows. Individual families maintain loose but regular contact with other kinship groups in the area. A gathering of families becomes a herd, whose size depends largely on the availability of food and water. If forage is plentiful, the herd is likely to be large; if scarce, not only is the heard smaller but individual families may fragment into even smaller groups.
Elephant society is completely matriarchal. The system works because of the strong bonds between the oldest cow and her female descendants. When young bulls reach the age of puberty at about 12, they are expected from the family by adult cows to go off on their own or with other bulls. Bulls do establish permanent relationships with family or kinship groups. They bear no responsibility for raising the young and probably don't know their own offspring. Their only function is the continuation of the species.
A Touching Society
In amiable social situations elephants use trunks the way people use hands--for greeting, caressing or otherwise giving reassurance. A mother elephant lays her trunk soothingly on the forehead of her sick baby. A young elephant will greet an older, larger stranger by putting its trunk in the strangers mouth. Members of the immediate family always seem to be touching each other affectionately. And in play-fighting, adult bulls fence and spar with their trunks rather than their tusks, which could inflict real damage.
A Proper Start
Elephants do not engage in the elaborate courting ritual of some animals, but they will occasionally intertwine trunks. If all goes well, 22 months after copulation a baby is born, weighing in at about 260 pounds and standing almost three feet high. It sometimes has trouble finding its food supply and settles for sucking its trunk. Once it has found its mothers teats it gobbles down about two and one half gallons of milk a day, feeding at frequent intervals. Calves are permitted to nurse until they are five or six years old, when their tusks become troublesome to their mothers.
A Long Happy Life
An elephant's potential life-span is about 60 years. In its first five years it doubles its weight and height. By age 30 an average elephant is almost fully grown--some 9 to 12 feet at the shoulder. An African elephant's tusks never stop growing. It has been calculated that if the tusks survived without damage throughout the animal's life, they would measure 16 feet in the female and 20 feet in the bull. But long before death an elephant's tusks are broken, chipped and worn smooth by life's vicissitudes.
Elephantine Conclave
A herd of elephants mills about on a grassy savanna. Cut off from their old migration routes because of man's unserpation of Africa's land, some elephants still gather during the seasons when once they began their journeys to new feeding places.
THE ELEPHANT'S CHILD
Even the youngest reader of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories knows that animals do not behave the way they do in these tales, but for generations the stories have been read for their charming fantasy. The story that follows, "The Elephant's Child," describes how the African elephant got its trunk. It is illustrated here with Kipling's original drawings.
In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant--a new Elephant--an Elephant's Child--who was full of 'satiable curiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions. And he lived in Africa, and he filled all Africa with his 'satiable curiosities. He asked his tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and his tall aunt the Ostrich spanked him with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of 'satiable curiosity! He asked his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, why her eyes were red, and his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, spanked him with her broad, broad hoof; and he asked his hairy uncle, the Baboon, why melons tasted just so, and his hairy uncle, the Baboon, spanked him with his hairy, hairy paw. And still he was full of 'satiable curiosity! He asked questions about everything that he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all his uncles and his aunts spanked him. And still he was full of 'satiable curiosity!
One fine morning in the middle of the Precession of the Equinoxes this 'satiable Elephant's Child asked a new fine question that he had never asked before. He asked, 'What does the Crocodile have for dinner?' Then everybody said, 'Hush!' in a loud and dreadful tone, and they spanked him immediately and directly, without stopping, for a long time.
By and by, when that was finished, he came upon Kolokolo Bird sitting in the middle of a wait-a-bit thorn-bush, and he said, 'My father has spanked me, and my mother has spanked me; all my aunts and uncles have spanked me for my 'satiable curiosity; and still I want to know what the Crocodile has for dinner!'
Then Kolokolo Bird said, with a mournful cry, 'Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.'
That very next morning, when there was nothing left of the Equinoxes, because the Precession had preceded according to precedent, this 'satiable Elephant's Child took a hundred pounds of bananas (the little short red kind), and a hundred pounds of sugar-cane (the long purple kind), and seventeen melons (the greeny-crackly kind), and said to all his dear families, 'Goodbye. I am going to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, to find out what the Crocodile has for dinner.' And they all spanked him once more for luck, though he asked them most politely to stop.
Then he went away, a little warm, but not at all astonished, eating melons, and throwing the rind about, because he could not pick it up.
He went from Graham's Town to Kimberley, and from Kimberley to Khama's Country, and from Khama's Country he went east by north, eating melons all the time, till at last he came to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, precisely as Kolokolo Bird had said.
Now you must know and understand, O Best Beloved, that till that very week, and day, and hour, and minute, this 'satiable Elephant's Child had never seen a Crocodile, and did not know what one was like. It was all his 'satiable curiosity.
The first thing that he found was a Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake curled round a rock.
''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child most politely, 'but have you seen such a thing as a Crocodile in these promiscuous parts?'
'Have I seen a Crocodile?' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, in a voice of dreadful scorn. 'What will you ask me next?'
''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child, 'but could you kindly tell me what he has for dinner?'
Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake uncoiled himself very quickly from the rock, and spanked the Elephant's Child with his scale some, flail some tail.
'That is odd,' said the Elephant's Child, 'because my father and my mother, and my uncle and my aunt, not to mention my other aunt, the Hippopotamus, and my other uncle, the Baboon, have all spanked me for my 'satiable curiosity--and I suppose this is the same thing.'
So he said good-bye very politely to the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, and helped to coil him up on the rock again, and went on, a little warm, but not at all astonished, eating melons, and throwing the rind about, because he could not pick it up, till he trod on what he thought was a log of wood at the very edge of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees.
But it was really the Crocodile, O Best Beloved, and the Crocodile winked one eye--like this!
''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child most politely, 'but do you happen to have seen a Crocodile in these promiscuous parts?'
Then the Crocodile winked the other eye, and lifted half his tail out of the mud; and the Elephant's Child stepped back most politely, because he did not wish to be spanked again.
'Come hither, Little One,' said the Crocodile. 'Why do you ask such things?'
''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child most politely, 'but my father has spanked me, my mother has spanked me, not to mention my tall aunt, the Ostrich, and my tall uncle, the Giraffe, who can kick ever so hard, as well as my broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and my hairy uncle, the Baboon, and including the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, with the scalesome, flailsome tail, just up the bank, who spanks harder than any of them; and so, if it's quite all the same to you, I don't want to be spanked any more.'
'Come hither, Little One,' said the Crocodile, 'for I am the Crocodile,' and he wept crocodile-tears to show it was quite true.
Then the Elephant's Child grew all breathless, and panted, and kneeled down on the bank and said, 'You are the very person I have been looking for all these long days. Will you please tell me what you have for dinner?'
'Come hither, Little One,' said the Crocodile, 'and I'll whisper.'
Then the Elephant's Child put his head down close to the Crocodile's musky, tusky mouth, and the Crocodile caught him by his little nose, which up to that very week, day, hour, and minute, had been no bigger than a boot, though much more useful.
'I think,' said the Crocodile--and he said it between his teeth, like this--'I think to-day I will begin with Elephant's Child!'
At this, O Best Beloved, the Elephant's Child was much annoyed, and he said, speaking through his nose, like this, 'Led go! You are hurtig be!'
the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake scuffled down from the bank and said, 'My young friend, if you do not now, immediately and instantly, pull as hard as ever you can, it is my opinion that your acquaintance in the large-pattern leather ulster' (and by this he meant the Crocodile) 'will jerk you into yonder limpid stream before you can say Jack Robinson.'
This is the way Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
Then the Elephant's Child sat back on his little haunches, and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and his nose began to stretch. And the Crocodile floundered into the water, making it all creamy with great sweeps of his tail, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled.
And the Elephant's Child's nose kept on stretching; and the Elephant's Child spread all his little four legs and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and his nose kept on stretching; and the Crocodile threshed his tail like an oar, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and at each pull the Elephant's Child's nose grew longer and longer--and it hurt him hijjus!
Then the Elephant's Child felt his legs slipping, and he said through his nose, which was now nearly five feet long, 'This is too butch for be!'
Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake came down from the bank, and knotted himself in a double-clove-hitch round the Elephant's Child's hind legs, and said, 'Rash and inexperienced traveler, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armour-plated upper deck' (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile), 'will permanently vitiate your future career.'
That is the way all Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
So he pulled, and the Elephant's Child pulled, and the Crocodile pulled; but the Elephant's Child and the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake pulled hardest; and at last the Crocodile let go of the Elephant's Child's nose with a plop that you could hear all up and down the Limpopo.
Then the Elephant's Child sat down most hard and sudden; but first he was careful to say 'Thank you' to the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake; and next he was kind to his poor pulled nose, and wrapped it all up in cool banana leaves, and hung it in the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo to cool.
'What are you doing that for?' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake.
''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child, 'but my nose is badly out of shape, and I am waiting for it to shrink.'
'Then you will have to wait a long time,' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake. 'Some people do not know what is good for them.'
The Elephant's Child sat there for three days waiting for his nose to shrink. But it never grew any shorter, and, besides, it made him squint. For, O Best Beloved, you will see and understand that the Crocodile had pulled it out into a really truly trunk same as all Elephants have to-day.
At the end of the third day a fly came and stung him on the shoulder, and before he knew what he was doing he lifted up his trunk and hit that fly dead with the end of it.
''Vantage number one!' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake. 'You couldn't have done that with a mere-smear nose. Try and eat a little now.'
Before he thought what he was doing the Elephant's Child put out his trunk and plucked a large bundle of grass, dusted it clean against his fore-legs, and stuffed it into his own mouth.
''Vantage number two!' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake. 'You couldn't have done that with a mere-smear nose. Don't you think the sun is very hot here?'
'It is,' said the Elephant's Child, and before he thought what he was doing he schlooped up a schloop of mud from the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo, and slapped it on his head, where it made a cool schloopy-sloshy mud-cap all trickly behind his ears.
''Vantage number three!' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake. 'You couldn't have done that with a mere-smear nose. Now how do you feel about being spanked again?'
''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child, 'but I should not like it at all.'
'How would you like to spank somebody?' said the Bi- Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake.
'I should like it very much indeed,' said the Elephant's Child.
'Well,' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, 'you will find that new nose of yours very useful to spank people with.'
'Thank you,' said the Elephant's Child, 'I'll remember that; and now I think I'll go home to all my dear families and try.'
So the Elephant's Child went home across Africa frisking and whisking his trunk. When he wanted fruit to eat he pulled fruit down from a tree, instead of waiting for it to fall as he used to do. When he wanted grass he plucked grass up from the ground, instead of going on his knees as he used to do. When the flies bit him he broke off the branch of a tree and used it as fly-whisk; and he made himself a new, cool, slushy-squshy mud-cap whenever the sun was hot. When he felt lonely walking through Africa he sang to himself down his trunk, and the noise was louder than several brass bands.
He went especially out of his way to find a broad Hippopotamus (she was no relation of his), and he spanked her very hard, to make sure that the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake had spoken the truth about his new trunk. The rest of the time he picked up the melon rinds that he had dropped on his way to the Limpopo--for he was a Tidy Pachyderm.
One dark evening he came back to all his dear families, and he coiled up his trunk and said, 'How do you do?' They were very glad to see him, and immediately said, 'Come here and be spanked for your 'satiable curiosity.'
'Pooh,' said the Elephant's Child. 'I don't think you peoples know anything about spanking; but I do, and I'll show you.' Then he uncurled his trunk and knocked two of his dear brothers head over heels.
'O Bananas!' said they, 'where did you learn that trick, and what have you done to your nose?'
'I got a new one from the Crocodile on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River,' said the Elephant's Child. 'I asked him what he had for dinner, and he gave me this to keep.'
'It looks very ugly,' said his hairy uncle, the Baboon.
'It does,' said the Elephant's Child. 'But it's very useful,' and he picked up his hairy uncle, the Baboon, by one hairy leg, and hove him into a hornet's nest.
Then that bad Elephant's Child spanked all his dear families for a long time, till they were very warm and greatly astonished. He pulled out his tall Ostrich aunt's tail-feathers; and he caught his tall uncle, the Giraffe, by the hind-leg, and dragged him through a thorn-bush; and he shouted at his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and blew bubbles into her ear when she was sleeping in the water after meals; but he never let any one touch Kolokolo Bird.
At last things grew so exciting that his dear families went off one by one in a hurry to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, to borrow new noses from the Crocodile. When they came back nobody spanked anybody any more; and ever since that day, O Best Beloved, all the Elephants you will ever see, besides all those that you won't, have trunks precisely like the trunk of the 'satiable Elephant's Child.
I Keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
I let them rest from nine till five.
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men:
But different folk have different views:
I know a person small--
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes--
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
A Ruinous Appetite
Feeding is an elephant's principle activity. Since it digests only 40 percent of its food, an adult must spend 16 hours a day searching for and munching the 500 pounds it needs to fuel its enormous body. Elephants eat mostly grass, but despite their need for quantity, they have notions about quality as well and are especially fond of such things as wild celery, black plums, desert dates and wild raspberries. In Tanzania, where food is plentiful, elephants are known to dine off at least 134 of the 630 plant species.
An elephant's unique physical equipment is of great help in foraging. In lean times its tusks gouge the bark from baobab trees so that its trunk can pick up the pieces. Then, using tusks, trunk, head and the strength of its body, it pushes over the gutted baobab to get at the water in the tree's fibrous interior.
A Way with Water
The rhythm of an elephant's day is set largely by its watering routine. An adult needs about 30 gallons of water a day. When water is abundant there is no problem. But during droughts elephants resort to an intriguing technique:digging wells. In a dried-up riverbed they scoop out holes with their forefeet until they reach water. After waiting patiently for the sand to settle, they drink in order of seniority-calves last. Elephants spray water over their ears to stay cool. So vital is this to their survival that in extreme drought conditions elephants have been known to put their trunks deep inside their own throats, sucking out water with which to cool themselves.
Rigorous Grooming
Good grooming is an essential ritual, for the elephant's thick skin is highly sensitive to heat, bruises and insect bites. One step in the process-the sand shower-gives elephants a temporary colouring of the country they inhabit. Elephants can appear white, brown, ocher or even red. At the end of the grooming process they find a handy object to rub against-either a tree or a termite hill. The rubbing pulverizes the parasites that plague elephants.
Out of My Way!
Fights between bull elephants are probably rare because the hierarchy among bulls is established during adolescence, and each animal therefore knows when to give in and when to assert himself. Intimidation, when it does occur, is of the mildest sort; slight differences in the position of head, legs or trunk are enough. Bulls are good-natured animals and, in protected areas, lead a pleasant way of life:no enemies, no responsibilities. Even in unprotected areas they do not have to defend territories, as many other animals do. Bulls occasionally form groups that travel and feed together for several hours or days at a time, but these associations are fleeting. Nevertheless, a solitary bull is rarely found more than a mile away from another bull or family unit.
Among the Elephants
by Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton
In the mid 1960s a young Scottish zoologist, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and his photographer wife, Oria, lived in Tanzania where they studied the ecology of elephant herds. Their daily observations of the elephants enabled them to recognize individuals, to follow families and track herds and thus to develop a new and compelling view of these animals.
The following passage from Among the Elephants is Iain's eyewitness account of an elephant's death.
To me the death of an elephant is one of the saddest sights in the world. The day I met Torone Sister Number Four unexpectedly in the Ndala woods she was an epitome of vigorous life, a powerful strident member of her species, the growth of scores of years had fused her skeleton and muscles into a marvelous organism, co-ordinated by a brain conditioned by decades of experience. Motivated, at that instant, in defense of her family, she bore down, like a mighty battleship going full speed ahead Mhoja and me. Next second, separated only by a pin-point in time and the deadly passage of lead through living tissues, she was a collapsed mound of flesh, a colossal lifeless wreck, with a tiny hole in her head from which came a thin trickle of blood.
To a statistician the only significance of death is in its effects on population dynamics and the causes of death are analyzed for their relative importance. For human beings and for elephants death remains significant in the behaviour of the survivours. In life individuals of both species are tied by strong family bonds and frantic attempts may be made to save a sick or dying relative.
Many great zoologists including Charles Darwin have thought that animals possess strong emotions and I have little doubt that when one of their number dies and the bonds of a lifetime are severed, elephants have a similar feeling to the one we call grief. Unfortunately science as yet has no means of measuring or describing emotion even for human beings, let alone for animals.
It is perhaps not surprising that attempts to assist a dying elephant may continue long after it is dead. Mhoja and I searching for more elephant paths up to the Marang Forest one day heard the loud bawling of an elephant calf in distress about a hundred feet up the Endabash escarpment. It was coming from our left, so we cautiously worked our way across the face of the scarp until we were very close to the source of the noise. Peering through the foliage I could make out the head of a cow at a curious angle to the slope. Her eye was open but she didn't move. In front of me a tree jutted out, and by swinging up into its branches I was able to get a better view.
Now I saw quite clearly a scene of great natural drama. The cow, an adult, was lying on her side down the slope; one of her hind feet was wedged between a boulder and a thick tree and she was hanging from it. Her head was bent backwards at an acute angle and she was stone dead. Next to her stood three calves of different sizes. The eldest was moaning quietly but every so often gave vent to a passionate bawl. The second just stood dumbly motionless, its hand resting against its mother's body. The smallest calf, less than a year old, made forlorn attempts to suck from her breasts. Then the eldest knelt down and pushed its head and small tusks against the corpse, in a hopeless attempt to move it. I watched them for fifteen minutes repeating these patterns of behaviour until suddenly they caught my wind and wandered slowly away.
On closer inspection I found that the cow was still warm and that no flies had settled on her, so the accident must have happened only a short time earlier. Trees which had stood in the path of her fall were broken and boulders dislodged. I back-tracked the path of her descent to a point about 400 feet up the slope where I found her last foot-prints. It appeared that she had stepped into a pig hole covered in vegetation, lost her balance and rolled out of control down the precipitous slopes. There were several cliffs and in places it looked as if she had bounced down them leaving the vegetation undamaged. The calves must have had some difficulty in finding her afterwards, for the nature of the terrain would have forced them to make a wide detour. It seemed that they were not aware that she was dead, although they must have known something was wrong. Perhaps they could not adjust immediately to the finality of her death.
Similar behaviour has been well authenticated elsewhere. Shortly after her accident Harvey Croze and a photographer friend witnessed the death of an old cow in the middle of her family unit in the Serengeti. Her dying dragged out over an afternoon in that lovely rolling northern country, not far from where we had darted the young bull. Harvey first noticed her lagging behind the family unit; when she fell they all clustered around her, putting their trunks in her mouth, pushing against her and trying to raise her. The most prominent was an independent bull who happened to be with the cows and calves, and he at times kept the others at bay while he attempted alone to aid the dying elephant. She died there among her family, and they stayed with her for several hours longer. The bull in his frustration at failing to raise her, indulged in totally irrelevant behaviour. He mounted the dead cow as if he were attempting to copulate, before finally moving off with the others. One cow, presumably she had a particularly strong bong with the dead animal, stayed longer than the others, only withdrawing reluctantly at nightfall.
A more extreme attachment to a dead animal was witnessed by Bill Woodley, the Warden of the Aberdares National Park in Kenya, who told me he observed cows and calves defending the body of a young female for three days after it had been shot, and even more bizarre is the account given by Rennie Bere in his book "The African Elephant" of a cow who refused to abandon the decomposing corpse of her new-born calf, and carried it around for days resting on her tusks. The only other animals I have heard of doing this are baboon mothers who may carry a dead baby for a week or more.
Such a responsiveness to inert bodies is of obvious value in saving a member of a group who has temporarily collapsed. The helpers may also later benefit from the sick animal's recovery when it resumes its role in the family unit's life. It may participate in the communal rearing and defense of the calves, or if it is the matriarch herself, may continue to lead in times of stress and benefit the family unit by drawing on her accumulated stores of experience. A zoologist brought up in the theory of natural selection must always try to explain apparently altruistic behaviour in terms of the helper's own advantage, or in cases where one animal sacrifices itself to save another, such behaviour must statistically tend to perpetuate the genes which prompted it, by increasing the chances of survival in a closely related animal that carries those same genes. What is far harder to explain in these rational terms is the value of the extraordinary interest which elephants sometimes show in corpses even when they are decomposed.
After ten days of rotting in the woodlands Torone Sister Number Four was reduced to a foul black cavity enclosed by a bag of skin, with bones sticking out. The tips of her feet had been gnawed by hyenas and some of the metacarpal foot bones were missing. I paid her a visit every day to watch the return of all the salts and minerals to the ground. In the rains this process was speedy and within a few more weeks I expected to see grass and herbs sprouting from the dark fibers that had once been her stomach contents.
On the tenth morning a large number of elephants came up from the south to the Ndala woodlands. I was curious to see what they would do if they found the corpse, so I parked the Land-Rover just behind the carcass, with a clear view, and waited events. After a little while a large matriarch named Clytemnestra appeared with her family unit close behind her. She was a fierce inhabitant of the south whose range overlapped in many places with that of the Torone sisters, and she must have known Torone Four when she was alive. As soon as she caught sight of my vehicle she brandished her ears and looked sideways in my direction. Having made this aggressive flourish she continued quietly on her path. Over the four years I had known her she had calmed down a great deal and was now almost used to quiet vehicles. The tourist explosion and the ever-increasing stream of cars through the Park even down in the wilder regions was gradually having its taming effect on all elephants except for the irreconcilable Torones and a few others. Clytemnestra continued for several paces, and then all of a sudden she caught a whiff of the corpse blowing towards her on the wind and spun round. Her trunk held out like a spear, her ears like two great shields, she strode purposefully towards the scent, like a mediaeval olfactory missile of very large proportions. Three other large cows came right behind her, heads suspiciously raised, until they closed around the corpse. Their trunks sniffed at first cautiously, then with growing confidence played up and down the shrunken body, touching and feeling each bared fragment of bone. The tusks excited special interest. Pieces were picked up, twiddled and tossed aside. All the while they were aware of my presence at ten paces' distance. Never had they come so close to me before. One of the young cows took two paces in my direction and tossed her head angrily; the others reacted to her mood, and the spell cast by the corpse was broken. They made perfunctory threat displays and moved away. But for my proximity I felt their investigation would have gone on longer, and I cursed myself for being to close.
Before this incident, I had heard of the elephant graveyard, the place where elephants are supposed to die. This persistent myth I knew to be untrue after discovering elephant corpses scattered all over the Park. I had, of course, also heard that elephants took a special interest in the corpses of their own kind; it sounded like a fairy tale and I had dismissed it from my mind. However, now after seeing it with my own eyes I collected every reliable account I could find and the earliest I discovered came from David Sheldrick. In 1957 from Tsavo he wrote:
There is now fairly convincing evidence that elephants have a strange habit of removing tusks from their dead comrades. In Tsavo East over the past eight years, the warden has recovered a great number of tusks from elephants-which had died from arrow wounds or from natural causes-and has found in many instances that the tusks have been removed and carried anything up to half a mile from the carcass. In other cases, the tusks have been shattered against tree or rocks. Quite obviously, no hyena could manage to drag or move a tusk weighing up to 100lb. for no purpose. The lack of teeth marks, and the fact that some of them are smashed, showed it could only be elephants that resorted to this practice.
Asiactic Elephants
In Asia the elephant has always been held in special reverence. Ganesha, the Hindu god of wisdom and prudence has the head of an elephant. In various festivals throughout India elephants are richly caparisoned in embroidered finery studded with jewels and silver, and their faces are painted in a variety of designs and colours. King Bhumipol of Thailand was presented with a rare "white" bull as a tapping of power.
The Asiatic elephant comes from a different ancestral line and differ in important anatomical respects from its African counterpart. It is on average about one third smaller and lighter, and whereas the African elephant is slightly swaybacked, The Asiatic is humpbacked. It has a high-domed forehead in contrast to the African's flat, sloping head. Its ears are triangular and only one third the size of the African's. Its trunk is smoother and has only one lip at the tip compared to the African's two.
Partly because of its fearsome aspect, the elephant was long used in Asia in warfare. In the fourth century B.C. Alexander the Great defeated elephant-borne legions in his conquest of northwest India. And as recently as 1862 King Mongkut of Siam(today Thailand) offered to send several of his best fighting elephants to President Abraham Lincoln for use against the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Lincoln politely declined-a good decision, for, even before the introduction of gunpowder, elephants had proved unreliable in battle except as intimidators. They were skittish, easily alarmed by unfamiliar sounds and inclined to break ranks.
In Asia elephants are still captured and trained for heavy work, a practice that dates back more than 5,500 years. Today thousands of elephants are used in many parts of Asia to carry heavy burdens, and they are a vital part of the lumber industry in Thailand, Laos and Burma(Myanmar) where valuable hardwoods such as teak grow deep in lush tropical forests. The burly elephant bulldozes its own roads through the dense underbrush and then easily maneuvers heavy logs along these lanes with its head and tusks. In mountainous terrain it is a surprisingly good climber, moving slowly and carefully, with a better sense of equilibrium than a horse. Work elephant are roused at dawn and given a leisurely breakfast and bath before beginning their tasks.
Like men, they take a four-hour rest when the equatorial sun is at its highest and hottest. Although elephants are excellent swimmers, the prefer to walk through shallow waterways. When they are in deeper water they hold their trunks above the surface, breathing through them like snorkeling devices.
Work elephants are still usually born in the wild; breeding them in captivity is too expensive. The gestation period of an elephant is 22 months, during the latter part of which the female can do no work and yet must be fed an average of 500 pounds of food a day. After giving birth she must devote a good part of the next three years to nursing her calf, which will not be able to begin its training as a work animal until it is 10 years old. Thus it has long made sense to capture grown elephants for training. This is done by means of the keddah, or drive. Trainers round up wild herds, from which they select the sturdiest young elephants, preferably females. Those over 30 are released as too difficult to train. Before a wild elephant can be trained, its spirit must be broken, and this is done in a seemingly brutal fashion: The beast is tethered with stout ropes and kept semi-starved until it is too weak to resist when a mahout, or trainer, begins teaching it to obey commands. The fully trained elephant knows about 30 commands and displays a touching diligence in its effort to please its trainer, on whom it is now entirely dependent for food.
Like its African cousin, the Asiatic elephant is gradually losing its natural ranges to man's inexorable expansion. Forests are disappearing all over Asia as more and more land comes under cultivation. Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, had about 40,000 elephants four centuries ago. During the 19th century British and Dutch colonists began clearing the dense jungles and slaughtering elephants to cultivate the world-famous Ceylonese tea. Today, although Ceylonese elephants are protected, there are fewer than 3,000 left, more than half of them living in the wild on ranges that may be in jeopardy. Within a short time perhaps the only elephants left will be in captivity-anachronistic reminders of a gentle animal that was simply too big for the modern world.
Living Art Forms
Life-sized elephants were carved from solid rock in 600-750A.D. They are part of a monumental frieze at Mahabalipuram, India, showing animals, men and gods offering thanks to the god Shiva for the Ganges River. Ever since the Stone Age, when primitive artists engraved them on walls of caves, elephants have been a favourite subject with artists. Elephant sculpture, either religious or simply decorative, has flourished in Asia especially; it appears on temples and public buildings or as mosaics on walls of houses and fortresses. Even standing quietly, sleek and wet after a mud-bath, elephants tend to look like sculptures. Or merely fording a river in Nepal, carrying their trainers and their own dinners, their massive, purposeful grace is living art.
Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, was born in India and, after an English education, returned to serve with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. In this essay Orwell tells of having to kill a tame elephant for "political" reasons. The fact that he hates what he does and despises himself for doing it makes the event even more appalling.
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the
only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen
to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an
aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one
had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the
bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As
a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it
seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football
field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end
the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the
insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my
nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were
several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have
anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already
made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I
chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically--and
secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their
oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the
dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling
in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the
long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged
with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated
and I had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the
British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal
better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew
was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage
against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job
impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an
unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist
priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of
imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off
duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It
was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had
had before of the real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which
despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police
station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that
an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something
about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an
old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought
the noise might be useful IN TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the
way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a
wild
elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained up,
as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on
the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the
only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in
pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours'
journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in
the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless
against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow
and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the
municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his
heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me
in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor
quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm leaf,
winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy,
stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any
definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the
scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the
elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had
almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we
heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of
"Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in
her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd
of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and
exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to
have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the
mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he
could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant
had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with
its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This
was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly
with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was
coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an
expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the
dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The
friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as
neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an
orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had
already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and
throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges,
and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was
in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started
forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of
the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting
excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it
was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to
them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat.
It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is
always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill,
looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an
ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you
got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry
waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy
from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was
standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not
the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches
of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them
into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with
perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter
to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and
costly piece of machinery--and obviously one ought not to do it if it can
possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think
now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he
would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and
caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided
that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not
turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It
was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.
It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the
sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited
over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.
They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a
trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to
shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got
to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward,
irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle
in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the
white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,
standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading
actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this
moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he
destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized
figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall
spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis
he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and
his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had
committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got
to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind
and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two
thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away,
having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at
me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long
struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch
of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that
elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At
that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot
an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a
LARGE animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered.
Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would
only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had
got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been
behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you
left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to
within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If
he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe
to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going
to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was
soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged
and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a
steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own
skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with
the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would
have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front
of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought
in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans
would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning
corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite
probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine
and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still,
and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theater curtain go
up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have
their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with
cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one
would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I
ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight
at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this,
thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one
never does when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee
that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one
would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious,
terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell,
but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken,
shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a
long time--it might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged
flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years
old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not
collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly
upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That
was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his
whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in
falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed
beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his
trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only
time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was
obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He
was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound
of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open--I could
see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for
him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two
remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The
thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die.
His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing
continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony,
but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him
further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It
seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and
yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back
for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his
throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued
as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later
that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and
baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body
almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting
of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and
could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad
elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control
it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was
right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for
killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been
killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient
pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the
others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
