In light of the recent news about the self-awareness of elephants, an article I read in the NY Times recently seems even more tragic. It seems that elephants the world over are becoming more and more likely to lash out at their human neighbors (or caretakers). This is largely due to poor living conditions in captivity or the oftentimes violent encroachment of humans into elephant “stomping grounds” (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). Other species face similar hardships, of course, but it would seem the elephants’ strong and unique societal ties are making their conflicts with humans into a particularly dramatic case.
Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.
When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting.
[...]
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression.
0 Responses to “The Elephants in the Room”