We’ve just about ruined the elephants.
There have been, in the last few years, reports in Africa and India of elephants charging human villages, and of violent elephant-on-human attacks. The docile elephant, blessed with the sheer size to warrant no natural enemies, seems to have taken a turn towards the aggressive, with humans being the primary target. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of elephant attacks.
Of course, the scientists are fascinated and alarmed. Elephants have lived easily alongside humans for centuries, at least. It’s been a model of zoological coexistence; peaceful mutual respect, if you don’t count the poaching.
It turns out, after a little elephant studying, that we’ve learned that the great pachyderms are victims of their infamous memories. Unfortunately, these elephants seem to be storing up traumatic memories of all of the terrible things that humans have been doing to them. They remember poachings and huntings and shootings. They remember watching their parents and other members of their tribes die. They remember what we’ve been doing, and, in an over-simplified explanation of the problem, it’s driving them literally crazy. The elephants of the world have developed a collective Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They have hit the breaking point. They have begun to charge. Their incredible memories and sizable intellect mean that the elephants evolve a little faster than some other species, so it’s happening quickly. And whereas we, the homosapien assholes, have been rapidly evolving in our technology, and can now develop remarkable elephant guns that get better by the day, or the hour, the unfortunate downstream of our evolutionary composition appears to be that our ethics and morals and sense of our place in the world is devolving at an equally rapid rate. We build bigger guns and smaller hearts. We create larger explosions that please our shrinking brains. We are so smart and advanced that we can genetically remove all nutrients from our fruits and vegetables, making them pretty and useless (just like us!). We are an evolutionary disaster, and it didn’t really bother me that much, until I found out that we’ve ruined the elephants. Now I’m mad.
When an elephant dies, its family members conduct a weeklong vigil over the body. They cover it with brush and grass, and caress its cheeks with their trunks, as they would in greeting. They howl and mourn and sit, day and night, with their recently departed, in a compelling and poignant elephant shivah. They come back annually and visit the bones. Years later, when scientists play back audio recordings of since-deceased elephants from a loudspeaker on a jeep, the elephants of the tribe, hopeful and confused, run over and touch the speaker. “Are you in there? Have they got you? Are you back from beyond?” They do not forget their dead, nor how they died, and the elephants, rightfully, are pissed off.
So I’m mad and they’re mad and the scientists are trying to figure it all out and are suggesting therapy and residential sanctuary programs for the angry elephants. They want to talk with them and nurture them and have them think about their relationship with the other elephants. They think that this will stall the problems.
I say leave them alone. Do NOT send the elephants into Freudian analysis- for Christ’s sake, they’re smarter than we are, and it’s just embarrassing. Stop hunting them and shooting at them and “relocating them for their own survivial.” Leave the elephants alone. Send the hunters into analysis, and let the elephants be. I’m so sad for the elephants. Another notch in the belt of things that humans have just screwed up so miserably. When is someone going to take off that belt and teach us a lesson we won’t forget? Further arguments for atheism. If there were a God, I feel, we’d have gotten a lot more hits with the God-switch.
We need to learn to walk away, and not try to keep sticking our paws in the things we have broken. Fixing them is not always the answer. Sometimes we just need to realize that solving problems is a selfish and self-serving exercise, and that the best thing we can do is put our hands in our pockets and walk away, trying to fit our feet into the footprints that we left on the way in. If I ever see a human being trying to talk therapy-speak to an elephant, I’m going to rally an angry herd of folks and go charge an HMO office somewhere. Not to fix the problem, per se, but just as a little release.
I’m just so damned upset about the elephants.
September 23, 2008 at 4:14 am
Elephants were cought in Asia until late seventies. The african elephants were hunted until 1989, when the ivoryban partly stopped the hunting. After this, when there was no hunting pressure anymore, and human settlements got larger and elephant envoronment smaller, human-elephant conflict increased, and more poor farmers were killed, and so was the elephants.
There was almost no hunting at all th last 20 years, during a time when elephant aggressivness has increased.
Today, the asian elephant is, once again, increasing in numbers. The african elephant is in some parts of africa increasing with over 8% per year.
It very easy, when noone shoots elephants, they will of course try to eat the tasty maize or likewise for the farmers. They have no fear anymore.
An annual hunting of 10% will keep the elephants away from the villages.
We can not walk away, and leave poor families who lost their father and income. Also those people has to be cared for. And so the elephants.
Theres a strong need to find a balance between the two of us, man and elephant. Unfortunately we cant leave them alone in order to reach that balance. And believe me, no god has anything to do with this.