Elephant History &
Culture: Lines of
Demarcation
CONSIDERING THAT ANIMALS CAME
FIRST, ARE HUMANS MORE LIKE
ANIMALS, OR ARE ANIMALS MORE
LIKE HUMANS?
History
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Elephants were first captured and tamed in the Indus Valley
about 4000 BC.
Their enormous size and power were harnessed on the
battlefield and recorded in Thai history. For instance, Porus,
Emperor of India, used 85 elephants to confront Alexander the
Great at the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BC.
The strength and intelligence of elephants has been used by
people in huge construction projects such as the irrigation
system on Sri Lanka.
Elephants play an important role in both Hindu and Buddhist
religions. Ganesh, the Hindu elephant God is revered as the
remover of obstacles and Buddha often spoke about elephants
and their image and characteristics as powerful metaphors.
Elephant Culture
In “An Elephant Crackup” by Charles
Siebert, elements of elephant culture were
presented from research done on elephants
in Uganda.
Before the onset of the research, elephants
all over Africa, India, and parts of
Southeast Asia, from within and around
whatever patches and corridors of their
natural habitat remain have been striking
out, destroying villages and crops, and
attacking and killing human beings.
The problem was becoming so
commonplace that a new statistical
category was created by elephant
researchers in the mid 1990s to monitor the
problem known as HEC or Human
Elephant conflict.
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Since the early 1990s, young male elephants in Pilanesberg
National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game reserve in South
Africa have even been raping and killing rhinoceros.
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It turns out that like much like humans, elephants were reacting
violently to the loss of their habitat, increased competition with
humans for resources, and poaching.
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Specifically the loss of elephant elders and the traumatic
experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs
normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.
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At the level of neuroscience, elephant trauma is seen by scientists
and researchers to mar neuronal fields, snap synaptic bridges, and
create chemical imbalances.
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The unanswered questions left by the article were: “What does
this mean beyond science? How do we respond to the fact that we
are causing other species like elephants to psychologically break
down?
Elephant Family Structure
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Elephants have a matriarchal head. The family will consist of an older matriarch,
her (daughters usually about three or four of them) and their calves.
Typical elephant family comprises 6-12 individual elephants but can expand to a
larger group of 20.
The family eventually splits depending on the herd. However, they reunite at
watering holes and feeding spots with joy and celebration at seeing each other.
When traveling in search of food the herd is led by the matriarch.
Bulls stick to a bachelor (all-male) pod in which they live and travel. When a bull
is ready to mate they search for an elephant cow and wait until she is ready to
mount. Once mated, they return to the bachelor pod, having nothing to do with the
rearing of the child.
When the male calves in the herd reach adolescents they break away from the
herd and from bachelor pods with their peers. Adolescent females stick to their
main herd until adulthood.
Like humans elephants are capable of forming special bonds with their friends and
family members. They value their family structure more so than other animals and
are naturally outgoing and sociable animals.
Attributes shared by humans and
elephants in The White Bone:
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The have social structure, and hierarchies, living in matrilineal family
groups.
They grieve over the death of their loved ones.
They adopt orphaned elephants as She-Scares becomes Mud’s
adoptive mother.
The have keen memories
They have feelings, and the communication to transmit those feelings
to each other
They share the same need for basic necessities such as food, water, and
protective shelter
They have ritual and customs: culture
They survive and find ways to adapt to violence, as Mud survives an
attack on her family by ivory poachers
Are there any more shared attributes from The White Bone?
Elephants in Captivity
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Captive elephants are tamed not
domesticated.
In the past they were sent off to war
and were used for heavy logging and
construction work, but the industrial
revolution replaced them with
machinery.
Now, elephants are captured and/or
kept in captivity for our
entertainment.
Around the world there exists
between 15,000 -20,000 captive
elephants.
I was captured in the wild,
taken from my family;
Now I live alone,
in this small, dark pen.
You can read in my eyes,
and in the color of my skin, that
I am sad, lonely and frightened
of those small, bad men.
Elephants in Circuses
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Elephants are confined and chained for hours.
Through physical punishment and the threat of
its use, they are trained to pose in unnatural and
difficult positions.
They are moved in unbearable heat and below
freezing temperatures from city to city chained
in flatbed trucks and in boxcars.
Calves are separated from their mothers at an
early age for the purpose of training.
Elephants are moved from their companions to
be brought and sold and frequently moved
about.
Circus elephants have no level of autonomy
over their lives to the extent where they are
trained to defecate into a bucket on command.
Elephants in Circuses (cont’d)
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http://vimeo.com/21489460
This video clip released by Animal Defenders
International, displays behind the scenes footage at
the winter quarters of Bobby Roberts Super Circus. It
shows graphic violence and confinement of circus
animals. For example, Annie (Ann), an elderly,
severely arthritic 57 year old elephant is seen being
hit with a metal pitchfork and kicked around the face
and body over 48 times over the period of
observation by workers.
Elephants in TV and Films
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To ensure that the elephants perform
consistently they are kept under the constant
control of the handler who uses a steel-tipped
device similar to a fire poker to jab and strike
the elephants to action.
Training is a violent affair that begins when
elephants are still babies; it is life long and
unrelenting, meant to force them into
compliance and obedience.
Elephants in TV and Films (cont’d)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK27aknW
VI4&feature=player_embedded
How does this clip portray the way we treat
elephants in today’s world? Also, what
capabilities do we seem to place upon
animals?
After reading the text, The White Bone, is there any
absolute boundary or line of demarcation that can be
drawn between animals and humans?
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What boundaries
between the human
and the animal are
depicted by the
At&t cell phone ad
that carefully places
both elephant and
electronic in India?
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Why would Accenture, a
fortune global 500 company
use elephants to advertise their
management, consulting firm?
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What do these ads that
objectify elephants say
about the boundaries we’ve
imposed between humans
and animals?
We’ve acknowledged elephants’ human-like qualities, but only
insofar as to make them into more of a commodity. Thus, the
source of the absolute boundaries that we try to create between
humans and animals could be rooted in the fact that we are a
consumer-driven, free market based economy motivated solely by
profit and loss.
The End!