Are We Driving Elephants Crazy?

The cover of the Sunday, October 8, New York Times Magazine has a close-up photo of an elephant face and the headline, "Are We Driving Elephants Crazy?" The subheading reads, "Their behavior in the wild has grown strange and violent in recent years. Researchers say our encroachment on their way of life is to blame."

The article inside is by Genesis Award winner Charles Siebert. (See http://www.hsus.org/ace/14849 for more on the Genesis Awards) Siebert won for his July 4, 2005, NY Times Magazine cover story "Planet of the Retired Apes." Now he explores the effect that poaching, culling and captivity have had on elephants.

In "An Elephant Crackup?" (pg 42) we learn:
"All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings.... In the Indian state 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 unprovoked elephant attacks."

We also learn that "young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses..." And "In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities."

We read about the work of Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University:

"In 'Elephant Breakdown,' a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

Siebert continues:
"It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention."

We read that Bradshaw has sought "to combine traditional research into elephant behavior with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience."

Siebert writes about elephant matriarchal societies, about their intense mourning and burial rituals including weeklong vigils over the body and their elaborate communication systems.

The we read, "This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or 'allomothers') had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever....As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life.

Bradshaw says: "The loss of elephants elders and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants."

We read:
"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. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, 'locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.'"

Allan Schore a UCLA psychologist and neuroscientist who has focused his research on early human brain development and the negative impact of trauma on it is quoted:

"We know that these mechanisms cut across species. In the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas."

Siebert describes a visit to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, writing that it is "a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States — cases so bad that the people who profited from them were eager to let them go."

We learn that some of the elephants there have histories of striking out at trainers, even lethally. He describes what has historically happened in this country to elephants who killed humans -- the public electrocution of Topsy who killed a trainer who tried to feed her a lit cigarette, and the public hanging of Mary who killed a keeper after he jabbed her behind the ear with a bullhook.

Of the sad history of captive elephants in the US and elsewhere we read:
"Wild-caught elephants often witness as young calves the slaughter of their parents, just about the only way, shy of a far more costly tranquilization procedure, to wrest a calf from elephant parents, especially the mothers. The young captives are then dispatched to a foreign environment to work either as performers or laborers, all the while being kept in relative confinement and isolation, a kind of living death for an animal as socially developed and dependent as we now know elephants to be."

We read, however:

"And yet just as we now understand that elephants hurt like us, we’re learning that they can heal like us as well." The elephant sanctuary uses a system of "passive control," a therapy similar to those used to treat humans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
We later read, however, about the killing at the sanctuary of loving caretaker Joanna Burke. Just as in humans, sometimes the trauma is not erased -- there is an "indelible etching."

It is explained that elephants suffer, "not simply because of us, but because they are, by and large, us. If as recently as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by a psychological harm — the idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and intricately woundable as we are."

The article suggests we need to develop "interspecies empathy" and that "involves taking what has been learned about elephant society, psychology and emotion and inculcating that knowledge into the conservation schemes of researchers and park rangers. This includes doing things like expanding elephant habitat to what it used to be historically and avoiding the use of culling and translocations as conservation tools."

That empathy is expected to change the way we care for captive elephants. We read that the Bronx Zoo announced plans to phase out its elephant exhibit on social-behavioral grounds. Carol Buckley from The Elephant Sanctuary is quoted:

"They’re really taking the lead. Zoos don’t want to concede the inappropriateness of keeping elephants in such confines. But if we as a society determine that an animal like this suffers in captivity, if the information shows us that they do, hey, we are the stewards. You'd think we'd want to do the right thing."

I have given a relatively brief summary of a lengthy and rich article that I hope you will read. You'll find it on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

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