A profound and tragic tale…
October 27th, 2006From the NYT - Elephant culture so far in decline they've become psychotic and lawless beasts.
…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.
Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. 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.
That is terrible and disturbing. To think of elephant culture as something large enough, with enough inertia and importance to keep the psychic well-being of elephants as a species intact…and then to shatter that to the point where they take on the form of a human nation, post World War III perhaps, after the thin veneer of civilization has fallen away and the savage alone survive harsh and short lives through sheer force of will and physical violence. Shed a tear for our fellow noble beings, brought low by the senseless, self-serving and numb hand of mankind.
