An Elephant Crackup: Blog comments

[Guest guest]

Please find below some comments on a blog site, which is copied for

our members in perspective of the Book on Elephant Trauma by Gay

Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at

Oregon State University after an article appeared in the New York

Times.

 

The original Blog page:

 

http://2012.tribe.net/thread/b4a906dd-b652-40b2-b092-0e6834e968ba

 

To read the NY Times book article:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/ma...8elephant.html

 

Thanks,

 

Azam Siddiqui

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" An Elephant Crackup " Thu, October 12, 2006 - 7:17 AM

Below are excerpts from the today's NYT Magazine. It deals with

elephants but its implication to our species should be a wake up

call to the human's place in the ecosystem of Gaia.

 

The full article can be found here:

www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08...ephant.html

 

 

These were not isolated incidents. 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 fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that

a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict,

or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990's to

monitor the problem. 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; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of

them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used

everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their

revenge. 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.

 

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that

is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a

less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. 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.

 

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at

the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes

that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity,

a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, " To Avoid

Confrontation, Don't Worship Elephants. " " Everybody pretty much

agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has

dramatically changed, " Bradshaw told me recently. " What we are

seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and

elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence, there is now

hostility and violence. Now, I use the term `violence' because of

the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of

humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants. "

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their

careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so

abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be

attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant

researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of

testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for

land and resources between elephants and humans. But 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.

 

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. In Uganda,

herds were often found to be " semipermanent aggregations, " as a

paper written by Bradshaw describes them, with many females between

the ages of 15 and 25 having no familial associations.

 

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. " The loss of

elephants elders, " Bradshaw told me, " and the traumatic experience

of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain

and behavior development in young elephants. "

 

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, wasn'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. 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. "

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Re: " An Elephant Crackup " Thu, October 12, 2006 - 8:35 PM

This is very distressing news. It seems that the " canary in a coal

mine " for Gaia may actually be an elephant. I hope our species will

heed their message instead of killing off the messenger.

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Re: " An Elephant Crackup " Fri, October 13, 2006 - 9:14 AM

it also sounds oddly familiar to the sociological analysis of what

goes on in the inner city with young males.

maybe we're just not just monkeys, but elephants and canaries too?

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Re: " An Elephant Crackup " Fri, October 13, 2006 - 7:40 PM

indeed. so much for the " pathetic fallacy " .

 

this is a profound story. I've also seen numerous stories about

shocking abnormal behavior being observed in dolphins over the past

few years, but not quite as dramatic what is going on with the

elephants.

 

if we should see more incidences of shocking animal behavior, it

won't surprise me.

 

Earth prepares to vomit.

Either lend a hand and hold back her hair,

Or say your prayers and grab hold of your shorts.

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Re: " An Elephant Crackup " Fri, October 13, 2006 - 10:07 PM

Yes, it is distressing.... alot of the animals are sensitive to what

is going on. Birds flying off course, whales & dolphins beaching....

Particularily interesting is that alot of the wave frequencies that

are unnaturel to most creatures and that have been introduced since

the Industrial Age (via radar, sonar, Star Wars etc) is causing alot

of madness not only in animals but in humans as well.

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Re: " An Elephant Crackup " Sat, October 14, 2006 - 10:06 AM

>causing alot of madness not only in animals but in humans as well.

<

________________

amen, " in humans as well "

for me lies a great wormhole of confusion as to what point in human

evolution did we wake up and declare ourselves completly

disconnected from everything around us.

Smarter than everything, mightier, tragically alone in our own

conceptions.

We chose to rebuke connections to our planet, our environment, our

brothers in animals, and even denying the direct relationships at a

molecular level that we share with all that is.

 

What an amazing fortress we have contrived to maintain this " we are

all that matters or the end all, to the height of the evolutionary

pyramid " A hard lesson we created, but blessed and neccesary

nonetheless.

 

Even when the planet responds to our negativity and shows us our

tiny little level of participation in the grand " movie " by sending

giant waves or disrupting the vibrational field that gives us

direction, we fumble around in the techno-logical ways to explain it

or prevent it from occuring again.

 

The wisdom that is avaliable is ringing loud from within these days,

and as we continue to merge in the great confluence of light, more

of these incidents will continue to present themselves to elevate us

and show us that the universal love and compassion is crying out for

us to give blessings of conclusion to this difficult lesson we have

engaged for some time. It beckons us to re-join in the ethers of

connection and remember that within each of our divine selves lies

tools and technologies far greater than the greatest of human

advancements to date.

 

Sound, light and compassion is the only compass we need.

Blessing to all!