One Red Hot Country Mama!

  I was at the gym on Sunday watching the screens while running and sweating and CBC veteran reporter Joe Schlesinger was on talking about elephants. Through the reduction in their natural habitat by expanding human settlement and increased poaching, elephants are becoming more violent, some suffering from Elephant Breakdown, a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The show went to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee (with the very cool URL of www.elephants.com) a 2,700 acre sanctuary dedicated to caring for old, sick and needy elephants. There are currently 19 living there. Some of the elephants have killed humans, a crime that would usually be punishable by death, but the sanctuary accepts elephants as the social, emotional animals that they are, with long memories and ability to recover from their stress through therapy.

A New York Times Magazine article posted on their site by Charles Siebert writes thoroughly on the subject:

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.

Even in India, where elephants were considered a deity, a headline of a newspaper warns “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.”  Why is this happening?

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years.

Why is the network weakening?

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.

What happens when they lose that network?

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.

Wow. It is hard to ignore the similarities between elephant society and human society – animal researchers strive to avoid anthropomorphism in order to stay objective, but I can see how it is hard to resist. After the show ended, I had that feeling of helplessness and discouragement that comes from watching a show like that in Toronto, where there is extremely little I can do any time soon to help. I had a stressful day to worry about at work and I have bills to pay. Now I am also worried about the human race causing an animal crisis… I am only 1 in 6 billion…

I got off of the treadmill and went to lift some weights and started thinking more about elephants. The Bronx Zoo in New York City is no longer holding elephants in captivity because of the harm that it causes them. Awareness is good. The woman who founded the Elephant Sanctuary used to manage elephants for entertainment and now she has dedicated her life to providing awareness about the elephant crisis. That is an inspiration. I choose to replace that helpless and worried feeling with compassion. And one day, who knows, maybe I can do something.