NYTM: An Elephant Crackup?
kuac...@yahoo.com
October 8, 2006
An Elephant Crackup?
By CHARLES SIEBERT
'We're not going anywhere," my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered
to me one morning this past June, the two of us sitting in the front
seat of a jeep just after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in
southwestern Uganda. We'd originally stopped to observe what appeared
to be a lone bull elephant grazing in a patch of tall savanna grasses
off to our left. More than one "rogue" crossed our path that
morning - a young male elephant that has made an overly strong power
play against the dominant male of his herd and been banished, sometimes
permanently. This elephant, however, soon proved to be not a rogue but
part of a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations registered just
before the emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees and brush.
We sat there watching the elephants cross the road before us, seeming,
for all their heft, so light on their feet, soundlessly plying the
wind-swept savanna grasses like land whales adrift above the floor of
an ancient, waterless sea.
Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left
bumper, a huge female emerged - "the matriarch," Okello said
softly. There was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and
knocking about within the secure cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia
leaves are an elephant's favorite food, and as the calf set to work
on some low branches, the matriarch stood guard, her vast back flank
blocking the road, the rest of the herd milling about in the brush a
short distance away.
After 15 minutes or so, Okello started inching the jeep forward,
revving the engine, trying to make us sound as beastly as possible. The
matriarch, however, was having none of it, holding her ground, the
fierce white of her eyes as bright as that of her tusks. Although I
pretty much knew the answer, I asked Okello if he was considering
trying to drive around. "No," he said, raising an index finger for
emphasis. "She'll charge. We should stay right here."
I'd have considered it a wise policy even at a more peaceable
juncture in the course of human-elephant relations. In recent years,
however, those relations have become markedly more bellicose. Just two
days before I arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a
fishing village nearby. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by
a young male elephant at the northern edge of the park, near the
village of Katwe. African elephants use their long tusks to forage
through dense jungle brush. They've also been known to wield them,
however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators,
pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive
thrust. Okello told me that a young Indian tourist was killed in this
fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, just north of
where we were.
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.
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.
Once the matriarch and her calf were a comfortable distance from us
that morning, Okello and I made the 20-minute drive to Kyambura, a
village at the far southeastern edge of the park. Back in 2003,
Kyambura was reportedly the site of the very sort of sudden, unprovoked
elephant attack I'd been hearing about. According to an account of
the event in the magazine New Scientist, a number of huts and fields
were trampled, and the townspeople were afraid to venture out to
surrounding villages, either by foot or on their bikes, because
elephants were regularly blocking the road and charging out at those
who tried to pass.
Park officials from the Uganda Wildlife Authority with whom I tried to
discuss the incident were reluctant to talk about it or any of the
recent killings by elephants in the area. Eco-tourism is one of
Uganda's major sources of income, and the elephant and other wildlife
stocks of Queen Elizabeth National Park are only just now beginning to
recover from years of virtually unchecked poaching and habitat
destruction. Tom Okello, the chief game warden at the park (and no
relation to my driver), and Margaret Driciru, Queen Elizabeth's chief
veterinarian, each told me that they weren't aware of the attack in
Kyambura. When I mentioned it to the executive director of the wildlife
authority, Moses Mapesa, upon my initial arrival in the capital city,
Kampala, he eventually admitted that it did happen, but he claimed that
it was not nearly as recent as reported. "That was 14 years ago,"
he said. "We have seen aggressive behavior from elephants, but
that's a story of the past."
Kyambura did look, upon our arrival, much like every other small
Ugandan farming community I'd passed through on my visit. Lush fields
of banana trees, millet and maize framed a small town center of
pastel-colored single-story cement buildings with corrugated-tin roofs.
People sat on stoops out front in the available shade. Bicyclers bore
preposterously outsize loads of bananas, firewood and five-gallon water
jugs on their fenders and handlebars. Contrary to what I had read, the
bicycle traffic along the road in and out of Kyambura didn't seem
impaired in the slightest.
But when Okello and I asked a shopkeeper named Ibrah Byamukama about
elephant attacks, he immediately nodded and pointed to a patch of maize
and millet fields just up the road, along the edges of the surrounding
Maramagambo Forest. He confirmed that a small group of elephants
charged out one morning two years earlier, trampled the fields and
nearby gardens, knocked down a few huts and then left. He then pointed
to a long orange gash in the earth between the planted fields and the
forest: a 15-foot-deep, 25-foot-wide trench that had been dug by the
wildlife authority around the perimeter of Kyambura in an attempt to
keep the elephants at bay. On the way out of town, Okello and I took a
closer look at the trench. It was filled with stacks of thorny shrubs
for good measure.
"The people are still worried," Byamukama said, shaking his head.
"The elephants are just becoming more destructive. I don't know
why."
Three years ago, Gay Bradshaw, then working on her graduate degree in
psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara,
Calif., began wondering much the same thing: was the extraordinary
behavior of elephants in Africa and Asia signaling a breaking point?
With the assistance of several established African-elephant
researchers, including Daphne Sheldrick and Cynthia Moss, and with the
help of Allan Schore, an expert on human trauma disorders at the
department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at U.C.L.A.,
Bradshaw sought to combine traditional research into elephant behavior
with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience. Using the few
remaining relatively stable elephant herds in places like Amboseli
National Park in Kenya, as control groups, Bradshaw and her colleagues
analyzed the far more fractious populations found in places like
Pilanesberg in South Africa and Queen Elizabeth National Park in
Uganda. What emerged was a portrait of pervasive pachyderm dysfunction.
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. Studies of established herds have
shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for
nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young
females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males
go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into
the fold as mature adults.
When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning
and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully
covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years
afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns
rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull's lower jaw, the way
living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an
elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of
cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that
elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations,
from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets,
along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks
to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating
over long distances - in order to pass along, for example, news about
imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance
to elephants, the death of a community member - they use patterns of
subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by
exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.
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."
In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made
to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent
substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park
rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into
several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the
wayward behavior - including unusually premature hormonal changes
among the adolescent elephants - abated.
But according to Bradshaw and her colleagues, the various pieces of the
elephant-trauma puzzle really come together at the level of
neuroscience, or what might be called the physiology of psychology, by
which scientists can now map the marred neuronal fields, snapped
synaptic bridges and crooked chemical streams of an embattled psyche.
Though most scientific knowledge of trauma is still understood through
research on human subjects, neural studies of elephants are now under
way. (The first functional M.R.I. scan of an elephant brain, taken this
year, revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, a huge hippocampus, a seat of
memory in the mammalian brain, as well as a prominent structure in the
limbic system, which processes emotions.) Allan Schore, the U.C.L.A.
psychologist and neuroscientist who for the past 15 years has focused
his research on early human brain development and the negative impact
of trauma on it, recently wrote two articles with Bradshaw on the
stress-related neurobiological underpinnings of current abnormal
elephant behavior.
"We know that these mechanisms cut across species," Schore told me.
"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."
For Bradshaw, these continuities between human and elephant brains
resonate far outside the field of neuroscience. "Elephants are
suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves
as a result of violence," she told me. "Elephant behavior is
entirely congruent with what we know about humans and other mammals.
Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain organization and
early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar.
That's not news. What is news is when you start asking, What does
this mean beyond the science? How do we respond to the fact that we are
causing other species like elephants to psychologically break down? In
a way, it's not so much a cognitive or imaginative leap anymore as it
is a political one."
Eve Abe says that in her mind, she made that leap before she ever left
her mother's womb. An animal ethologist and wildlife-management
consultant now based in London, Abe (pronounced AH-bay) grew up in
northern Uganda. After several years of studying elephants in Queen
Elizabeth National Park, where decades of poaching had drastically
reduced the herds, Abe received her doctorate at Cambridge University
in 1994 for work detailing the parallels she saw between the plight of
Uganda's orphaned male elephants and the young male orphans of her
own people, the Acholi, whose families and villages have been decimated
by years of civil war. It's work she proudly proclaims to be not only
"the ultimate act of anthropomorphism" but also what she was
destined to do.
"My very first encounter with an elephant was a fetal one," Abe
told me in June in London as the two of us sipped tea at a cafe in
Paddington Station. I was given Abe's contact numbers earlier in the
spring by Bradshaw, who is currently working with Abe to build a
community center in Uganda to help both elephants and humans in their
recovery from violence. For more than a month before my departure from
New York, I had been trying without luck to arrange with the British
Home Office for Abe, who is still waiting for permanent residence
status in England, to travel with me to Uganda as my guide through
Queen Elizabeth National Park without fear of her being denied re-entry
to England. She was to accompany me that day right up to the departure
gate at Heathrow, the two of us hoping (in vain, as it turned out) for
a last-minute call that would have given her leave to use the ticket I
was holding for her in my bag.
"My dad was a conservationist and a teacher," explained Abe, a
tall, elegant woman with a trilling, nearly girlish voice. "He was
always out in the parks. One of my aunts tells this story about us
passing through Murchison park one day. My dad was driving. My uncle
was in the front seat. In the back were my aunt and my mom, who was
very pregnant with me. They suddenly came upon this huge herd of
elephants on the road, and the elephants just stopped. So my dad
stopped. He knew about animals. The elephants just stood there, then
they started walking around the car, and looking into the car. Finally,
they walked off. But my father didn't start the car then. He waited
there. After an hour or more, a huge female came back out onto the
road, right in front of the car. It reared up and trumpeted so loudly,
then followed the rest of the herd back into the bush. A few days
later, when my mom got home, I was born."
Abe began her studies in Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1982, as an
undergraduate at Makerere University in Kampala, shortly after she and
her family, who'd been living for years as refugees in Kenya to
escape the brutal violence in Uganda under the dictatorship of Idi
Amin, returned home in the wake of Amin's ouster in 1979. Abe told me
that when she first arrived at the park, there were fewer than 150
elephants remaining from an original population of nearly 4,000. The
bulk of the decimation occurred during the war with Tanzania that led
to Amin's overthrow: soldiers from both armies grabbed all the ivory
they could get their hands on - and did so with such cravenness that
the word "poaching" seems woefully inadequate. "Normally when you
say 'poaching,' " Abe said, "you think of people shooting one
or two and going off. But this was war. They'd just throw hand
grenades at the elephants, bring whole families down and cut out the
ivory. I call that mass destruction."
The last elephant survivors of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Abe said,
never left one another's side. They kept in a tight bunch, moving as
one. Only one elderly female remained; Abe estimated her to be at least
62. It was this matriarch who first gathered the survivors together
from their various hideouts on the park's forested fringes and then
led them back out as one group into open savanna. Until her death in
the early 90's, the old female held the group together, the
population all the while slowly beginning to rebound. In her
yet-to-be-completed memoir, "My Elephants and My People," Abe
writes of the prominence of the matriarch in Acholi society; she named
the park's matriarchal elephant savior Lady Irene, after her own
mother. "It took that core group of survivors in the park about five
or six years," Abe told me, "before I started seeing whole new
family units emerge and begin to split off and go their own way."
In 1986, Abe's family was forced to flee the country again. Violence
against Uganda's people and elephants never completely abated after
Amin's regime collapsed, and it drastically worsened in the course of
the full-fledged war that developed between government forces and the
rebel Lord's Resistance Army. For years, that army's leader, Joseph
Kony, routinely "recruited" from Acholi villages, killing the
parents of young males before their eyes, or sometimes having them do
the killings themselves, before pressing them into service as child
soldiers. The Lord's Resistance Army has by now been largely
defeated, but Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court
for numerous crimes against humanity, has hidden with what remains of
his army in the mountains of Murchison Falls National Park, and more
recently in Garamba National Park in northern Congo, where poaching by
the Lord's Resistance Army has continued to orphan more elephants.
"I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and
the elephants," Abe told me. "I saw that it is an absolute
coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We
still don't have villages. There are over 200 displaced people's
camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these
camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically
eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin's time,
and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We
are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But
the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced
people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All
these kids who have grown up with their parents killed - no fathers,
no mothers, only children looking after them. They don't go to
schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They
form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It's the same thing
that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they
are wild, completely lost."
On the ride from Paddington that afternoon out to Heathrow, where I
would catch a flight to Uganda, Abe told me that the parallel between
the plight of Ugandans and their elephants was in many ways too close
for her to see at first. It was only after she moved to London that she
had what was, in a sense, her first full, adult recognition of the
entwinement between human and elephant that she says she long ago felt
in her mother's womb.
"I remember when I first was working on my doctorate," she said.
"I mentioned that I was doing this parallel once to a prominent
scientist in Kenya. He looked amazed. He said, 'How come nobody has
made this connection before?' I told him because it hadn't happened
this way to anyone else's tribe before. To me it's something I see
so clearly. Most people are scared of showing that kind of
anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn't sound like I'm
inventing something. It's there. People know it's there. Some might
think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals
look like people. But people are animals."
Shortly after my return from Uganda, I went to visit the Elephant
Sanctuary in Tennessee, a 2,700-acre rehabilitation center and
retirement facility situated in the state's verdant, low-rolling
southern hill country. The sanctuary 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. Given that elephants
in the wild are now exhibiting aberrant behaviors that were long
observed in captive elephants, it perhaps follows that a positive
working model for how to ameliorate the effects of elephant breakdown
can be found in captivity.
Of the 19 current residents of the sanctuary, perhaps the biggest
hard-luck story was that of a 40-year-old, five-ton Asian elephant
named Misty. Originally captured as a calf in India in 1966, Misty
spent her first decade in captivity with a number of American circuses
and finally ended up in the early 80's at a wild-animal attraction
known as Lion Country Safari in Irvine, Calif. It was there, on the
afternoon of July 25, 1983, that Misty, one of four performing
elephants at Lion Country Safari that summer, somehow managed to break
free of her chains and began madly dashing about the park, looking to
make an escape. When one of the park's zoologists tried to corner and
contain her, Misty killed him with one swipe of her trunk.
There are, in the long, checkered history of human-elephant relations,
countless stories of lethal elephantine assaults, and almost invariably
of some gruesomely outsize, animalistic form of retribution exacted by
us. It was in the very state of Tennessee, back in September 1916, that
another five-ton Asian circus elephant, Mary, was impounded by a local
sheriff for the killing of a young hotel janitor who'd been hired to
mind Mary during a stopover in the northeast Tennessee town of
Kingsport. The janitor had apparently taken Mary for a swim at a local
pond, where, according to witnesses, he poked her behind the left ear
with a metal hook just as she was reaching for a piece of floating
watermelon rind. Enraged, Mary turned, swiftly snatched him up with her
trunk, dashed him against a refreshment stand and then smashed his head
with her foot.
With cries from the townspeople to "Kill the elephant!" and threats
from nearby town leaders to bar the circus if "Murderous Mary," as
newspapers quickly dubbed her, remained a part of the show, the
circus's owner, Charlie Sparks, knew he had to do something to
appease the public's blood lust and save his business. Among the
penalties he is said to have contemplated was electrocution, a ghastly
precedent for which had been set 13 years earlier, on the grounds of
the nearly completed Luna Park in Coney Island. A longtime circus
elephant named Topsy, who'd killed three trainers in as many years
- the last one after he tried to feed her a lighted cigarette -
would become the largest and most prominent victim of Thomas Edison,
the father of direct-current electricity, who had publicly electrocuted
a number of animals at that time using his rival George
Westinghouse's alternating current, in hopes of discrediting it as
being too dangerous.
Sparks ultimately decided to have Mary hanged and shipped her by train
to the nearby town of Erwin, Tenn., where more than 2,500 people
gathered at the local rail yard for her execution. Dozens of children
are said to have run off screaming in terror when the chain that was
suspended from a huge industrial crane snapped, leaving Mary writhing
on the ground with a broken hip. A local rail worker promptly clambered
up Mary's bulk and secured a heavier chain for a second, successful
hoisting.
Misty's fate in the early 80's, by contrast, seems a triumph of
modern humanism. Banished, after the Lion Safari killing, to the
Hawthorn Corporation, a company in Illinois that trains and leases
elephants and tigers to circuses, she would continue to lash out at a
number of her trainers over the years. But when Hawthorn was convicted
of numerous violations of the Animal Welfare Act in 2003, the company
agreed to relinquish custody of Misty to the Elephant Sanctuary. She
was loaded onto a trailer transport on the morning of Nov. 17, 2004,
and even then managed to get away with one final shot at the last in
her long line of captors.
"The details are kind of sketchy," Carol Buckley, a founder of the
Elephant Sanctuary, said to me one afternoon in July, the two of us
pulling up on her all-terrain four-wheeler to a large grassy enclosure
where an extremely docile and contented-looking Misty, trunk high, ears
flapping, waited to greet us. "Hawthorn's owner was trying to get
her to stretch out so he could remove her leg chains before loading her
on the trailer. At one point he prodded her with a bull hook, and she
just knocked him down with a swipe of her trunk. But we've seen none
of that since she's been here. She's as sweet as can be. You'd
never know that this elephant killed anybody."
In the course of her nearly two years at the Elephant Sanctuary -
much of it spent in quarantine while undergoing daily treatment for
tuberculosis - Misty has also been in therapy, as in psychotherapy.
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.
And yet just as we now understand that elephants hurt like us, we're
learning that they can heal like us as well. Indeed, Misty has become a
testament to the Elephant Sanctuary's signature "passive control"
system, a therapy tailored in many ways along the lines of those used
to treat human sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. Passive
control, as a sanctuary newsletter describes it, depends upon
"knowledge of how elephants process information and respond to
stress" as well as specific knowledge of each elephant's past
response to stress. Under this so-called nondominance system, there is
no discipline, retaliation or withholding of food, water and treats,
which are all common tactics of elephant trainers. Great pains are
taken, meanwhile, to afford the elephants both a sense of safety and
freedom of choice - two mainstays of human trauma therapy - as well
as continual social interaction.
Upon her arrival at the Elephant Sanctuary, Misty seemed to sense
straight off the different vibe of her new home. When Scott Blais of
the sanctuary went to free Misty's still-chained leg a mere day after
she'd arrived, she stood peaceably by, practically offering her leg
up to him. Over her many months of quarantine, meanwhile, with only
humans acting as a kind of surrogate elephant family, she has
consistently gone through the daily rigors of her tuberculosis
treatments - involving two caregivers, a team of veterinarians and
the use of a restraining chute in which harnesses are secured about her
chest and tail - without any coaxing or pressure. "We'll shower
her with praise in the barn afterwards," Buckley told me as Misty
stood by, chomping on a mouthful of hay, "and she actually purrs with
pleasure. The whole barn vibrates."
Of course, Misty's road to recovery - when viewed in light of her
history and that of all the other captive elephants, past and present
- is as harrowing as it is heartening. She and the others have
suffered, we now understand, 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. And while
such knowledge naturally places an added burden upon us, the keepers,
that burden is now being greatly compounded by the fact that sudden
violent outbursts like Misty's can no longer be dismissed as the
inevitable isolated revolts of a restless few against the constraints
and abuses of captivity.
They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to
grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the
more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most
devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants' continued keeping,
their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what's
left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from
naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end
- their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous
resilience - reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this
revolt they're currently staging against their own dismissal. And
while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of
impulses - the preservation of our own self-image - the great
paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is
that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will
demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.
On a more immediate, practical level, as Gay Bradshaw sees it, this
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. "If we want elephants around," Bradshaw told
me, "then what we need to do is simple: learn how to live with
elephants. In other words, in addition to conservation, we need to
educate people how to live with wild animals like humans used to do,
and to create conditions whereby people can live on their land and live
with elephants without it being this life-and-death situation."
The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however,
is far more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a
fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension,
ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw somewhat whimsically refers to as
a new "trans-species psyche," a commitment to move beyond an
anthropocentric frame of reference and, in effect, be elephants. Two
years ago, Bradshaw wrote a paper for the journal Society and Animals,
focusing on the work of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, a
sanctuary for orphaned and traumatized wild elephants - more or less
the wilderness-based complement to Carol Buckley's trauma therapy at
the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. The trust's human caregivers
essentially serve as surrogate mothers to young orphan elephants,
gradually restoring their psychological and emotional well being to the
point at which they can be reintroduced into existing wild herds. The
human "allomothers" stay by their adopted young orphans' sides,
even sleeping with them at night in stables. The caregivers make sure,
however, to rotate from one elephant to the next so that the orphans
grow fond of all the keepers. Otherwise an elephant would form such a
strong bond with one keeper that whenever he or she was absent, that
elephant would grieve as if over the loss of another family member,
often becoming physically ill itself.
To date, the Sheldrick Trust has successfully rehabilitated more than
60 elephants and reintroduced them into wild herds. A number of them
have periodically returned to the sanctuary with their own wild-born
calves in order to reunite with their human allomothers and to
introduce their offspring to what - out on this uncharted frontier of
the new "trans-species psyche" - is now being recognized, at
least by the elephants, it seems, as a whole new subspecies: the human
allograndmother. "Traditionally, nature has served as a source of
healing for humans," Bradshaw told me. "Now humans can participate
actively in the healing of both themselves and nonhuman animals. The
trust and the sanctuary are the beginnings of a mutually benefiting
interspecies culture."
On my way back to New York via London, I contacted Felicity de Zulueta,
a psychiatrist at Maudsley Hospital in London who treats victims of
extreme trauma, among them former child soldiers from the Lord's
Resistance Army. De Zulueta, an acquaintance of Eve Abe's, grew up in
Uganda in the early 1960's on the outskirts of Queen Elizabeth
National Park, near where her father, a malaria doctor, had set up camp
as part of a malaria-eradication program. For a time she had her own
elephant, orphaned by poaching, that local villagers had given to her
father, who brought it home to the family garage, where it immediately
bonded with an orphan antelope and dog already residing there.
"He was doing fine," de Zulueta told me of the pet elephant. "My
mother was loving it and feeding it, and then my parents realized, How
can we keep this elephant that is going to grow bigger than the garage?
So they gave it to who they thought were the experts. They sent him to
the Entebbe Zoo, and although they gave him all the right food and
everything, he was a lonely little elephant, and he died. He had no
attachment."
For de Zulueta, the parallel that Abe draws between the plight of war
orphans, human and elephant, is painfully apt, yet also provides some
cause for hope, given the often startling capacity of both animals for
recovery. She told me that one Ugandan war orphan she is currently
treating lost all the members of his family except for two older
brothers. Remarkably, one of those brothers, while serving in the
Ugandan Army, rescued the younger sibling from the Lord's Resistance
Army; the older brother's unit had captured the rebel battalion in
which his younger brother had been forced to fight.
The two brothers eventually made their way to London, and for the past
two years, the younger brother has been going through a gradual process
of recovery in the care of Maudsley Hospital. Much of the
rehabilitation, according to de Zulueta, especially in the early
stages, relies on the basic human trauma therapy principles now being
applied to elephants: providing decent living quarters, establishing a
sense of safety and of attachment to a larger community and allowing
freedom of choice. After that have come the more complex treatments
tailored to the human brain's particular cognitive capacities: things
like reliving the original traumatic experience and being taught to
modulate feelings through early detection of hyperarousal and through
breathing techniques. And the healing of trauma, as de Zulueta
describes it, turns out to have physical correlatives in the brain just
as its wounding does.
"What I say is, we find bypass," she explained. "We bypass the
wounded areas using various techniques. Some of the wounds are not
healable. Their scars remain. But there is hope because the brain is an
enormous computer, and you can learn to bypass its wounds by finding
different methods of approaching life. Of course there may be moments
when something happens and the old wound becomes unbearable. Still,
people do recover. The boy I've been telling you about is 18 now, and
he has survived very well in terms of his emotional health and
capacities. He's a lovely, lovely man. And he's a poet. He writes
beautiful poetry."
On the afternoon in July that I left the Elephant Sanctuary in
Tennessee, Carol Buckley and Scott Blais seemed in particularly good
spirits. Misty was only weeks away from the end of her quarantine, and
she would soon be able to socialize with some of her old cohorts from
the Hawthorn Corporation: eight female Asians that had been given over
to the sanctuary. I would meet the lot of them that day, driving from
one to the next on the back of Buckley's four-wheeler across the
sanctuary's savanna-like stretches. Buckley and Blais refer to them
collectively as the Divas.
Buckley and Blais told me that they got word not long ago of a
significant breakthrough in a campaign of theirs to get elephants out
of entertainment and zoos: the Bronx Zoo, one of the oldest and most
formidable zoos in the country, had announced that upon the death of
the zoo's three current elephant inhabitants, Patty, Maxine and
Happy, it would phase out its elephant exhibit on social-behavioral
grounds - an acknowledgment of a new awareness of the elephant's
very particular sensibility and needs. "They're really taking the
lead," Buckley told me. "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."
Four days later, I received an e-mail message from Gay Bradshaw, who
consults with Buckley and Blais on their various stress-therapy
strategies. She wrote that one of the sanctuary's elephants, an Asian
named Winkie, had just killed a 36-year-old female assistant caretaker
and critically injured the male caretaker who'd tried to save her.
People who work with animals on a daily basis can tell you all kinds of
stories about their distinct personalities and natures. I'd gotten,
in fact, an elaborate breakdown from Buckley and Blais on the various
elephants at the sanctuary and their sociopolitical maneuverings within
the sanctuary's distinct elephant culture, and I went to my notebook
to get a fix again on Winkie. A 40-year-old, 7,600-pound female from
Burma, she came to the sanctuary in 2000 from the Henry Vilas Zoo in
Madison, Wisc., where she had a reputation for lashing out at keepers.
When Winkie first arrived at the sanctuary, Buckley told me, she used
to jump merely upon being touched and then would wait for a
confrontation. But when it never came, she slowly calmed down. "Has
never lashed out at primary keepers," my last note on Winkie reads,
"but has at secondary ones."
Bradshaw's e-mail message concludes: "A stunning illustration of
trauma in elephants. The indelible etching."
I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past
June. As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf
to pass, he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two
months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that,
the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly
fraught moment we've arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that
after the man's killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one
of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then
standing vigil over it.
Even as we're forcing them out, it seems, the elephants are going out
of their way to put us, the keepers, in an ever more discomfiting
place, challenging us to preserve someplace for them, the ones who in
many ways seem to regard the matter of life and death more devoutly
than we. In fact, elephant culture could be considered the precursor of
our own, the first permanent human settlements having sprung up around
the desire of wandering tribes to stay by the graves of their dead.
"The city of the dead," as Lewis Mumford once wrote, "antedates
the city of the living."
When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man's
body for his family's funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge.
Human remains, a number of researchers have observed, are the only
other ones that elephants will treat as they do their own. In the end,
the villagers resorted to a tactic that has long been etched in the
elephant's collective memory, firing volleys of gunfire into the air
at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away.
Charles Siebert, a contributing writer, is at work on "Humanzee," a
book about humans and chimpanzees.