The Cause of Elephant Violence

I can’t pretend to summarize this remarkable analysis in a short post, so all I’m going to do is provide some key excerpts to pique your interest, and then tell you what I think its most important lessons are. I’m not going to try to capture the arguments and stories underlying those lessons — you’ll have to read the article to appreciate them.

Siebert attempts to understand a recent global phenomenon: The huge increase in violence committed by elephants against humans, against other creatures in their ecosystems, and against other elephants:

The factors that precipitated this collapse are eerily and ominously similar to those that have shattered some of the most dysfunctional segments of modern human societies:

UCLA psychologist Allan Shore explains the consequences of this:

The result is psychological breakdown, first of individuals and then as it cascades, of whole packs and societies. Ugandan wildlife management consultant Eve Abe describes the parallels between the behaviours of displaced and orphaned humans and elephants victimized by violence during and since the time of Idi Amin:

Siebert goes on to tell the story of Misty, an elephant treated cruelly by American circuses for decades, as she is treated for both tuberculosis and a horrific case of post-traumatic stress disorder that caused her to become unmanageably violent. The story has a happy ending, and it’s a story that should be told to every child, and to every adult who believes animals are incapable of intelligent thought and profound feeling. It’s a story of tremendous hope and understanding.

In fact, Siebert’s entire article will probably stay with you long after you read it, haunting you with its significance not only for what it tells us about our tragic modern disconnection from all-life-on-Earth, but for what it bodes for the future of our profoundly psychologically damaged species. Please, just read it, without judgement, and let yourself think about it, absorb it. Let it change you, as it did me.

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Wise men have often advised us to study the lessons of history to better understand how to cope with problems of the present. Now we have the opportunity to study objectively what happens when a species that has a peaceful, tens-of-millennia-old largely unchanged culture suddenly faces the breakdown of that culture as a result of stress, and learn what that means for our own species’ fragmenting and horrifically-stressed culture. I have posited that, in natural environments, as illustrated in the graphic above, human population increases with food availability, and decreases with prevalence of natural predators. Usually that keeps numbers of humans and other creatures in balance, a function of the carrying capacity of the land and the interconnectedness of the entire ecosystem and food chain. When numbers get too high, a stress response pulls them back down either by increasing vulnerability to disease, or in extreme cases, as a last resort, by increased violence against their own kind.

This is, I believe, what is happening to elephants, which have been shown, in research like that in Jeff Masson’s When Elephants Weep, to be very intelligent and very emotional creatures (much like our species). The difference is that the stress is being caused not by an unnatural increase in numbers, but by an unnatural decrease in their livable habitat, due to relentless human encroachment. In a couple of generations, we are witnessing in a noble and gentle species, one that has thrived on this planet much, much longer than we have, the kind of psychological and social breakdown leading to self-destructive and massively violent behaviour that has taken tens of millennia to manifest itself in our own species, because in our case it occurred much more gradually.

There are important lessons here. I hope enough people will take the time to learn them, ponder them, and act on them. Our willingness and ability to do so will be a measure of our humanity, and a barometer for our own species’ future health andsurvival.

Thanks to my KM colleague Howard Deane for the link.