Dumb, Dumber and Dumbo

The saddest news I've heard lately is what some are calling a "species-wide trauma and the fraying of the fabric" of society. Sound familiar? Surprisingly we're not talking about humans but elephants -- according to Charles Siebert in the New York Times.

Siebert notes that "these attacks have become so commonplace that a 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." He goes on to list incidents and statistics that give heft to the seemingly bizarre notion that the cliche of a rampaging elephant is becoming less uncommon, more commonplace than we might care to think.

"In the Indian state of 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. "

Yikes. Just when you thought it was safe to go wildlife watching -- if you could make it through the TSA baggage check, the strip search, the visa hurdles, airplane food (or lack thereof) and the shots. Just do a Google search on elephant safari, and you'll find a passel of these pachyderm packages, from Bali to India to Africa, though most of us may have had our first if not only elephant-back ride at a traveling circus (which means that most of us have never had an elephant-back ride).

But it's no laughing matter. As scientists learn more and more about the mental and emotional abilities of animals, from a clearly self-aware parrot as described in Scientific American Mind to pet border collies with vocabularies of 200 words, to primate species with complex social networks, it should be no surprise that cultural complexity may not be exclusively human after all. In the case of elephants, the lore alone of accurate memories and secret graveyards suggests an understanding beyond mere animal relfex.

With such complexity comes, unfortunately, perversity. Young male elephants in southern Africa have been reported to intentional kill and rape (you read that right) rhinosceroses. And in one South African park, Addo Elephant National Park, up to 90 percent of elephant deaths are attributable to other elephants, not natural causes 0r hunters. More unfortunately details are in Siebert's article cited above, including the following: "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."

The cause or causes are simply the inexorable dimunation and deterioration of animal habitat, and with it the animals within. A social network is a fine fabric that can't be easily torn, at least without leaving scars. Consider something as commonplace as a death in the family: an empty seat at holiday dinners, a phone that no longer rings. Extend it to a national level -- trying to make peace in a nation torn apart by war, especially when the inhabitants retreat to the comfort of sectarian beliefs which inevitably exclude opposing sectarians. Make it global, and you have people blowing one another up for the thinest of reasons, upon the most fragile pretexts, because trying to live together is too stressful with limited resources and competing ideologies and priorites.

Such social breakdowns -- a collapse, in cultural terms, as Jared Diamond had it -- are themselves not isolated to the human race, which is not insulated from its environment and cohabitants. We're not in this alone, and if we offend another person on the highway then road rage is the likely result; if we offend an animal one hundred times our size and weight, we shouldn't be surprised to end up on the sharp end of a tusk.

A final note: is it just a coincidence that the New York Times story on the elephant cultural crisis comes out the same week as the above Newsweek cover and its story on the GOP? Of course it is.