For the Love of Elephants

Is the Sun Setting on the African Elephants?

The Gentle Giants are under siege. Their habitat is disappearing.

When they multiply, they are liable to be shot.

These highly intelligent beings are poached and culled for their ivory, meat and hide as though they were a commodity and a nuisance. And yet the structure of the herd is very sophisticated and they are very tender and caring of one another.

Elephants are the largest animals on the African continent

and they co-exist peacefully…

with all other species……….

…..except people!

The family structure of a herd of elephants is close and intimate and they are all bonded for life.

The entire herd is extremely protective of the babies.

“Genetically, we are poles apart, but in habit and concern, humans and elephants seem to meet in many ways on strangely common ground.”

“For most mammals, young are born with brains of almost adult size, growing very little after birth….Our nearest relative, the chimpanzee, gives birth to babies with 54 percent of their adult brain weight….

…But the Elephant’s Child, ‘full of satiable curiosity,’ is born with just 35 percent of its brain size and potential, adding the rest in a period of dependency and social education which is far longer, more than our own.”

“In humans, the brain at birth is 29 percent of its adult size and weight. And in both elephants and humans this extra tissue is added to the cerebrum and cerebellum, where memory and awareness, and perhaps creativity, can be located.”

“The elephant network is extensive…. but each individual is part of a far larger communication system, a cell in a network that covers hundreds of thousands of square miles, potentially an entire country.”

“This natural internet is vast and calls into question all the assumptions we have been making about elephant society. Families can no longer be restricted to a group of visibly bonded animals.”

“Herds could consist of every elephant in the whole ecology, which makes nonsense of all the culling programs that involve taking out just family groups to prevent disturbing other groups in the area. Kill one elephant and every elephant within infrasound range knows about it instantly.”

“Elephants have always loomed large in Africa…. Before agriculture, nomadic pastoralists and elephants cooperated,… elephants converted woodland to grassland, while herds of domestic cattle…stimulated a re-growth of the kind of bush elephants prefer. “

“But ever since cultivation, this symbiosis has broken down. Every acre under crops is one lost to elephants, and each area set aside for conservation inhibits the expansion of human populations. The result is competitive exclusion.”

“Ninety percent of the Central African elephants have been destroyed,…where once there were several hundred thousand, their numbers are now down to 50,000 or less.”

“Citing ‘major biologists,’…the diminution of the elephant herds is believed to have affected the African rain forest, which in turn has had an effect on climate.”

The consciousness of wild elephants is not the same as that of tame elephants who have not been initiated by the matriarch of the herd. Tame elephants are denied their chance for tribal initiation—the vast library of ancient knowledge that is the treasure wild elephants hold.

“More and more often these days, elephants are not totally wild. They are fenced ‘as wild’; or they are semi-wild and being fed some of the time; or they are fully domesticated, kept under some kind of control all the time.”

“And the situation in all of the last three categories is complicated by the fact that many of the elephants involved are ‘salvaged,’ rescued when young from a cull of all the adults in their herd. (Let's be honest about it, they are the survivors of a messy massacre)”

While corporate interests are looking to Africa’s wealth and while agri-business is eyeing the vast reaches of the African plains with the intention of feeding the mushrooming global population, one must ask—what will become of the elephants?

In order to keep them isolated in fenced reserves where they cannot wander their migratory routes, we tighten control on elephant populations and use culling to control their numbers. What will become of the elephants?

In an evolving world, there are other options if we are willing to take the time to explore them. What if we suddenly discover that with losing the elephants, the world has lost a great treasure… …after it is too late to get them back?

www.corelight.org * ©2010 Leslie Temple-Thurston, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Quotes from Elephantoms by Lyall Watson * Music by Terry Oldfield (The March of a Thousand Days and Ancestral Futures ) Black and white photos by Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson from Walking Thunder—In the Footsteps of the African Elephant by Merrell Publishers London 2009 All rights reserved * Golden Mean Productions You may use or reproduce as long as the text is unaltered and appropriately credited.