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27 October 2006
Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:20:22 GMT An Elephant Crackup?via Kjell Olsen805 days agotoday’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.
100 years from now will we be looking back on our desecration of the elephant in africa as we look now upon condemnable acts of human vs human genocide?
Because psychologically, it’s looking like elephants aren’t all that different from us humans. They share tremendous social bonds within their herds, which are really just large familial units.
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.
Neural studies of elephants are now underway
. Holy shit. How long until we can figure out what they’re thinking, even communicate with them?Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals. Eve Abe
Figuring out how to live with elephants
will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.
I like to think that animals on the most part are so far advanced than us feeble humans that we can’t even comprehend it. We only take the delusional point of view that god made us in his own image to be caretakers of the world. Nature really does have things under control; it’s just waiting for us to overstep the bounds, so it can blow us all to hell.
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Also somewhat recently
