Elephant

Dan Wylie

Animal series
Elephant
Animal
Series editor: Jonathan Burt

Already published
Crow Fox Penguin
Boria Sax Martin Wallen Stephen Martin
Ant Fly Hare
Charlotte Sleigh Steven Connor Simon Carnell
Tortoise Cat Beetle
Peter Young Katharine M. Rogers Yves Cambefort
Cockroach Peacock Ape
Marion Copeland Christine E. Jackson John Sorenson
Dog Cow Spider
Susan McHugh Hannah Velten Katja and Sergiusz Michalski
Oyster Swan Pigeon
Rebecca Stott Peter Young Barbara Allen
Bear Shark Lion
Robert E. Bieder Dean Crawford Deidre Jackson
Bee Rhinoceros Camel
Claire Preston Kelly Enright Robert Irwin
Rat Duck Chicken
Jonathan Burt Victoria de Rijke Annie Potts
Snake Moose Octopus
Drake Stutesman Kevin Jackson Helen Tiffin
Falcon Horse Butterfly
Helen Macdonald Elaine Walker Matthew Brower
Whale Eel Sheep
Joe Roman Richard Schweid Philip Armstrong
Parrot
Paul Carter Forthcoming
Tiger Wolf
Susie Green Garry Marvin
Salmon Pig
Peter Coates Brett Mizelle
Elephant

Dan Wylie

reaktion books
For Jill Wylie

Published by
reaktion books ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2008

Copyright © Dan Wylie 2008

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Wylie, Dan
Elephant. – (Animal)
1. Elephants
I. Title
599.6'7

isbn: 978 1 86189 397 0

 Contents

1 Proboscidae 7
2 An Astounding Physiology 27
3 Representing Elephants 62
4 Using Elephants 114
5 Conservation 153
Timeline 184
References 186
Bibliography 193
Associations and Websites 195
Acknowledgements 197
Photo Acknowledgements 198
Index 200
1 Proboscidae

Let me begin in my own home, perched on the coastal escarp-

ment of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. I have just
spent some fifteen years researching and publishing on early
Zulu history; not once in that time did anyone ever give me
a Zulu-related memento or artefact. Within months of
announcing that I was involved in researching elephants, how-
ever, I found my cottage inundated with ‘elephantiana’: t-
shirts, calendars, mugs and cushion covers, postcards made
from elephant-dung paper, a leather keyring from Singapore,
a soapstone carving from Zimbabwe, a Ganesh statuette from
Mumbai and a German-made Steiff limited-edition, collec-
tor’s-item furry replica of baby Indian elephant ‘Kandula’,
born in Washington, dc’s National Zoo in 2001 and named
Kandula – Sinhalese for ‘strength’ – after a Sri Lankan war-
elephant. It shows how fondly fervent a lot of people are about
elephants, as well as how commercialized elephant images
have become, even as actual elephants worldwide have
declined rapidly in numbers. Almost everyone I speak to has
an elephant story or can tell me about another book, picture
or objet d’art. Elephants populate the global consciousness
more deeply and emotively than perhaps any other species,
bar dogs and cats, so forgive me if this book misses your per-
sonal favourite one.

7
Named for a A couple of centuries ago, the coastal plain I gaze across
famous Ceylonese
war elephant,
virtually swarmed with elephants. European ivory hunters and
‘Kandula’ was ‘sportsmen’ obliterated them. Now I’m just thankful that I can
born in the drive westwards for an hour to the Addo Elephant Park, where I
Washington Zoo,
and is marketed can calmly observe, almost at arm’s length, the 400-plus descen-
as an individually dants of the only surviving elephants native to this province.
numbered, cuddly
collector’s item. Not far from Addo, in the hills behind the industrial town of
Uitenhage, a cave wall bears ochre paintings of elephants, exe-
cuted by Bushman or San artists, probably several hundred
years ago. Other Bushman art in southern Africa dates back
an awesome 25,000 years, and doubtless in the million or so
years before that evolving hominids lived alongside evolving
elephants. As far as we can tell, both began in Africa.

8
 And I don’t have to go far from my cottage to find local crags
whose crevices are alive with the dumpy, scurrying figures of
the elephant’s closest living relative, the rock hyrax or cony,
locally known as the dassie. It seems quite a stretch of the imag-
ination, but then ‘closest’ is deceptive: elephants and dassies
hark back to an as yet undiscovered common ancestor that
lived around 60 million years ago. So too, amazingly, do the
manatees or sea cows. Elephants, for obvious reasons, were
once grouped with the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus as
‘pachyderms’, the ‘thick-skinned ones’. One major academic
journal is still called Pachyderm, which publishes studies on
rhinos and African (but not, oddly, Asian) elephants, even
though the grouping has become taxonomic history. Rather,
the links with hyraxes and manatees, implied by foot structure
and dentition, are now being confirmed by dna studies, as well
as the ongoing discovery of transitional fossils on the North
African coasts. There, in the shallows of the Mediterranean’s
geological precursor, the Tethys Sea, the manatees evolved into
their present aquatic niche.
More recognizable elephantine ancestors – Proboscidae, or
trunk-snouted mammals – also appear to have emerged first in
North Africa. At least, that’s where the oldest fossils have been
found, around 40 million years old, in the sands of the Fayoum
in Egypt, once a lush depression in the land. It’s not clear,
however, whether these somewhat hippo-like, probably amphibi-
ous and herbivorous creatures, the moeritheres, were true
Proboscidae; the same uncertainties surround the contempor-
ary barytheres, though these animals had the extended incisors
that would evolve into elephants’ tusks, and the beginnings of
the ‘conveyor belt’ system of replaceable teeth.
The family Proboscidae, a name invented by German natu-
ralist Carl Illiger in 1811 (pro = forward, boskein = mouth), really

9
 comes clearly into focus in the Miocene period (24 million years
ago). Then, the deinotheres, ‘terrible beast’, after their fear-
some four tusks, whose skulls show all the signs of having
carried a genuine trunk, spread from central Africa both south
and north as far as eastern Europe; they are not direct ancestors
of the elephant, but lasted for an astonishing 20 million years.
Over this period, doubtless due to climatic and vegetation
changes, they changed, mainly in becoming bigger, some
species reaching over 4 metres in height. Deinotherium gigan-
teum would have dwarfed a modern elephant, and had powerful
down-curving tusks, possibly used for digging. There were asso-
ciated changes in dentition, too, grinding molars becoming
more frequently characterized by ridges suitable for shearing
Elephant ances-
tors: a page from
Raman Sukumar’s
The Living
Elephants, drawn
by J. Ramesh.

10
(known as hypsodonty). Primarily, things during the Miocene
dried out, forcing animals to adapt to expanding grassland con-
ditions and tougher browsing, and land bridges opened up new
opportunities for migration.
Other Miocene Proboscidae also originated in Africa, and
eventually colonized every land mass apart from the islands of
Greenland, Antarctica and Australia. Amongst them were the
Stegodontidae, whose exact evolutionary relationship with the
true elephants remains somewhat controversial. The best-
known stegodon, Stegodon ganesa, evolved in Asia alongside the
African elephantid lines, and so was named after the Hindu
elephant-headed god Ganesh. Though not therefore in direct
genetic line, S. ganesa displayed many characteristic elephan-
tine features, including long and elegant tusks – possibly a case
of convergent evolution. Recent fossils unearthed from sand
pits in Thailand and China have complicated the picture: mag-
netostratigraphy, which dates sediment layers more precisely
than ever before, indicates that some of these stegodontids pre-
date the earliest African examples, so maybe some migrations
went the other way. Moreover, still-tentatively classified sub-
species of stegodontids migrated and differentiated throughout
China and across the Japanese islands.1
There were also the ponderously named and pig-like gom-
photheres (from gomphos, a ‘bolt’, hence stiff, and theiron, ‘wild
animal’). The gomphotheres are a rather loose grouping: ele-
phant biologist Jeheskel Shoshani has called it a kind of ‘waste-
basket’ into which anything that couldn’t be fitted into a family
line could be dumped.2 Some species of gomphothere also grew
larger over time, presumably to cope with having to eat greater
amounts of less nutritious foods. Shoshani distinguishes two
broad groups: the short-jawed and the long-jawed. The long-
jawed, or ‘shovel-tuskers’, like Platybelodon, had bizarrely

11
 extended lower tusks formed like scoops, useful, one imagines,
for digging up plants in shallow waters.
The short-jawed varieties included Mammut americanum,
the mastodon. The fossil record improves in this case: many
Pleistocene skeletons have been exhumed from American
swamps, most famously La Brea tar pits, now surrounded by the
city of Los Angeles. The mastodons carried tusks on both upper
and lower jaws, the upper ones, extravagantly curved, sometimes
reaching a massive 3 m in length and 25 cm in diameter. Their
teeth were clearly distinct from those of the mammoths and
other true elephants, having high rounded cusps (indeed, they
are named for them: mastos meaning ‘nipple’).
At much the same time, other species of Proboscidae were
radiating from Africa, especially during the Pliocene period.
Amongst them seems to have been that intermediate form
known as Primelephas – ‘first elephant’. A wealth of fossils

The mastodon
skeleton formerly
on display in
the British
Museum, London,
photographed
in the 1870s by
Frederick York.

12
unearthed in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Kenya, indicates
that this ancestor probably evolved from the gomphotheres
rather than the Stegodontidae. It’s hard to say, however, as
there were so many types co-evolving. For a time, the ‘splitters’
amongst taxonomists prevailed over the ‘lumpers’; in the 1930s
the famous naturalist Henry Osborn distinguished over 350
species of proboscidae. Today, some sanity has prevailed, and
a mere 163 different species, in 39 genera, now grace the pro-
boscidean family tree. But as Jeheskel Shoshani notes, an element
of subjectivity is always present in the interpretation of inevitably
scant remains.3
The family Elephantidae was established by J. E. Gray in
1821. This family, evolving during the late Miocene period, was
extraordinarily diverse, including some 22 of the 39 or so
known genera. It includes the woolly mammoth, now most
familiar to our youngsters from the charmingly grumpy charac-
ter of Manny, aka The Heavy, in the Ice Age cartoon feature
films, but also the subject of many novels ranging from J. H.
Rosny’s Quest for Fire (1911) to Jean M. Auel’s The Mammoth-
Hunters (1986). It has also been the subject of fascinated artists,
from Neolithic cave painters to Rudolph F. Zallinger, whose
mural The Age of Mammals in the Peabody Museum of Natural
History at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, is dominated by a
mammoth. A film of Quest for Fire was made in 1981: a herd of
elephants dressed up in shaggy coats to resemble mammoths
are pacified by Neanderthals with handfuls of grass, whereupon
they obligingly go off to stomp out the Neanderthals’ enemies.
As Eric Scigliano has said in his fine book Love, War and
Circuses, the scene is ‘supremely silly, but points up something
plaintively real: humankind’s abiding fascination with and
affection for elephants’.4 Even more massive than a modern
African elephant at up to seven tons, and made still more

13
 imposing by its woolly coat and curling tusks, the mammoth
has become a by-word for enormity: Mammoth Cave in
Kentucky, to take just one example, has nothing to with the ani-
mals at all – it’s just huge. (Not to mention the ‘mammoth sale’
at your local furniture store . . . )
The mammoths too originated in Africa, but have become
most strongly associated with the northern hemisphere, where
in both North America and Siberia complete bodies have been
found frozen solid in the permafrost, their stomach contents
intact and their flesh still edible. The most celebrated discovery
was one of the earliest, in 1806, by a Scottish botanist, Michael
Adams, on the River Lena. He was following up earlier reports
that the local Tungu people had in 1799 found a mammoth
body frozen into an ice wall, complete with skin and hair; they
had avoided touching it, believing it cursed. Indeed, the
nomadic peoples of both Siberia and China accorded the mam-
moths legendary status. The so-called ‘pope’ of descriptive

A cast of ‘Dima’,
a baby mammoth
exhumed from the
Siberian ice; note
the tufted ankles.

14
zoology, Alfred Edmund Brehm, recounted that some Chinese,
by way of explaining heaps of gigantic bones, conceived that
mammoths were giant underground rats which ‘found sunlight
hurtful’ and ‘perished as soon as [they] came into the open air’.5
So reported a Dutch traveller named Nicolaas Witsen in 1692;
Witsen is said to have coined the word mammoth, possibly
based on Russian or Estonian words derived from mamma,
earth, and mutt, rat.
Rock painting of a
At any rate, greed got the better of the alleged curse in mammoth, usually
Adams’s case; the Tungu chief sold the tusks for a pittance, per- labelled ‘with
enormous feet’,
haps the first recorded sale of mammoth ivory. (Much later, in but clearly a baby
1989, when trade in elephant ivory was suppressed, mammoth with heavily tufted
ankles.
ivory began to circulate more widely instead.) Adams was left
with a mouldering heap of bones, skin and fur. Of the last, he
gathered some 38 pounds, some strands of it 2 feet long –
‘irrefutable proof that the mammoth lived in a cold climate’, as
Brehm wrote.6 The skeleton now resides in the Mammoth
Museum in Yakutsk where, as its website quaintly puts it, ‘in
bowels of Yakutia is found out a significant part of all unique
finds of mammoths’.7 Another famous carcass, named ‘Dima’, a
baby found on the River Kolyma in Siberia, was so intact that
even blood cells and individual proteins could be extracted for
analysis. Some dna has been sequenced from 28,000-year-old
mammoth material by an American-Canadian team led by
Stephen Schuster.8 This has given rise to some probably pre-
mature speculation that mammoths might somehow be cloned
or resurrected.
The excitement of such discoveries, and the clash of Western
science with local cultures, has scarcely diminished. The nomadic
Dolgan hunters of Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula, while happy to
lead fossil hunters to mammoth remains, still regard them as
huge mole-like rats with the potential to curse the communities

15
that disturb them: in 1999, when the so-called Jarkov mammoth
was airlifted out intact in a 23-ton block of ice, to be stored in an
ice cave 322 km away, the Dolgan sacrificed a precious white
reindeer to appease the spirits.9 (The Americans, by contrast,
made a film out of it, Raising the Mammoth, narrated by Jeff
Bridges.) Not that the West had been immune to wild mytho-
logy: from the time of St Augustine on, mammoth bones were
long used to support the pseudo-science of ‘giantologie’ – the
‘study’ of that mythical time when the earth was allegedly pop-
ulated with giants.
But the most enticing question has always been: what caused
the mammoths rather abruptly to die out? Brehm put it suc-
cinctly in 1860:

Nobody could explain the sudden disappearance of the

beasts of this region. Some, on the basis of vegetal
remains, entertained the idea of a sudden change in the
earth’s axis of rotation; others tended toward the notion
of a flood that might have submerged Siberia.10

A century later, Immanuel Velikovsky, in his infamous

Worlds in Collision books, used the disappearance of the mam-
moth as evidence for an abrupt and catastrophic shift of the
Earth’s axis; and you can read the latest version of a well-read
but unconvincing post-biblical Flood scenario by creationist
Michael Oard on the ‘Answers in Genesis’ website (Oard care-
fully avoids dating anything, and fails to explain how mam-
moths – or elephants – might have fitted onto the Ark).11
Arguments continue. Changes in climate were almost cer-
tainly part of the story, though as we now know from our own
period of global warming, climatic effects can be highly local-
ized and apparently contradictory. Around 2 million years ago,

16
 A 1917 us war
propaganda
cartoon by W. A.
Rogers optimisti-
cally relegated
Hindenburg’s
military threat to
the ‘Museum of
Ancient History,
Berlin’.

a mini Ice Age set in, though punctuated by warmer interglacial

spells. Ice smothered Scandinavia, Britain and Canada. Sea levels
dropped; land bridges formed while other areas were cut off;
vegetation altered and competition for food intensified, all
stimulating ‘a great geographical expansion of the elephantids
and a high rate of speciation and phyletic evolution’. However,
as Raman Sukumar adds, ‘At the end, the curtains also came
down swiftly on a bewildering array of proboscideans, from
dwarf elephants not unlike the moeritheres in size to the tower-
ing mammoths.’12
It was not just that mammoths got overwhelmed by
encroaching glaciers, as the Ice Age cartoons might suggest.

17
Some argue that it was actually a warm spell 13,000 years ago –
an abrupt and frightening increase of some 6 degrees in only
ten or twenty years – that put an end to the heavily furred
giants. But we also have to explain the apparently simultaneous
extinction of a large number of other mammals (up to 90 per
cent in some regions), as well as the demise of proboscideans at
different times on other continents, including South America
and Africa. David Webb, Dale Guthrie, Richard Kiltie and others
have proposed various scenarios based on rapid changes in
vegetation availability in an era of more violent seasonality.
Despite this, some mammoths seem to have survived for several
thousand years more: remains on the Wrangel Islands of Arctic
Siberia date back only 4,000 years.
This means, of course, that mammoths shared their envi-
ronments with humans, as evidenced by a number of examples
in Neolithic rock art in Europe – notably the beautiful example
at Pech-Merle in France. It’s highly likely, then, that human pre-
dation was, at least in some places, a factor in the mammoth’s
extinction. A French civil servant, Jacques Boucher de Perthes,
found woolly mammoth bones lying alongside human artefacts
in a River Somme valley site in the mid-nineteenth century.
Stone arrow- and spear-heads with the long hafts of the Paleo-
Indian or Clovis peoples are to be found with mammoth
remains across North America, mostly dating to around 11,000
years ago; these are suddenly replaced in the archaeological
record by the Folsom culture’s smaller weapons, associated with
the remains of smaller species, suggesting that this was the time
that the mammoths had finally expired. In a number of places
across the globe, the disappearance of various megafauna
apparently coincides with the appearance of humans. Some
scholars have used computer modelling to show that even a rel-
atively small but expanding band of humans could have an

18
effect on animal populations so devastating that biologist Paul
Martin has called it the ‘blitzkrieg’ theory.
Ross McPhee and Preston Marx have proposed, rather, that
mammoths might have succumbed to some ‘hyperdisease’ car-
ried by humans – partly because, despite some unambiguous
instances of mammoth hunting on Jersey in the Channel
Islands and in Germany, there is actually little hard evidence
that humans hunted them that much. They might just as often
have scavenged off naturally dead carcasses, or taken out
enough vulnerable calves to suppress breeding rates. As anthro-
pologist Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada in Reno sums
it up: ‘A sweeping conclusion that would indisputably pin the
blame for proboscidean extinction on Clovis hunters would be
a literary triumph but a scientific impossibility.’13 Most likely,
human predation on this gigantic mobile source of food and
artefacts was just the culminating factor in an already dire cli-
matic situation.
At least in North America, the most recent theory proposes,
the mammoths, along with other species that included Clovis
humans, were wiped out by the effects of a comet strike or near-
strike. The evidence lies in a thin layer of carbonated material –
but none of the iridium associated with meteorites – discover-
able over huge stretches of the continent, dating uniformly to
around 13,000 years ago.14
The familiar woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius has
become so strongly associated with the northern tundras (wit-
ness the charming poster compiled by the British Columbia
Provincial Museum) that it’s all but lost to sight that different
species of mammoth appeared elsewhere, too. The steppe
mammoth M. trogontherii lumbered across both the grasslands
of Europe and the woodlands of England; the Columbian mam-
moth M. columbi was the largest of all and migrated as far south

19
as Mexico. Even more interestingly, some mammoths and other
elephantids that became isolated on various islands – Sumatra
and Indonesia, Sicily and Malta – bucked the trend towards
greater size and in time dwarfed down. The dwarf elephant
Elephas falconeri, found on several Mediterranean islands, just
reached waist height, as did the dwarf mammoths of the Santa
Rosa islands off California.
In the proliferation of elephantid species between 2 and 1
million years ago, three genera would gain most prominence:
Mammuthus, destined for early extinction; Elephas, to which
the present-day Asian elephant belongs; and Loxodonta, the
African elephant’s line. All arose in Africa, migrating one after
another, and sometimes alongside each other in direct compe-
tition. Adrian Lister opines that one European mammoth, M.
meridionalis, might have been pushed into extinction by the
appearance of the competing E. antiquus. Exact relationships
between the three genera remain controversial: morphological
characters suggest that Mammuthus and Elephas were closer to
each other than either were to Loxodonta, though some genetic
tracing suggests otherwise.15
The various species also evolved at differing rates. The rate is
measured in Darwins, a unit invented by the great scientist
J.B.S. Haldane in 1949 (1 Darwin = doubling or halving of a
selected physiological feature in 1 My). The rates of change
amongst elephantids has most accurately been traced through
the hardest of all fossil remains, the molar teeth. Here, changes
in number of plates, size and character of cusps and ridges, and
densities of enamel, show that while Loxodonta evolved only at Canada’s British
Columbia
the rate of 0.1 Darwins, dwarfing could occur at a rate of up to Provincial Museum
10 Darwins. The accuracy of our understanding here has been commissioned
children to draw
recently enhanced by advances in dental imaging, including a their favourite
structure of dentin known as Schreger patterns, which are highly mammoth.

21
Schreger patterns,
or ‘engine-turning’
in a cross-section
of elephant tusk

accurate in the discrimination of species.16 Some tusks can in

their tree-like layering yield a finely graded, even daily, impres-
sion of age and growth patterns, and can therefore cast a side-
light on changes in climatic conditions, food and habitat.
Some species could adapt quickly to environmental changes,
but many could not. Those few that did – the three remaining
species – probably survived because a mixture of specialized
and generalized characteristics allowed them to adapt more
readily. They too were the inheritors of long, diverse and entan-
gled evolutionary lineages. The best-known species of Elephas,
E. recki, excavated mainly in Kenya, gave rise to a number of
other Elephas varieties, even as primitive forms of Loxodonta
were evolving. One recent scholar believes the evidence shows
that E. recki was not a single species at all, but more of a ‘complex’
of interrelated species.17
Why Elephas left Africa, and did not survive there, and why
Loxodonta never left Africa, are unanswered questions. Quite

22
how the modern Asian elephant evolved is also in doubt,
because fossil remains are particularly scarce. Probably, the late
Pliocene migration of one E. ekorensis split into different lines,
including E. planifrons, a species well known from deposits in
the Siwalik Hills of India. This was the direct ancestor of the
modern Asian elephant, E. maximus. As for Africa, southern
and central Africa were dominated by L. atlanticus, which died
out as the Elephas species retreated, and the stage was left for
our modern African elephant, L. africana. The two strains have
never reunited. Though some Eurasian armies probably used
both African and Asian elephants alongside each other, as we
will see, there is only one recorded instance of a successful mat-
ing between captive African and Asian specimens: the tiny off-
spring died after only ten days. Union must remain a matter of
imagination and advertising – as in huge billboards erected in
Beijing for the 2006 China–Africa trade summit. Even Asian
elephants have long since vanished from the whole of China,
largely caused by human predation (which is why Mark Elkin
African elephants
in China: a bill-
board in Beijing
for the 2006 trade
summit.

23
Indian elephant, has titled his recent monumental environmental history of
from Samuel
Daniell’s
China The Retreat of the Elephants).
Picturesque We are left with only a couple of taxonomic squabbles.
Illustration of the While examination of both Asian and African haplotypes,
Scenery, Animals
and Nature based on mitochondrial dna sequences, show that the two
Inhabitants of the clades parted some 3 million years ago, dna studies also track
Island of Ceylon
(1808). some of the differentiation within the two main species.
Arguments have raged about whether or not a certain degree of
differentiation justifies the declaration of separate sub-species
or not. As Raman Sukumar writes, ‘The molecular data from
both Asian and African elephant populations, although still in
early analysis, are already threatening to overturn the tradi-
tional systems of classification.’18 The Sri Lankan elephants,
though highly divergent in some respects, show a high degree of
commonality of mitochondrial haplotypes with the mainland

24
elephants, so there seems little support for a previous division
into separate sub-species (E. maximus maximus and E. m. indi-
cus). There is a certain degree of support for declaring the
Sumatran and Malaysian elephants separate sub-species, but
the jury is still out.
The African case is even more complex. In 1986 East African
wildlife expert David Western investigated legends that there was
a ‘pygmy’ elephant hidden in the forests of central Africa. Then in
the 1990s a team led by Alfred Roca sequenced four nuclear genes
from 195 elephants in 21 different populations, and concluded
that there was sufficient justification for separating the savannah
elephant (L. africana) from the somewhat smaller forest elephant
(L. cyclotis). However, the picture is complicated by clear signs
that the two had hybridized where savannah and forest abutted
one another. Further studies have suggested that there are at least
three, maybe five, fairly distinct populations, their differences
probably accentuated by long separation, as humans have elim-
inated them from intervening areas and increasingly boxed them
in. Interestingly, the forest elephants bear the most genetic
resemblance to their Asian cousins. Sukumar opts for the safest
response – that more work is needed – but acknowledges that
these studies have ‘opened up a virtual Pandora’s Box of African
elephant taxonomy’.19
We’ll look more closely at present-day distributions in the
final chapter. Let’s return for the moment to something I men-
tioned early on: the fact that elephants and humans have virtu-
ally co-evolved in Africa. They have spread in waves across the
world along similar paths – and if we believe anthropologist
Gary Haynes, sometimes the exact same paths, humans
padding along the dusty trails conveniently opened up by
pachyderms. Ever since both species came into recognizable
existence, they have probably killed one another in some places,

25
and elsewhere coexisted peaceably or warily. This general pat-
tern has not really changed. The perception that elephants and
humans originated in the same space and time pervades many
cultures, as we will see shortly. It’s rather tawdrily summed up
in a recent advertisement that evokes the savannah landscape
in which both humans and elephants are supposed to have
discovered themselves – grassland dotted with nutritious and
sheltering trees. In this case, it’s the marula tree (Sclerocarrya
birrea), on which fermenting fruit elephants are exaggeratedly
supposed to enjoy getting drunk – as are humans, by means of
the marula liqueur being advertised. (I keep meeting people
who claim to have witnessed this, but someone calculated it
would take at least 200 kg of fermenting plum-sized marulas
to turn an elephant tipsy.) The main line across the photo of
elephants feeding on their arboreal sundowners reads: ‘Our
origins. Our inspiration.’ Hic!

26
2 An Astounding Physiology

Anatomy, it might be said, is destiny.

The elephant’s sheer size – 5.5 tons for the average African
male – has made it irresistible to the mythographer, to the
warlord wanting to terrify, to the hunter seeking his outsized
trophy with his tiny copper-jacketed bullet, to the child at the
circus, to the stroller in the zoo and to the modern game-park
tourist. (Though he was probably wrong about the etymology,
Isidore of Seville in the seventh century stated that the name
elefante came from the Greek word for ‘mountain’, lophos.)
Massive weight means a massive intake of food, which dic-
tates large feeding ranges, which in turn has produced perpetu-
al territorial conflict with humans. The elephants’ huge tusks,
so beautifully textured for carving, has resulted in the deaths of
millions of them. On the other hand, their awesome bulk and
their stately shamble are awe-inspiring, giving off such an air of
peaceableness and even sagacity that many of us can’t bear the
thought of them disappearing. Their often comical trunks and
baggy hides are ripe for cartooning, too, and for charming small
children with animal antics (scan the first 100 titles containing
‘elephant’ on Amazon.com: two-thirds will probably be children’s
books). The size and strangeness of our largest land-dwelling
mammal are difficult to grasp: hence the famous parable
(originally from Jaina teachings) about the blind men and the

27
A woodcut print by
the Japanese artist
Itcho Hanabusa
(1652–1724), illus-
trating the parable
of the blind monks
and the elephant.

elephant. Each man, encountering so different a piece of the

anatomy, deduces an utterly divergent picture of the beast to
hand: rough and wrinkled; no, long and smooth; nonsense, it’s
snaky and hairy! As one stanza of John Godfrey Saxe’s nine-
teenth-century poem, ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’, put it:

The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
‘God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!’

This story has entered world culture in the oddest ways:

titles of articles from just one Internet database, for instance,
include these: ‘Language Awareness: The Whole Elephant’;
‘Accounting and Operational Research: Trunk or Tail?’; and
even ‘Gene Expression Arrays in Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis:

28
 The eroded surface
of this elephant
skull shows the
honeycomb pattern
of weight-saving
diploe.

Will the Blind Men Finally See the Elephant?’. And Heathcote
Williams, as the closing image of his poetic lament at the
destruction of the elephant, Sacred Elephant, uses it again:

In the story of the blind men,

Each one gave a different description of the elephant,
Depending on which part of it he felt.
Now they are to be left
Feeling only each other.1

Hopefully, it won’t be quite that bad.

It takes a sturdy skeleton to support all that weight: a ribcage
roomy enough for a golf-cart, a skull the size of an internal com-
bustion engine. Yet the elephant moves surprisingly lightly. The
skull is full of air cells called diploe, reducing weight. The huge
leg bones are placed directly above one another, not at angles
as in cats or dogs, but in an arrangement like a table, termed
graviportal. This means that an elephant can sleep standing up,

29
 legs locked rigid. Some early writers thought they had to lean
against a tree to sleep, with disastrous results if the tree fell over
– a misconception, possibly resulting from a confusion with an
equally imaginary elk (alces) described as early as Julius Caesar’s
Gallic and Civil Wars (Book 6.27) in the first century bc. In fact,
those joints are remarkably flexible, like human knees, making
them unexpectedly nimble climbers (good for circuses). All
appearances to the contrary, elephants actually walk on tiptoe,
as do most ungulates, with its foot bones all pointing down-

The number of
toenails on an ele-
phant’s foot varies
between front and
back (usually 5 and
4) and between
sub-species.

30
Probably the most
massive tusks ever
recorded, displayed
here before a
Zanzibar door, 1899.
Another enormously
long set of tusks,
hunted in the
Sudan and
photographed
in 1923.

wards and forwards and the load being taken on a pad of fat
and connective tissue that spreads the weight evenly across the
broad sole. A 9,000-lb (4,180-kg) Asian elephant was found to
exert less than 9 lb per square inch (0.6 kg per square cm) of
pressure underfoot – a feature that allows it to move easily
through swampy or sandy ground, and with extraordinary
quietness. Ranger colleagues of mine, camping in the open in
Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley one night, inadvertently laid out
their groundsheet on an elephant path; in the morning they
found an elephant’s footprint square on the sheet between
them, and they hadn’t heard a thing.
The most prominent features of the skeleton are, of course,
the tusks. These outrageously extended upper incisors have been
both the elephant’s main means of defence and its downfall.

32
 The conveyor-belt
system of the
lower molars; this
elephant must
have died well
before its full life-
span of 60-odd
years.

Only two-thirds of the tusk shows outside the skin; under nor-
mal circumstances, it will grow continuously at a rate of about
15 centimetres a year. The biggest, mostly on African bulls,
proved irresistible as trophies for European hunters. The largest
recorded pair of tusks, from an African male elephant shot in
1899 by the slave of a Swahili merchant on the slopes of Mount
Kilimanjaro (see page 31), measured over 11 feet (349 and 335
cm, to be exact) and actually now weigh around 435 pounds
(198 kg); today they are in New York’s American Museum of
Natural History. Asian elephants’ tusks are generally much
lighter, though specimens of up to 9 feet (2.74 m) in length have
been recorded. Carrying such heavy tusks has produced marked
physiological compensations in bone and muscle structures in
neck and skull. As far as the elephant is concerned, the tusks
are excellent defence against its few predators, as well as being
useful for digging for roots or water, stripping edible bark
from trees, or lifting logs if the elephant is a captive worker.
Sometimes the tusks are even used as a rest for a weary trunk.
For humans, the ivory of the tusk has been most attractive
for its carvability. What makes it so different? A cross-section of
a tusk shows a characteristic pattern of criss-crossing diamond

33
shapes, known as ‘engine-turning’ – the evidence of tubules of
dentine running through the tusk. The engine-turning pattern,
unique to elephant teeth, is cross-hatched by concentric rings,
rather like tree-growth rings, the result of both annual and
seasonal growth phases. Untreated, dried-out ivory will crack
along these rings. In fact, ivory is remarkably water-absorbent;
some African peoples used tusks stuck in the ground as rain
predictors. The composition of the ivory does appear to change
markedly from one region to another: concentrations of calcium,
phosphate, magnesium and other elements as well as amino
acids vary significantly, leading Erich Raubenheimer, an expert
on elephant dentition, to propose that such analyses could be
used forensically to track the origins of poached ivory.2 All in
all, ivory is a uniquely pliable, yet resistant, material; no carver
worthy of the name accepts a substitute.
The invisible teeth are as fascinating as the visible tusks.
Unlike most mammals, which replace early or deciduous teeth
with new ones growing up from below, elephants boast a mere
six sets of brick-sized molars. These move forward, conveyor-
belt fashion, as the front ones wear out and break; once the
sixth set has been worn down, the elephant can no longer eat,
and starves to death. So a fairly strict limit is set to an elephant’s
longevity: about 60 years, depending on diet and disease.
Perhaps the fact that broken teeth might be found lying about
with half-eaten branches or in elephants’ faeces gave rise to the
legend purveyed by Europeans in Renaissance times that ele-
phants actively and secretively buried their teeth. However, the
cunning Indians – according to one misguided commentator –
were cleverer: they would plant bottles of water in places they
thought teeth were buried, and those whose water disappeared,
withdrawn by some ‘magical power’ by the teeth, would reveal
their whereabouts. (Pliny, in his Natural History, fancifully

34
averred that the elephants knew the value of their own ivory, Some argue that
the elephant’s trunk
and would bury a tusk if it fell off.) is evidence of
The surfaces of the molars are characterized by lozenge- aquatic origins;
shaped ridges, which are ground and scissored across the vegeta- but it is also useful
for playful wrestling.
tion being chewed in a fore-and-aft motion; this lozenge shape,
more diamond-like in the African than the Asian elephant, gave
rise to the scientific name Loxodonta.
Of all skeletal features, one of the most fascinating is still
poorly understood: the hyoid apparatus. This complex set of five
bones provides attachment points for the tongue and for the
larynx, and so is essential to eating, breathing and communicat-
ing. Moreover, it anchors at its base a pocket-like structure
called the pharyngeal pouch, in which water is stored – a develop-
ment thought by elephant biologist Jeheskel Shoshani to have
evolved along with proboscideans’ move into drier grasslands

35
Elephants are around 25 million years ago. Uniquely amongst elephants, the
accomplished
swimmers: some
upper and lower parts of the hyoid are loose and are probably
swim many kilo- implicated in the production of the elephants’ rich range of
metres between infrasonic communication.
the Andaman
Islands. Steve Other internal organs, many of them the subject of intensive
Bloom photo- recent study, also display unique features. The heart, for instance,
graphed this one
in India in 2006. weighing between 26 and 46 lb (12 to 21 kg), occupies a normal
mammalian proportion of total body weight (about 0.5 per
cent), but has a bifid or double-pointed apex instead of the
usual single point. This is one feature that links it anatomically
to sea cows – evidence, some argue, for elephants’ aquatic ori-
gins. Some have suggested that certain features of the kidneys
also point to that oceanic beginning, in particular ciliated ducts
on the surface called nephrostomes; nephrostomes allow for
osmotic exchanges with the blood and are found in sturgeons

36
and frogs, but never in other viviparous animals. More pro-
saically, the kidneys, located high under the rear spine, are most
important as a fat reserve, and the visible depression that devel-
ops there in an undernourished elephant is one indicator of
Rudyard Kipling’s
health and environmental stress. own drawing for
Of all the elephant’s supposedly aquatic features, the respi- his ‘Just-So Story’
of ‘How the
ratory system has invited the most controversy. It was observed Elephant got
early in the twentieth century that elephants have no pleural its Trunk’.

37
cavity for the lungs: the lungs are attached directly to the
abdominal wall, and are pumped by muscular action. J. B.
West, professor of physiology at San Diego University, has
argued that this developed along with the trunk and a necessity
for ‘snorkelling’ – swimming along with the trunk above water
level. I’ve seen elephants doing this when crossing deep pools in
the Zambezi Valley, but the evidence is as yet unconvincing that
this activity was a primary evolutionary pressure for the ele-
phant’s peculiar respiratory system. The relative lack of scien-
tific or fossil evidence for a gradual development of the trunk
has even provided ammunition for some creationists to argue
for God’s more direct hand in the business. (Or one could sim-
ply offer Rudyard Kipling’s famous 1902 ‘Just So Story’, in
which the original baby elephant finds his originally stubby
nose caught in the jaws of a crocodile, and pulls, and pulls . . . )
At any rate, the trunk is a far more interesting and multi-
functional instrument than just a snorkel, and surely evolved as
the result of multiple stimuli. Hand, nose, trumpet, water-hose,
weapon: the elephant’s trunk is delicate enough to pick up a
coin, powerful enough to smash a tiger to the ground. A combi-
nation of up to 100,000 longitudinal and radial muscles, with
no bone or cartilage, makes it an instrument of extraordinary
versatility. The Asian elephant’s having only one ‘finger’ at its
tip seems to render it no less flexible and sensitive than the
African cousin’s two-finger arrangement. Moreover, elephant
anatomist D. Mariappan of Madras discovered that the ele-
phant’s trunk tip and the female’s clitoris contained hypersen-
sitive nerve bundles peculiar to the elephant. In honour of his
mentor at the Institute of Anatomy at Madras, Mariappan
named these ‘Ayer’s nerve endings’. Other studies show that
many elephants appear to have left-trunk and right-trunk biases,
rather like left- or right-handedness in humans, though the

38
evolutionary advantages or reasons for this remain obscure. At least 20,000
individual muscles
The trunk is vital: an elephant without one, lost to injury or give the trunk
disease, quickly succumbs to starvation. its flexibility and
Other external organs are hardly less important. Perhaps strength.

least important to the elephant are the eyes, though to we visu-

ally orientated humans it’s the eye that most often seems to con-
nect us. The elephant’s eye is somehow soft and imperturbable.
Researcher Katy Payne recalls gazing into the ‘patient amber
eye’ of an Asian matriarch: from that ‘bulk flowing forward,
huge and slow’, the little eyes ‘are looking down; the speckled
ears are waving slowly and symmetrically in and out; the face –
well, to call it a face’.3 That an elephant does seem to have a face
to which we can respond is graphically illustrated by the final
photograph in Heathcote Williams’s Sacred Elephant – a clever
montage of two elephant eyes positioned to look, well, aston-
ishingly human. On the other hand, you don’t want to be on the

39
receiving end of an elephant charge, with those same eyes fixed To look into an
elephant’s eye is
implacably on your destruction: to feel unquestion-
ably considered,
assessed.
Ndlulamithi raised his head sharply, as though to focus
his amber eyes on us. We could not have been even vague- An elephant’s ears
play a vital role in
ly discernible to him, as we were hovering well beyond the both cooling and
limits of his range of vision. His massive trunk coiled up communication.
menacingly under his chin. His ears were initially spread
wide as he strained to listen, to pinpoint our position
from any further giveaway sound that we might have
made. Then those great ears were suddenly slapped tight
against his head and he rushed towards us. I knew this
was no mock charge; the silent message of deadly intent
was unnerving.4

The huge ears (smaller in the Asian species) do more than

signal aggression or calm. They are vital heat regulators, both
through the network of veins close to the surface and through
flapping cooling air across the shoulders. Researchers Polly

Still from the film

Dumbo.

41
The elephant’s skin Phillips and James Heath, using a combination of infrared
is a complete
organ in itself,
thermography and a flat plate model, calculated that the whole
though lacking of an elephant’s heat-loss requirements were met by ear-flapping
sweat pores. under normal conditions. (In a slightly bizarre extension of this
research, Phillips and Heath also calculated heat-loss gradients
in Walt Disney’s cartoon elephant Dumbo, whose ears are pro-
portionately a little larger than real elephants; they decided that
the large ears were necessary to dissipate heat generated while
flying at high speeds!).5
On the ears, the skin is less than 2 mm thick. Across the rest
of the body, the grey, wrinkled, fissured skin is up to 2.5 cm
thick, but it’s still a sensitive organ. Almost hairless, except in
the very young, and lacking sweat glands, the skin is vulnerable
to irritation and parasites, mostly ticks, lice and warble-fly larvae,
needing to be bathed in water and dust in a constant cycle. In

42
the Asian elephant, pigmented patches often develop, especially
around the face, resulting in a characteristic appearance of
mottled pink. Exaggerated examples of this resulted in the
mythology of the ‘white elephant’, still much sought after as
symbolic of royalty. The kings of Siam were particularly famed
for this desire; one such king, because elephants are pretty
expensive to keep, used to make a present of a white elephant
to courtiers he wished to ruin. Hence the term ‘white elephant’
for any grand fiasco involving spending more than you can
ultimately afford.
Like any other complex organism, not surprisingly, elephants
do suffer various diseases, mostly parasitic, both external and
internal: flatworms, hookworms, roundworms and oestrid fly
larvae in the guts of youngsters or in infected wounds. These are
particularly prone to getting out of hand amongst captive ele-
phants, or where overcrowded waterholes become infected
through faeces. Raman Sukumar has published some admittedly
tentative but intriguing studies of correlations between tusk size
and parasite loads as retrieved from dung samples: the bigger
the tusks, it seems, the fewer the parasites. Quite what this might
imply is as yet unknown. Isolated cases of anthrax have also
been recorded; at least one carver is supposed to have contracted
anthrax from breathing in ivory dust. Infectious pneumonias,
salmonellae and tuberculosis have occurred amongst captives.
Dental infections can set in, particularly amongst the aged, as
can arteriosclerosis, hastening the elephants’ usually lingering
deaths from malnutrition.
Asian mahouts, fondly bathing their elephants in the rivers
of India and Burma, have understood these sensitivities, and
much else, for at least 3,000 years. Good nutrition and skin care
are obsessively tended. What might appear to us as rather com-
ically unsightly bags of wrinkles are points of beauty to the

43
discerning mahout’s eye: as J. H. Williams recounts in Bandoola,
his lesser-known sequel to Elephant Bill, the loose flap of skin
running from between the forelegs to the under-belly was
known as the Pyia Swai, or honeycomb, and would be aestheti-
cally judged. Indeed, there are sophisticated criteria for beauty
amongst elephant handlers: proportions, head breadth and
shape of bumps, tusk symmetry and thickness, length of trunk
and overall height, all combine to produce subtly classifiable
types of elephant elegance. Some, for example, are identified as
mriga or ‘deer-like’ in physique, which is very different from
kumera or ‘royal’. Different regions can also be identified in
their respective elephants’ appearance: those from Kerala are
said to be the most beautiful of all.
By contrast, in the post-Roman West, where elephants and
their relatives had long been eradicated and only the rare excite-
ment of a captive animal provided knowledge, all sorts of myths
about elephant physiology abounded. It was only in the twentieth
century that a sense emerged of how the elephants’ physiology
interacted with their ecology, and indeed with an intricate ele-
phantine society. After the genocidal depredations of European
hunters in Africa and Asia alike – hunters who saw elephants as
no more than animated repositories of coveted ivory – the
notion that elephants could possess a society at all came as
something of a surprise. Today, elephant interactions are so
intimately studied and known that not a few observers believe
that we can learn something from them: ‘The wisdom of the
tuskèd domination/ Holds up to shame the apery of mankind’, A study of the foot
as a poem by Henry Harmon Chamberlin put it.6 and a cross-section
of the head of an
So how does elephant physiology dictate behaviour? Two elephant, illustra-
physical functions govern all: consumption and reproduction. tions from the
Comte de Buffon’s
Elephants are huge; they have to eat a lot. A 5-ton elephant will enormous Histoire
consume up to 300 kg – 6 to 8 per cent of its body weight – of naturelle (1749–67).

45
vegetable matter every day, which takes over twelve hours of
steady feeding. Elephants will eat a wide variety of plants – hun-
dreds of different species if available – ranging from tree bark to
grass, gorging on fruits like tamarinds in Asia or marulas in
Africa when they are in season. They will also seek out mineral
supplements in salt licks or caves, and even create caves of their
own; the most famous are the Kitum caves on Mount Elgon in
western Kenya, enormous caverns largely created by elephants
tusking out deposits of sodium-rich earth to supplement the
inadequately nutritious forest diet of the area.
The digestive system, taking some fourteen hours to pass
food through a 35-metre tract, is quite quick and provides suffi-
cient energy, but metabolically it is rather inefficient: the process
converts only about 22 per cent of the intake’s protein. What
eventually gets defecated – up to 100 kg a day – is a treasure-trove
for dozens of other creatures, ranging from baby elephants
ingesting crucial micro-organisms from the pre-digested adult
faeces, through baboons to dung-beetles. (Amusing but serious
signposts on the roads through Addo National Park in South
Africa give right of way to dung beetles: they are that vital to the
whole ecosystem.) Some species of plant, like certain acacias and
(the most thoroughly researched) Balanites wilsonia, best germi-
nate once they have passed through the acids of an elephant’s
gut, and the elephants are instrumental in dispersing them.
There are a number of studies out now trying to determine the
impact of hunting elephants on the germination patterns of
such forest species.
Really dedicated elephant observers can even identify
individuals by their dung. J. H. Williams, in Bandoola, describes
the capacity of one forest manager in Burma to recognize each
of 400 individual elephants’ droppings, which he would care-
fully examine, ‘prodding it with his shooting stick. Usually he

46
had no comment to make, but occasionally he would say, “Look
at that. Mee Too’s been eating earth again. I don’t like that.”
Prod, prod. “Um. Elephant-worms again.” Or, “Poor old Kah
Gyis. Beginning to show his age. Bamboos passing through him
like tough string”.’7 Ecology apart, elephant dung is pretty clean
and inoffensive, and you can now buy all manner of greeting
cards, envelopes and notepads made from rough-textured but
attractive elephant-dung paper! A more controversial use of
elephant dung involved one dab of it strategically placed over
the nude breast of artist Chris Odili’s 2004 multi-media work,
‘Black Madonna’, which offended New York mayor Rudi Giuliani
so deeply that he threatened to close down the whole gallery.
It is little wonder, given the volumes of consumption
involved, that elephants can be regarded as positively destruc-
tive of the vegetation around them, especially when confined to
fenced-in areas much smaller than the vast ranges of yesteryear,
and when artificial waterholes encourage elephants to congre-
gate in more limited ranges. Given the freedom to do so,
elephants will range over enormous areas. Walter Leuthold’s
studies of radio-collared elephants in Tsavo, Kenya, showed ele-
phants wandering across an area of over 3,000 square
kilometres, with distinct seasonal rhythms and preferences. The
range will vary hugely, however, with differences in vegetation
cover and availability of water. Though elephants have been
known to survive without water for more than a week, under
normal circumstances they will drink up to 200 litres a day. They
will go a long way for it, and evidently have an excellent memory
even for those spots in dry riverbeds where they have to dig deep
holes to reach it. There are, however, few such free-range move-
ments available to elephants nowadays.
Perhaps it is this necessity to remember far-flung spots that
has helped develop a brain formidable enough also to hold a

47
A page of uncertain good deal of ‘cultural’ information. That 6-kg organ has been
origin, ‘The revenge-
ful or chivalrous
the subject of some intensive study. Though the elephant’s
elephant of Africa’, brain is four times the size of a human brain, it occupies a much
binarizes the smaller proportion of total body weight. It nevertheless has a
extremes of human
perceptions of highly convoluted cerebrum and cerebellum, correlated with
elephant behaviour. excellent cognitive and motor coordination. Rather than risk
anthropomorphism by speculating about ‘intelligence’, some
scientists now measure the ‘encephalisation quotient’ (eq) – the
relationship between actual brain/body-weight ratio against
the expected ratio. In this scheme, humans have an eq of 6,
The close mother, chimpanzees 2.5 and elephants 1.9. Your humble house dog has
child and aunt, or
allomother bond, an eq of 1, which is to say ‘average’. A study of six Asian and six
is the core of the African elephants indicated a higher eq value for the Asian, but
elephant family
unit, and crucial
it’s too small a sample to conclude much from. The eq is per-
to infants’ survival. haps less important, however, than noting in the elephant the

48
presence of an unusually large temporal lobe, which in humans
has been shown to be particularly associated with memory. So
there is at least some neurological evidence to support the
legends of the elephant’s monumental memory.
Others prefer to measure intelligence by observing behav-
iour. Over the last 30 or 40 years of study, particularly by a set
of extraordinary women watching wild elephants in Africa for
years on end, it has become clear just how complex and
nuanced undisturbed elephant relationships are. Cynthia Moss
is one of those women: for over 30 years she has lived amongst
and observed the elephants of Amboseli National Park in Kenya.
She has mapped the intricacies of family relationships, geo-
graphical movements and individual characteristics amongst
hundreds of animals, recounting her discoveries in a remark-
able book, Elephant Memories.
Perhaps at the forefront of such recent discoveries is the car-
ing complexity of elephant family ties. Moss outlines concentric
circles of relationship: a mother and her calf at the centre,
enclosed in a wider circle of cows closely related to the mother,
usually including an older matriarch, and their own juveniles.
Outside that, a looser coterie of younger bulls hovers, gradually
asserting their independence; and finally there is on the outside
a scattering of bulls who spend much of their time alone, except
for brief periods of mating activity. The central group may split
and drift apart from time to time, but contact is always main-
tained, and reunions are tumultuous and joyous, as Cynthia
Moss describes:

The two subgroups of the family will run together,

rumbling, trumpeting, and screaming, raise their heads,
click their tusks together, entwine their trunks, flap their
ears, spin around and back into each other, urinate and

50
 defecate, and generally show great excitement. A greeting
such as this will sometimes last as long as ten minutes.8

The core groups are devoted primarily to the raising of

calves. A calf is 22 months in gestation (a span that, combined
with sophisticated scanning and camera techniques, made pos-
sible an astonishing 2006 bbc film of a calf ’s development in
utero). The youngster will remain with the mother for the first
few years of its life. Both mother and ‘aunts’, or allomothers,
rush to its assistance should it fall into trouble. A calf without
allomothers is three times less likely to survive than one with
four or more.
The essentially matriarchal structure of these elephant fami-
lies has been seized on by some feminists as worthy of emulation.
Whatever one thinks of that, the maternal care demonstrated by
elephants can reach the marvellous. Veteran elephant researcher
Anthony Hall-Martin related this incident amongst the aggres-
sive elephants of Addo National Park in its early days:

I spent time habituating the elephants to me and my

vehicle. When I began they would charge on sight, but
within six months they were coming up and touching
me. One day I was near the herd, with my wife Catharina
and our new baby, Vega. I presented my first-born to the
old matriarch, who I had got to know quite well. She dis-
appeared into the bush and, a few moments later, re-
appeared with her new baby. She had come to show me
her youngster. Now I am a scientist and have thought
about that incident and I can’t explain it – it was a
moment of magic. There was a special bond between us
for that moment.9

51
There is a long,
sometimes exag-
gerated history of
enmity between
elephants and
rhinos: an English
magazine depic-
tion of a rhino
‘attacked by
elephants’, c. 1836.

Raising a calf is itself an intricate business – discipline, play,

learning and safety all held in delicate balance. Education into
elephant ways continues well into an elephant’s ‘teens’. In one
recent, illuminating case, ten young bulls were translocated from
Kruger National Park in South Africa to the Pilanesberg reserve. A
bit like the boys in Lord of the Flies, the youngsters ran positively
amok, to the extent of trying to mount and then actually killing
several rhinoceros – wholly aberrant behaviour for elephants.
However, the introduction of six older elephants rapidly calmed
them and sorted them out, partly by suppressing the youngsters’
too-early onset of musth, the state when testosterone rises.
(There are, incidentally, a number of testimonies to ele-
phant–rhino relations through history in both Asia and Africa.
Both the Romans and the Indian Mughals enjoyed pitting
them against each other in the arena; the emperor Babur in six-
teenth-century India hunted rhinos from elephant-back. One

52
nineteenth-century hunter in tropical Africa misguidedly
claimed that they were sworn enemies. There are records of
mutual aggression, and you can view an elephant–rhino ‘face-
off ’ on YouTube. More strangely, when in late 2007 three
rhinos were killed by poachers in Imire private game reserve in
central Zimbabwe, the orphaned rhino youngsters apparently
found the domesticated elephants on the reserve something of
a substitute.)
I observed another extraordinary example of elephant socia-
bility at Imire. Owner Norman Travers, having obtained several
orphaned elephants at different times, discovered that one old
matriarch just didn’t get on with the others and had to be
enclosed in a separate area. There, lacking elephant company,
she instead adopted a herd of buffalo. I watched them all fol-
lowing her in a long train towards water one evening, a couple
of the smaller buffalo nestled up under her flanks. Even more
remarkably, it transpired that when a buffalo calf was born, the
elephant tended to kill it; possibly she didn’t quite recognize
them as buffaloes yet. The buffalo mothers – even those who
hadn’t experienced a personal loss – learned to go away and
give birth in remote reed-beds, and only tentatively introduced
them after a week or two, at which stage the matriarch seemed
happy to accept them.
Further complexities are evident in sexual activities.
Elephant cows come into oestrus at variable intervals, generally
around every sixteen weeks. Hence, perhaps, elaborate rituals
and signalling systems have developed. Bull elephants periodi-
cally enter that state known as musth, when testosterone levels
rise and aggressive behaviour manifests: it is well known now
that Asian mahouts who get killed by their own elephants are
almost always attacked by an animal in musth. (Though not
always: for one, ‘Nellie’ was a female Asian elephant held at

53
 Durban’s botanical gardens who eventually killed her keeper.)
Musth is visible in the leaking of dark fluid from temporal
glands just behind the eye. This is the source of the notion that
elephants cry; in fact – despite the title of Jeffrey Masson’s
famous book on animal emotions, When Elephants Weep – they
have no tear ducts. Wafting its powerful scent ahead with its
Asian ‘composite’
ears, a musth bull will approach a group of females, seeking out
elephant, depict- any in oestrus. He will explore the cows’ genitals and temporal
ing Kama, the god
glands with his trunk, placing its tip against the specialized
of love.
‘Jacobson’s organ’ located in the roof of his own mouth in order
to assay their chemical readiness, a test known as flehmen.
Much excited foreplay might ensue, with the female urinating
and defecating, spinning around and finally running off, the
bull in pursuit, dragging his distended penis, dribbling and
green-tinged. (Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole amusingly relate
how worried they were at first on observing this ‘green penis
disease’, as they initially termed it, thinking some dreadful com-
municable ailment was afoot.)
Given the enormity of the elephant member, it’s surprising
that it hasn’t been more sought after by humans, like tiger penis
or rhino horn. However, several cultures in both Africa and Asia
have associated the elephant with sexuality and the passions.
Classical writers like Pliny and Aelian alluded to elephants as
lustful, but these passages were excised by later Christians, like
St Francis de Sales, in the early 1600s, when the elephant
became iconic rather of honesty and reliability, even chastity
and good table manners!10 In India, Ganesh and his associated
myths often emphasize a generalized fertility. A sub-genre of
Indian painting, in which the shape of an elephant is construct-
ed from human figures, usually women, is sometimes extended
to a tangle of semi-dressed couples in variously graphic Tantric
positions. According to that ancient sex manual, the Kama

54
 The position of
the breasts
between the
forelegs is another
factor making
elephants seem
quasi-human.

Sutra, an elephant-woman or Hastini is the lustiest of women,

crude and vulgar in her carriage. In Kerala temples, the most
prized elephant was a bull elephant whose trunk, tusks and
penis touched the ground; it was seen as representing absolute
virility and was reserved for the shrine’s chief deity. Modern
‘magic’ practitioners tout elephants as combining both respon-
sibility and sexuality: buy a gemstone carving and ‘If you want
to be very sexual, rub Elephant with musk oil and place him fac-
ing your bed, this works for both sexes.’11
The odd fact that the cow’s vulva faces forward led some
early and uninformed speculators to depict elephants copulat-
ing face to face like humans. Their confusion was compounded
by the position of the bull’s testes within the body, not outside
like other mammals’, and the position of the cow’s two breasts
below the shoulders, also more like humans than dogs or ante-
lope. However, the bull mounts quite conventionally from the
rear, effecting brief entry with the aid of a sinuous s-bend to the

55
penis. Having mated, the bull plays little further part in the core
matriarchal group’s activities.
An elaborate family and herd life goes along with a complex
communication system, judged by many to be another crucial
indicator of intelligence. If not precisely a language, elephant
communication has nevertheless been recognized as extraordi-
narily intricate, and possibly dialectal. They evidently communi-
cate a great deal through scent and chemical signals, especially
pheromones, and perhaps even more through touch. Body
language – ear movements, head position, trunk position, modes
of walking such as the bull’s ‘musth walk’ or the peculiar wary
restlessness of an oestrous female – also conveys information at
every meeting.
They also listen to each other. George McKay, working
with Asian elephants, learned to distinguish a range of snorts,
growls, rumbles, squeaks and chirps to which he could assign
rough ‘meanings’. Beyond the obvious elephant trumpeting,
deep belly rumbles also communicate. And beneath that again,
infrasonic communication happens, below the range of human
hearing. McKay began to discern ‘an almost inaudible purring’
from elephants’ throats. Katy Payne, standing next to an ele-
phant in Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, one morn-
ing, became aware of ‘a palpable throbbing in the air like dis-
tant thunder’.
Payne, modifying technology developed for the detection
and recording of whale song, began to record this infrasonic
realm amongst elephants in eastern and southern Africa. A
whole world opened up: it became clear that elephants, rum-
bling to each other at frequencies between 14 and 35 hz, and up
to 115 decibels, could communicate over hundreds of metres,
possibly even kilometres. This explained observations by
people overseeing elephant culls, like Rowan Martin and Garth

56
 ‘Elephant grave-
yards’ may be
a myth, but
elephants are
not immortal.

Thompson in Zimbabwe, that groups quite far removed from

the scene of killing, certainly out of normal earshot, would
simultaneously become agitated. Payne was able to distinguish
at least eight different kinds of call and relate these to specific
behavioural responses. (Payne titled the book she wrote on her
research Silent Thunder.) Karen McComb, working with Cynthia
Moss in Amboseli, worked out through carefully calculated
playback experiments that a great deal of individual recognition
was being relayed as well: a single elephant was evidently famil-
iar with the individual calls of fourteen family groups, over 100
adult females in all. In one touching instance, playing back the
call of a female already three months dead elicited a positive
response from her closest relatives.12
This evident sensitivity to, and awareness of, the death of
relatives is another aspect that invites close comparison to
human intelligence. For thousands of years, bizarre legends of
‘elephant graveyards’ circulated. They are myth, though the ten-
dency of dying elephants to drift towards areas with water or

57
 softer vegetation means that more might die in some specific
areas. The legend continues to stimulate writers – though
nowadays more likely in satirical vein, as in this stanza from a
poem by South African poet Chris Mann:

Those old hunter-types are gone,

yet still the legend lingers,
for elephants
are ponderous, likeable, anachronistic beasts,
and where better than Africa
can old idealists go
to lay their creaking structures down?13

Elephants’ unusual awareness of death, and something akin

to mourning, is nevertheless now well documented – probably,

A 19th-century
British traveller,
shown here in
Burma sketching an
elephant, reported
being repeatedly
deterred by the
elephant throwing
things at him.

58
Cynthia Moss writes, ‘the strangest thing about them’. Many
have observed how elephants try to revive dying siblings, moth-
ers or offspring, and remain with the corpse for long periods, or
return to it frequently. They sometimes throw dirt or branches
onto a body, as if in a rudimentary gesture of burial. They often
revisit the bones of a long-deceased relative, throwing them
around, stirring them with a foot or exploring the crevices of
the skull with their trunks. This is such predictable behaviour
that filmmakers can lure elephants into choice positions by
moving elephant bones there.
Yet another indicator of relatively high intelligence is a
primitive form of tool-using, such as scratching inaccessible
spots with a broken-off branch. Wild elephants observed in
Nagarahole National Park in India routinely used branches to
swat away irritating flies. Thirteen captive elephants, also at
Nagarahole, were provided with a variety of branches as an
experiment; eight of them quickly modified the branches by
pulling unwanted bits off in order to fashion more effective fly-
switches. Elephants’ capacity to manipulate objects, of course,
has been crucial to their use in circuses; some are still taught to
throw darts at balloons and other silly tricks. One zoo elephant
was, worryingly, hurling objects repeatedly into the rafters of
her night-house; it was discovered that she was throwing them
at scurrying rats, whether in irritation or amusement it would
be hard to say. Elephants do often appear to have a sense of
humour and mischief, as calves ambush one another or sling
things at each other in fits of pique. Their capacity for altruism
seems also highly developed: not only do they routinely help
one another out of muddy fixes or crowd round to help an ail-
ing member of the herd, but they have also been known to warn
people of the presence of lions or puff-adders. This can go awry:
there is a well-known story about an elephant who, having

59
attacked an intrusive cattle-herder and broken his leg, then
refused to let anyone else get near him.
This should not, of course, obscure less savoury aspects of
elephant behaviour: bullying, occasional indifference to suffer-
ing, sometimes fatal aggression between competing bulls, a
propensity to kill humans and destroy their crops and liveli-
hoods. Nevertheless, almost all who have the opportunity to live
amongst and alongside elephants in a non-threatening situation
develop a powerful, sometimes mutual affection. Iain Douglas-
Hamilton, a pioneer researcher, wrote in his ground-breaking
book, Among the Elephants, that ‘with other wild animals,
elephants fulfil part of man’s deep need for the refreshment of
his spirit.’14
All in all, elephants display societal structures and behaviour
so obviously complex, and so apparently close to the human,
that more than one writer has wondered what it might be like
to be an elephant. Do elephants have a remembered history? Do
they have a sense of culture, even some self-awareness? What do
they communicate to each other? Cynthia Moss inserts passages
of near-fiction in her book, Elephant Memories, but doesn’t try
the impossible task of getting inside an elephant’s mind. A
Canadian novelist, Barbara Gowdy, does. In The White Bone, set
in East Africa, Gowdy clearly draws on Moss’s, Joyce Poole’s and
Katy Payne’s researches to recreate elephant family life, histori-
cal memory and cultural awareness from the elephant’s point of
view. Gowdy portrays one elephant character attaining that
iconic measure of self-awareness: recognizing herself in the fall-
en wing-mirror of a human’s vehicle. (A 2006 scientific article in
fact reported some clever experiments indicating quite clear
self-recognition in mirrors by captive elephants.15)
Whatever the possibilities, the view that elephants are so
close to humans that they deserve special protection and atten-

60
tion has come to dictate many people’s attitudes, and to affect
management and even culling techniques. Dr Daphne Sheldrick
dbe, who for five decades has studied Kenyan elephants from
her base at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage, has no doubt that
they are a ‘kindred species’. Having hand-reared 75 orphans, she
wrote in 2006, she ‘can categorically state that they are, indeed,
very human in terms of intelligence, emotion and a few addi-
tional attributes besides’.16
On the other side stand those scientists who regard the attri-
bution of emotional states to animals as illegitimate anthropo-
morphism, and the presence of emotion either in the animals
or in the human observer as clouding the real issues. ‘Elephants
are elephants,’ as one anatomist has put it, ‘not big, grey
humans.’17
As we will see in the final chapter, where we review current
conservation issues and look into the elephants’ future, this
debate is now hot. For now, however, let us turn to the aston-
ishingly rich ‘life of elephants’ in the human imagination; their
mythology, literature and art.

61
3 Representing Elephants

The world is awash with images of elephants. For every living,

lumbering pachyderm there must be at least one poem, story,
novel, coffee-table tome or television documentary; a hundred
statues; a thousand paintings; tens of thousands of tourist trin-
kets; millions of postcards and advertising logos. Just about
anyone you speak to has their favourite anecdote, book or photo-
graph. This is the case even in places where elephants have
never lived, such as North America. Some years ago I flew into
Whitehorse, Yukon, about as far from southern Africa as it is
possible for me to get – and there in the first coffee shop I
entered was a wall covered in the proprietor’s own photographs
of Namibian elephants. Elephant collectibles are a serious
industry: Michael Knapik, a collector who has produced his
own encyclopaedia of elephant collectibles, found 3,000 ele-
phant artefacts for sale on eBay in a single week, from dramatic
realistic bronzes to cute plastic toys. I would hazard a guess that
– maybe dogs, cats and horses excepted – no other single
mammal has been so prominent in artistic representations of
the animal world. It would be difficult to do full justice to this
richness in a lifetime, let alone here.
This chapter starts, then, with the earliest rock art; then moves
on to the earliest myths of origins and folklore; through the
realms of religious iconography; the development of sculptures

62
and paintings of elephants up to the present; elephants in their
sundry literary appearances (in proverbs, hunters’ memoirs,
novels, poems, and as ubiquitous metaphor); and ends with the
elephant in contemporary popular culture, from music and
advertising to what is, no doubt, the medium of our time, film.
People have been depicting elephants ever since they could
depict anything, it seems. Mammoths and elephants appear in
many of the 75,000-odd known rock art sites across the world.
There are several well-known cave paintings of the mammoth in
Europe – at Font-de-Gaume, in France’s Dordogne (c. 15,000
years old); at Vallon Pont d’Arc (17,000 years old), at Rouffignac
(a small herd depicted) and most beautifully at Chauvet. In 2007
the subtle remains of a mammoth petroglyph were spotted in
Cheddar Caves in Somerset, England.
Africa is even better endowed with rock painting and engrav-
ing. Some of the earliest is work from southern Africa by San or
Bushman artists (just what to call this panoply of related but
scattered peoples, speaking a multitude of mutually unintelligible
languages, remains controversial). Wherever suitable surfaces in
sheltered caves and overhangs presented themselves, Bushman

Raised trunks
scenting the air;
a San rock paint-
ing at Roussow,
South Africa.

63
artists, for both shamanistic and, I would imagine, more prosaic
reasons (like fun!), painted their local animals. At least some
Bushman rock art is thousands of years old, ranging from a tiny
25 mm to the life-size paintings in Ruchera Cave in Zimbabwe’s
Mtoko district (dated to the ninth millennium bc). The depic-
tions generally show elephants side-on, but there is also one
depicting an elephant from behind, and one previously unpub-
lished example, from the Roussouw district of South Africa’s
Eastern Cape, viewed head-on, trunk inquisitively raised. The
paintings vary in colour from reds to greys, perhaps reflecting the
colour of the local mud or dust the elephants would have basked
in. Less colourful, but equally well observed, are rock engravings,
mostly in Namibia. There, the shapes of the elephants seem emi-
nently suited to the blue-black basalt boulders they appear on.
Some scenes depict hunting, mostly with arrows but occasionally
with hamstringing machetes. A few surviving Bushman commu-
nities remained elephant-hunting specialists until overtaken by
European firearm technologies in the early nineteenth century.
However, elephants were not merely food sources. Bushmen,
unsurprisingly, incorporated the biggest animals of their experi-
ence into their spiritual belief-system, and one painting, from
South Africa’s Porterville area shows a herd enclosed within a
double rainbow, presumably associating the elephants with reli-
giously significant rain-creation ritual. At one time, most
Bushmen believed animals were people, and this close ancestral
relationship was captured in their folk tales as well. What may
count as the earliest poem we possess about the elephant
(depending on how many generations handed it down, and who
can tell?) is a delightful Bushman couplet:

Tall-topped acacia, you, full of branches,

Ebony-tree with the big spreading leaves.1

64
 Distantly related peoples, the pygmies of the Congo and
Gabon, also mingled reverence and predation, as shown in one
Beku pigmy song:

Through the forest whipped by rain

Father elephant treads heavily, baou, baou, baou
Diffident, fearless, proud of his strength
Father elephant, whom nothing can subdue
In the forest he shatters at will.
He stops, starts up again, browses, trumpets
Knocks down a tree or two, searches for his woman.
Father elephant, a distant hunter hears you.
Elephant hunter, take up your bow!2

Less rock art appears in East, Central and West Africa

(though there is a beautiful elephant outline at Kakapel cave,
western Kenya). But North Africa, from Nubia to Morocco, is
replete with elephant depictions. Though they are difficult to
date precisely, some are thousands of years old. The particularly
finely executed examples from Chad’s Tibetsi mountains have
been dated to the so-called Age of Hunters, around 6,000 bc. As
revealed by the magnificent paintings at Tassili, now in southern
Libya, the central Sahara was once a thriving paradise of species
and wetlands. Some finely incised etchings are wonderfully real-
istic, others almost modern in their looping lines and distorted
planes. A remarkable one on the Messak plateau in Libya shows
a jackal-headed man following an elephant, picking up and lick-
ing its dung – presumably a shaman accessing elephant power.
Rock art is not confined to Europe and Africa: Asia also has
its examples, of almost equal antiquity, though elephants seem
more sparse. A particularly strange one was recorded by one Dr
K. Kamat, in a cave at Bhimbekata near Bhopal, showing an

65
This San elephant
painting near Lake
Chivero, Zimbabwe,
is probably associ-
ated with ‘rain-
snake’ motifs and
fertility rituals.

unmistakable elephant contained within the womb of some

kind of antelope – the remnant, perhaps, of some long-lost folk
tale. Much later, from the second century bc onwards,
Buddhists hollowed out the monastic caves of Ajanta in the
gorge of the Waghora river, north-eastern Deccan plateau, and
decorated the walls richly with depictions of, amongst other
sensuous scenes, their Prince Siddhartha and of a playful white
elephant, its trunk holding a lotus blossom. This image was
later adopted as the logo for India’s Tourism Department.
Asia’s great artistic gift to the world is the art produced with-
in the last 2,000 years, much of it associated with its religions,
primarily Hinduism and Buddhism. These works have to count
amongst the most ornate and vivid in human history. Some of
the works arose from the myths of world origins, which are
both variable and fantastic. The elephant has a key role to play.
In some of the earliest Hindu myths, the Creator cracks
open the cosmic egg: its yolk forms the sun, the other contents
the land, sea and sky. The two halves of the eggshell are then
presented to a conclave of twelve sages, who chant as the world

66
 An elephant rock
engraving on the
Djado plateau of
north-west Niger,
possibly 5,000
years old.

is formed. From the half in the Creator’s right hand emerge eight
tuskers (diggaja), four of which will take their place as pillars at
the corners of the universe. The others include the magnificent
Airvata, who will carry the god Indra, Lord of the Universe,
about his business. (This scheme has been whimsically paro-
died by Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels, in which four
elephants teeter atop a celestial turtle.) Indra was associated
above all with thunder and the life-giving rain. Hence, again
and again in Indian literatures, the elephant is associated with
water, the colour of its skin with the dark grey of monsoon clouds,
thunder with the unpredictable rages of musth. A Sanskrit poet,
Nilikantha, described an elephant in musth as ‘filled with

67
‘The Pregnancy’:
rock art from
Bhimbekata, India,
possibly 20,000
years old, as
rendered by
Dr K. Kamat.

thunder like a rolled-up cloud’.3 In their early existence, accord-

ing to another story, elephants could fly about and even change
shape as wilfully as clouds. Unfortunately, they once decided to
land en masse on the branch of a banyan tree, which broke beneath
their weight and flattened the hovel of a famed ascetic,
Dirghatapas. Furious at being disturbed, he cursed them to gravi-
ty’s pull and a role as man’s beast of burden. In an epic poem of
around ad 400, Kalidisa’s Meghaduta (‘The Cloud Messenger’), a
banished yaksha or forest dweller, whose lord’s garden has been
trampled by an elephant while he was entwined in distracting
love, calls on an elephant-shaped cloud for help:

Exiled in the forest, love-starved, emaciated by denial,

The yaksha lets a golden bracelet slip from off his listless
arm,
The Hindu god And as the final days of summer draw to an end, he sees
Indra mounted a cloud,
on his elephant
Airvata, northern
Like a musth bull elephant rutting against the moun-
India, 19th century. tainside . . . 4

68
 Red elephant
outline on the
Jain temple at
Sravanabelagola,
India.

The cloud, as elephant, then follows instructions to find the

yaksha’s wife, drinking and spraying the world with rain as he
flies. Hence the association of the elephant with fecundity in
many forms.
Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit
epics of the first millennium bc, contain numerous elephant
stories derived from obscure folklore and mingled with practical
management techniques. There, too, the turmoil of the world,
figured in the exile of Rama and Sita to the forest, involves an
elephant – in this case, the accidental killing of a young ascetic,
mistaken in darkness for an elephant, by Rama’s father
Dashartha. Although, as we have seen, Ganesh emerged under
Aryan influence rather late in the process, the myth nevertheless
arose that the Mahabharata had been written by the elephant-
headed god Ganesh himself, using his solitary tusk as a pen.
The legends related about Ganesh’s origins are many, but
here is one: Ganesh was the son of Shiva, the cosmic mover,
and his gorgeous wife Parvati. They had struggled to conceive,
despite Shiva being incited to desire by the flowery arrow of

69
Kama, god of love. In musth, as it were, Shiva once displeased
Parvati by surprising her at her bathing. So Parvati scraped the
dirt from her body, mixed it with oil and secret ingredients, and
moulded Ganesh from it. Set to guard her bathroom door,
Ganesh barred Shiva on his next visit – at the cost of having his
head lopped off by the furious god. So stricken was Parvati that
a contrite Shiva sent messengers to bring the first replacement
head they could find. It ‘just happened’ to be an elephant.
The details of Ganesh’s appearance in countless votive statues
and paintings are equally rich in mythology. He lost one tusk in a
fight with Parasa-Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu the destroyer.
He rides on a rat, who helps him in more subtle ways to remove
obstacles – his main job in life. His corpulent belly suggests both
affluence and power. He is always depicted holding symbolic
objects: a whip, a lotus, a radish or a death’s head. Ganesh or

Two images of
Ganesh, the most
popular of all the
Hindu gods: a
painting, and a
modern Ganesh
rendered in metal,
looking like a cross
between a bulldog
and a Hell’s Angel.

71
 Ganesa became, and remains to this day, the most popular of all
the teeming Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses. He became
known, in short, as ‘Lord of Beginnings, Undertakings and
Examinations’ and the ‘Remover of Obstacles’.
He even found his way into Buddhist lore, sometimes
conflated with Indra’s sacred mount as the pachyderm respon-
sible for the birth of the Buddha himself. Buddha (born as
Siddhartha), son of a noble from Kapilavastu, died a normal
human death around 483 bc; but the myths that grew up
around him figured him as one of a series of reincarnated
Enlightened Ones, and he was born, like Christ, to a virgin, the
Queen Sirimahamaya. She herself, though beautiful, with ‘arms
more lithe than an elephant’s trunk’, had devoted herself to

Some of the
famous Thai royal
‘white elephants’,
photographed by
William Henry
Jackson in the late
19th century.

72
chaste austerity. But one night in her Himalayan palace (she
claimed), a ‘silvery-white elephant descended from the moun-
tains, entered my room and bowed down before me. In its trunk
it bore a lotus. I was awakened by the call of a bird.’ And so,
impregnated by the visitor’s trunk, she retired to the Lumbini
Garden to give birth to the Buddha.
Ganesh images apart, Buddhist lore exhibits a culture
deeply familiar with elephants: the Jataka stories – folk tales
that relate the Buddha’s previous births and lives – are full of
stories of elephants in captivity and war. One story is particu-
larly poignant: the enlightened Buddha, or Bodhisattva, is rein-
carnated as a wild elephant with blind parents, to whom he is
devoted. Captured by a hunter and taken to the local king of

Marble elephants
at Nemnath
Temple, Mt Abu,
India, photo-
graphed c. 1903.

73
Elephant statues
line the Avenue of
Spirits leading to
the Ming tombs
outside Beijing,
carved in 1435.

Benares, he pines; the king, alert to distress, releases him to be

reunited with his bereft parents. Often, it seems, there is in
these tales a wealth of observed, even scientific, knowledge; a
capacity to cross an uneasy border from human to elephant;
and a willingness to learn from elephant family mores. It was
primarily Buddha’s incarnation into the wisest and most
munificent of all beasts that prompted the ongoing worship of
the white elephant, especially in Thailand: ‘Mouth open, head
the colour of cochineal, tusks gleaming like silver, all aglitter
with precious stones, clad in the finest of golden tulle, his limbs
and organs were flawlessly proportioned, his bearing majestic.’5
Hence, throughout Hindu and Buddhist Asia, the elephant
features prominently in religious iconography, sometimes
uneasily coalescing with royal or aristocratic power. Innumer-
able temples and palaces are guarded by massive colonnades of
elephants: at the Wodeyar palace in Mysore; at the Maharana
Palace at Udaipur, overlooking the waters of India’s Lake Pichola;

74
at the Kailasantha Temple at Ellora. There is a magnificent blue
beast in front of the temple of Bodnath in Nepal; another accom-
panied by two calves in Ayuthya, Thailand’s former capital;
another before the Pura Puseh temple in Batubulan, Bali. The
second-century bc Ruanweli Dagoba palace in Sri Lanka is
surrounded by rows of life-size, sanguine-looking elephants; the
walls of Angkhor Wat in Cambodia bulge with elephant friezes.
Most impressively, perhaps, kneeling elephants guard the so-
called Avenue of Spirits leading to the Ming tombs near Beijing
in China, built around 1435.
Islam, with its general reticence towards representational art,
seems not to have depicted many elephants. Not that they were
ignored: Alfred Edmund Brehm, author of an immense nine-
teenth-century study of animals, wrote: ‘“Elephants will leave
you alone if you don’t bother them,” a sheikh once told me on
the banks of the Blue Nile. “They left my father alone and his
father before him. When the monsoon season is nigh, I hang
amulets on tall poles; for these righteous animals, that is enough.
They revere the word of Allah’s prophet! They fear the retribu-
tion that awaits blasphemers. They are righteous animals”.’6

Egyptian amulet
in serpentine and
bone inlay; late
Naqada ii,
c. 3500-3300 bc,
height 3.5 cm.

75
 A seventh-century statue from Kashan in Persia depicts large
round shields over the elephant’s ears, a driver and two lovers,
perhaps, under an exaggerated howdah canopy. And the ele-
phant commands a special place in an extravagantly illustrated
thirteenth-century Arabic bestiary, the Manifi √al-Hajawan – ‘On
the Use of Animals’. (The author claimed that elephants lived for
400 years and that ivory powder cured leprosy.)
In ancient Egypt, despite the presence of both live elephants
and a lot of worked ivory (notably a headrest from Tutan-
khamun’s tomb in the form of the sun god Shu), elephants seem
not to have featured much in the hieroglyphic art of the dynas-
tic periods. There are some representations, however, that show
a clear distinction between domesticated and wild elephants.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art possesses an exquisitely sim-
ple artefact that is at once two elephants and a single face, in
serpentine with bone-inlay eyes, dating from late Naqada ii,
around 3600 bc. The black obelisk of Shalmaneser iii (858–824
bc) at Nimrud depicts a rather crude elephant with an oddly
tiny head, being stiffly pursued by a man with a human-headed
dog (or lion?) on a leash. And in 1667 the sculptor Bernini used
an Egyptian feature in mounting an already ancient obelisk,
originally erected by the Romans in honour of the goddess
Minerva, atop a recognizably Asian elephant, for a monument
to stand before the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra
Minerva. Sixty years later, the architect Giovanni Battista
Vaccarini imitated Bernini: he purloined a pink marble obelisk,
made in Aswan and up to then a finishing post for races in the
circus of the Italian town of Catania, and mounted it on an ele-
James V. Lafferty’s
elephant-shaped phant carved from volcanic tufa in the Roman era. The monu-
building, affection- ment’s nickname in the Sicilian language is ‘Liotru’, a reference
ately known as
‘Lucy’, Margate
to Elidoros, a heretical eighth-century apostate and wizard who
City, New Jersey. sought, through magic, to make the stony elephant walk. As

76
one website drily notes, ‘There’s no evidence that his attempts
met with any success.’ But it remains the centrepiece of
Catania’s Piazza Duomo.
A little further south, the Sudan has contributed some early,
sketchy engravings, an evidently domesticated and adorned ele-
phant on the frieze of the Lion Temple at Musaw-warat (first
century ad), and the intriguing, blocky ‘elephant colossus’ in
red sandstone at the same place. (This house-sized statue is
something of a precursor, perhaps, to more whimsical modern
‘elephant buildings’, like the Lucy Hotel built in South Atlantic
City in the 1880s by Philadelphia engineer and speculator James
V. Lafferty, and Bangkok’s ‘Chang’ – Thai for elephant – build-
ing.) Clearly the elephant acted as a symbol of royal power and
prestige, though whether it was revered amongst the Sudanese
in any religious fashion remains unclear.
Sub-Saharan Africa to some extent continued the traditions
of honouring and depicting elephants begun by the Stone Age
ancients, though more recent African art is overwhelmingly
anthropocentric. There are vastly fewer free-standing animal
figures than human, though animal motifs are ubiquitously fea-
tured on human figurines and ritual objects. Elephant motifs
appear on stools and masks, flywhisks and drums, tobacco
pipes and calabashes. This is an aspect neglected by most
accounts: Richard Carrington’s 1958 classic Elephants offers a
few pages, but only to be disparaging of the customary tales of
elephants as ‘rather pointless and inconsequential’ and illustra-
tive of ‘the childlike naïveté of the African mind’.7 Even Martin
Meredith’s comprehensive-sounding book, The African Elephant:
A Biography, contains scarcely a word about Africans’ own
cultural attitudes towards elephants before European coloniza-
tion. One has to turn to Albert Jeannin’s L’Eléphant d’Afrique for
a more comprehensive survey.

78
 Elephants, unsurprisingly, often symbolized power. Doran
Ross, in a catalogue for an exhibition, Elephant, held at the
University of California’s Fowler Museum in 1992, notes that
some forty African cultures use elephant imagery. Many of their
ritualistic significances remain jealously hidden from outsiders
even today, as Canadian filmmaker Douglas Curran has noted
of the great ceremonies of Malawi’s Nyau people. One ceremony
is dominated by a four-man elephant figure – the ‘elephant with
four hearts’, it’s called – and Curran rather despondently muses
that even as the full meaning remains obscure, the culture of the
Nyau (meaning ‘mask’) is itself on the verge of annihilation in
today’s globalizing world.8
We know some things. Not unlike the Buddhists, some
Africans believed that their chiefs were reincarnated as ele-
phants. At Igbo Ukwu in Nigeria in the tenth century the
leader was buried with his feet resting on elephant tusks. For
various clans, the elephant became a totem and the clans took
their name: the Ndovu among the Bapimbwe in Tanzania, the
Ndlovu in Zimbabwe. The Zulu chieftains, from Shaka in the
early nineteenth century onwards, have styled themselves
‘Great Elephant’. To this day, the Lozi of northern Zambia
carry their king to coronation on a multi-oared boat, the nalik-
wanda, adorned with an elephant figure. In West Africa,
thrones and altars might be flanked by carved or plain ele-
phant tusks. One of the Ashanti or Asante of Ghana royalty’s
main insignia was the Golden Elephant’s Tail (Sika mmara).
Leather from elephant skin might be sewn into the soles of
Danhome kings’ sandals, to impart their bo or spiritual power
as evoked by art. There is no record of Africans taming ele-
phants until the twentieth century (though one ivory carving
seems to show a king astride one). But if you couldn’t sit on a
real jumbo, you could at least sit on a carving: the asantahene,

79
Nigerian bronze
group.

Wooden Benin
hip-mask; the
trunk ends in a
human hand.

Wood carving
by an unknown
Makonde artist,
northern
Mozambique.
Asante kings, alone were permitted to perch on a wooden stool
carved as an elephant.
(This sort of thing was not confined to Africa: one
Romualdus carved a throne for Bishop Urso of Canosa in the
eleventh century, ornamented in the Byzantine style, which was
supported by two elephants. Poor ‘Sulayman’ was an elephant
given by John iii of Portugal to the upcoming Austro-Hungarian
emperor Maximilian in 1552. Having endured a gruelling trek
from Genoa to Vienna, Sulayman died exhausted a year later,
and then suffered a further indignity: two of his leg bones and a
shoulder blade were fashioned by the mayor of Vienna into a
gruesome chair, exhibited at the Benedictine chapter house in
Krems Cathedral.)
Though rare, examples of carved elephants from pre-colonial
Africa do exist. One unusual bronze group from Nigeria consists
of two men with handaxes following or herding two bug-like
little elephants with hands on the ends of their trunks – possibly
intended for sacrifice. In the Hamburg Museum is an 8-inch- (20
cm-) high waist mask from Benin. It is a stylized elephant face
with a hand at the trunk’s tip, symbolizing its dexterity. Many
parts of the continent lack a long tradition of sculpture, and we
have to come down to the modern period, when the whole
concept of an independent ‘African art’ becomes problematic.
African artists and Picasso, for example, are variously said to
have been borrowing from each other. Some recent sculpture,
then, seems remarkably Cubist or Surrealist, though it often
draws also on local folklores. Increasingly, what were once inno-
vative motifs created by excellent individual sculptors (at one
point in the 1990s, three of the four greatest stone sculptors in
the world were said to be Zimbabwean Shona artists) shade off
into the derivative, mass-produced little soapstone and wood
carvings sold to tourists along Africa’s roadsides.

81
A fantasial elephant For a long time after the implosion of the Roman Empire, as
from a late-12th-
century bestiary.
we’ve already noted, Europe lost much of its global contact, and
at least as far as the elephant was concerned fell into a strangely
timeless zone of ignorance. Depictions of elephants in bestiaries,
illuminated manuscripts and cathedral sculptures through the

82
 The unusually
accurate depiction
of the elephant
given by Louis ix
of France to
Henry iii of
England in 1254/5
for his menagerie
in the Tower of
London, was
apparently drawn
from the life by
Matthew Paris,
though there are
different versions.
This watercolour
is from the
Chronica Maiora.

Middle Ages become conventionalized into anatomically inac-

curate fantasy creatures – a far cry from the exquisitely observed
Roman mosaics from Tunisia or Sicily, say, which included ele-
phants fighting lions and crossing man-made trellis bridges. The
second-century Physiologus, widely disseminated for more than
a millennium, depicts elephants with tusks like a boar’s, droopy
trumpet-like trunks and bodies like cattle or horses. (According
to the text, they couldn’t breed without eating mandrake fruit.)
This European image seems drawn from more ancient Northern An absurd repre-
sources, such as the Gunderstrup Cauldron from Denmark. Its sentation of Hanno,
with Emanuel i of
fantastical spotted elephants in beaten silver and gold plate lope Portugal (1469–
along above some bird-headed, winged and taloned lion-like 1521) precariously
mounted. Hanno
creatures. This crudely drawn, bovine-hoofed and trumpet- was given away to
trunked ‘elephant’ was slavishly copied down the centuries, as in Pope Leo x in 1515.
a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript showing two compla-
cent, donkey-sized elephants being bloodily speared in the chest
by armoured riders, and a rather smug fourteenth-century carv-
ing loftily adorning Reims Cathedral (the elephant was a com-
mon motif amongst the stonemasons of Gothic churches). The

83
Martin Schöngauer’s
famous engraving
of 1480.

latter, at least, now has decent elephantine feet and ears clearly
derived from an Asian exemplar.
Indeed, as the first individual elephants, usually gifts
amongst kings, began to reappear in central and western
Europe, more anatomically accurate depictions followed. One
was that by Johannes de Cuba of Strasbourg, illustrating the
‘Horus Sanitatis’ of 1483; another was by Leonardo da Vinci. At
the same time – even as the famous emperor Akbar in India was
commissioning miniature battle scenes involving highly accu-
rate and colourfully adorned elephants with slightly but delib-
erately caricatured features – European illustrators seemed to
embark on another convention: an Asian-based but grossly
distorted elephant with an enormous head, lots of fine bristles
and widely spaced eyes looking almost straight ahead. This was
a mode that persisted, despite the increasing evidence of its
inaccuracy, right into the nineteenth century, and indeed into
some modern kitsch.

84
 By and large, however, the explosion of post-Renaissance
empirical science, the increasing presence of actual elephants in
zoos and royal menageries, and burgeoning travel by Europeans
to both Asia and Africa, meant that elephants were ever more
accurately portrayed. The first known dissection of an elephant
in the West occurred in Dundee in 1706: a doctor worked while
militia stopped the crowds going off with bits of the carcass, an
event brought to life in Andrew Drummond’s novel of 2008,
Elephantina. Hundreds of black-and-white etchings and illustra-
tions accompanied the many European hunters’ accounts that
emerged from colonial explorations. Once it became clear in the
Two examples of
nineteenth century that elephants were being shot to the point modern kitsch,
of extinction, painting pictures of them increasingly became an showing African
and European
act of tribute and later even a means of fundraising for elephant artistic conven-
conservation. Such wildlife artists have now proliferated into tions.

85
Rembrandt van the hundreds, but none has been more active in promoting the
Rijn, An Elephant,
in the Background
elephant cause through his painting than David Shepherd obe.
a Group of Calling himself in his autobiography The Man Who Loves Giants
Spectators, (the other giants he loves to paint are steam engines), Shepherd
Amsterdam, 1637.
raised £100,000 for conservation just at his 70th birthday bash
in 2001. His oil painting, Wise Old Elephant, must be the single
most widely reproduced elephant portrait of recent times.
If Shepherd represents a near-photographic realist end of
the Western painting spectrum, Salvador Dalí must represent
the opposite: the elephants that march in from the stormy hori-
zon in The Temptation of St Anthony (1946) do so on the most spi-
dery of legs, and bear monumental ‘howdahs’ that are a mix of
motifs taken from Byzantine cathedrals, Botticelli nudes and an
obelisk-like defensive tower. Quite different but just as night-

86
marish is Max Ernst’s The Elephant of Celebes (1921), which is
apparently an assemblage of machine parts, with flexible black
ducting for a trunk and a bull’s head. Evidently at least some
artists’ penchant for the fantastical has remained constant,
from pre-Christian Norseland to ancient Ghana to twentieth-
century Parisian studios. And the elephant always has potential
to inspire a strangely discomforting awe.
Written literature depicting the elephant is, not surprising-
ly, as diverse as painting and sculpture. From the ancient Vedic
epics of early India, through folk tales, parables and adages in
almost every culture, to modern poems and novels, elephants
appear everywhere. Power, magnificence, memory, familial
relations – these are the major motifs. Where African cultures
have handed down wisdoms in their proverbs, using elephants
as an image, the tone is usually respectful at least. Here are
some Shona proverbs from Zimbabwe:

An elephant with calves does not cough up phlegm.

One who is holding a treasure does not expose it to
danger.

An elephant is taboo in public but in private is delicious.

Hypocrites pretend to be of good character but reveal
loose morals under cover of privacy.

An elephant is not burdened by its own tusks.

One should be equal to one’s own responsibilities.

The elephant died on account of the ant.

A small habit, left uncontrolled, can harm the whole
community.9

87
A Malawian friend told me this one: From the back of an elephant
you cannot see the dew – meaning, don’t lose the bigger picture in
attention to trivial detail. There are hundreds more examples,
but here’s the most famous of all, applicable to so many situa-
tions and so widespread in Africa that its origins are lost: When
two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
There are such proverbs in all cultures. An Indian one: Only
an elephant can bear an elephant’s load. From Sri Lanka: The ele-
phant does not see with its own eyes how big it is and Lost opportu-
nities cannot be drawn back even by the might of elephants. From
Italy: Even if your enemy is an ant, see in him an elephant. And of
course the us adage, ‘See the elephant in the room’ – that which
is ignored but ultimately unavoidable. I recently heard Al Gore
use this with reference to global warming sceptics.
But elephants are also often seen as a threat, especially
when, as in many parts of Africa and Asia, the local humans are
none too well equipped to fend them off. Some of this fearful-
ness is conveyed by this section of a Nigerian Yoruba poem,
‘The Elephant’, written by E. A. Babalola in somewhat archaic
English in 1954:

He breathes gracefully and with dignity.

He walks gracefully and with dignity.
He is distinguished by his bulky tail.
To tie him to a stake is impossible.
The Oba [chieftain] who will tie him so is still to reign.
In the jungle, as well as in the bush,
He makes a fire to warm himself and feels at home.
The treading of a single elephant
Makes all the forest trees both big and small
To shake from their top to their very roots.
His is ne’er the shame of suffering hunger

88
 In his forest home; for he wards that off
By letting loose his anger on the forest trees,
And thus to them he proudly shifts the shame.10

The elephant could also be depicted as lacking in a certain

acuity. The Duiker is frequently said to have outwitted the
giant. Another common African folk tale (parallelled, interest-
ingly, by similar stories from India) tells of how the Hare tricked
the Elephant out of being elected King of the Animals. As Hare’s
village happened to be on the way to the gathering-place for the
great election, he hung about until Elephant came through.
Hare collapsed on the ground, all bulging eyes and racked
breath, barely able to croak out a request that the Elephant
carry him to the meeting. Elephant, naturally compassionate,
lifted Hare onto his back. When they reached the gathering,
Hare’s illness instantly vanished, he preened and waved to the
crowds – and since it was he who rode even above the mightiest
of beasts, Hare was the one who was invested with the title.
Such tales bear endless repetition: just one, ‘Why Elephant and
Hyena Live Far From People’, is retold by Alexander McCall
Smith, better known for quirky Botswana-set detective novels.11
Other traditional oral literature could take a more compas-
sionate view. A Hurutshe poem from northern South Africa is a
remarkable reversal of the usual stereotypes and a feeling of real
identity with the elephant, who narrates the poem:

I’m the big one of the mother of trees,

The big one eating trees,
Picker of leaves,
Big-grain-basket of the hyena’s place,
Worm with the big appetite,
Digger of trees:

89
The Syrischer
Maler woodcut
print, Syria,
c. 1354, illustrating
an originally
Indian folktale of
Fairuz the Hare
and the Elephant.

Let me dig the shepherd’s tree and the elandsboontjie.

I’m the big one of the mother of trees.
I’m the elephant, kin to mankind,
Hence I regard mankind’s ways with fear;
And so, when I kill one, I bury him, like people do,
And I stay unmarried, like people do,
And I rub on medicine, like people do.
I’m the big one of the mother of trees,
Smasher of trees.12

Alternatively, they could be commemorated as a resource, as in

this verse from a traditional African song:

Hunter of elephants, take your bow!

In the forest where nothing passes by but you,
Hunter! Lift your head, glide, run, leap and walk.
Your meat lies before you, an immense slab of meat,

90
 Meat that walks like a mountain,
Meat that makes the heart rejoice.
Meat you’ll roast in your hearth,
Meat in which you’ll sink your teeth,
Beautiful, red meat whose blood is drunk steaming . . . 13

This is at least celebratory. The literature of another kind of

hunter altogether – the European ‘sportsman’ and ivory hunter
– was murderous. These gentlemen spawned an extensive genre
of hunting literature, the conventions of which fed off each
other until by the late nineteenth century a major publishing
industry had developed around the genre. Many accounts
related the endless slaughter of Africa’s elephants. William
Finaughty, William Cornwallis Harris, Roualeyn Cumming,
Arthur Neumann, Frederick Courteney Selous – these were
among the names all but revered by subsequent hunters. They
established the style of the genre. They made a virtue of their
apparent roughness and routinely expressed humbleness at
the shortcomings of their literary skills, but in fact were often
canny writers who knew exactly what they were doing. The
following passage from Neumann’s Elephant Hunting in East
Equatorial Africa (1898) must serve as an example of their kind
of prose, and of the militaristic precision with which they
narrated their hunts:

The breeze being happily favourable for once, I got up

close without much difficulty, and made out two or three
enormous bulls standing together. One faced me, another,
whose tusks (from the glimpse I got) seemed as good,
stood broadside on. By great good luck I could see the
vulnerable part of his ribs, just behind his shoulder,
through a little opening among the leaves, etc., and was able

91
An elephant hunt
in Brazza, Congo,
in 1887.

to get a shot by kneeling. Following, as they disappeared

instantly after I fired, there was just a colour of blood (a
very spot or two only); and, though I felt positive my aim
had been true, I began to fear another failure. But, just

92
 after, he was heard ahead, and a little way on we came up
to him standing in a little bare place. I gave him two more
shots and he toppled over.14

And you will find screeds more of this depressing, essentially

uninformative stuff, leavened only by observations about local
peoples and customs in the explorer mode. By the time of
Neumann’s writing, though, a consciousness that other opin-
ions were current is palpable, and these hunter-writers are often
quite defensive about their task. But many features of their style
continue to make their presence felt in more recent hunting lit-
erature, and even in the self-deprecating, laconic but macho
prose of the newer genre of game-ranger memoirs. Being
chased by an angry elephant is, of course, a staple of such rem-
iniscences, as is the image of the so-called ‘rogue elephant’ –
actually usually suffering from some human-inflicted wound or
something as banal as toothache.
The earliest forays towards scientific collecting amongst some
nineteenth-century ‘sportsmen’ (Selous took home innumerable
‘specimens’ for English museums), their familiarity with the ani-
mals and growing guilt at their own depredations, gradually
transmuted into full-blown ethology or animal-behavioural stud-
ies and conservationists’ accounts, which finally incorporated the
language of ecology and biodiversity. These scientific perspectives
have affected the prose of elephant managers’ and biologists’
more public literary works, though something gung-ho, however
modified by regret, often remains in their general advocacy of
‘culling’ as a management tool.
Another minor literary industry has developed around ele-
phant-focused memoirs, written by those who love African
elephants most: Cynthia Moss, Daphne Sheldrick, the Douglas-
Hamiltons, Richard Leakey, Joyce Poole, Katy Payne, David

93
 Paynter and many others. These have been accompanied by an
explosion of photographic coffee-table books and glossy wildlife
magazines, stimulated at once by the development of ever more
refined photographic equipment and the creation of the touris-
tic wildlife park experience. Not only the tourist brochures, but
also the photographic books have developed generic norms of
their own, to the point of predictability. The photos themselves
often sanitize the realities, concentrating on elephant familial
relations, babies playing with their trunks and being rescued
from mud, close-ups of wrinkled skin, solitary bulls silhouetted
against dusty sunsets, etc., etc. It’s sobering to return to a book
like Peter Beard’s The End of the Game (1965) with its grim assess-
ment of human cruelty: page after page of shocking sepia aerial
photos of elephant corpses, forming almost abstract montages,
are the very antithesis of the colourful, calm, playful spreads that
are the conventions of the coffee-table genre.
Novels about elephants were also spun out of the hunting
genre, and many of them involved hunters. Henry Rider

Edward van Altena’s

photo of American
president Theodore
Roosevelt posing
with his kill ‘some-
where in Africa’,
c. 1909.

94
Haggard’s African-set potboilers, King Solomon’s Mines (1886)
being only the most famous of them, took his character Allan
Quartermain into the heart of elephant country, and established
the norms for most of his successors. Ernest Hemingway was one
such successor writer (though he hunted elephants in Kenya, his
story ‘Hills like White Elephants’ doesn’t actually have anything
to do with the animals). Thriller writer John Gordon-Davis made
a Hemingwayesque ‘Great White Hunter’ the central character in
his popular 1975 novel, Taller than Trees (this being the name of a
bull elephant with which the hunter has an old-fashioned, drawn-
out duel – a translation of the Zulu name ‘Dhlulamiti’, an actual
elephant who once haunted Kruger National Park).
In time, shifts in attitude towards a more compassionate
conservation were also registered in fiction. Wilbur Smith’s
gore- and sex-sodden thrillers, while similar to Davis’s, never-
theless begin to depict a new sensitivity towards elephants, as in
the description of a culling scene in Elephant Song (1991). The
man in charge, Johnny Nzou (his name ‘by coincidence’ means
elephant in Shona, though the character is Zulu), expresses a
deep repugnance for the killing his department is forced to
undertake. The novel’s hero, Daniel Armstrong, asks a provoca-
tive question: ‘Your management of your herds of elephants has
been too good . . . Now you have to destroy and waste these
marvellous animals.’ Nzou replies: ‘No, we won’t waste them.
We will recover a great deal of value from their carcasses . . . The
death of these animals will not be a complete abomination.’
Nzou berates Armstrong for using ‘the emotive, slanted lan-
guage of the animal rights groups’, reflecting the tension
between scientific objectivity and rights-based ‘emotionality’
that indeed bedevils the elephant-management debates. But as
the cull comes to an end, Nzou himself bids the dead matriarch
farewell in quasi-religious terms: ‘Go in peace,’ he intones, ‘and

95
forgive us what we have done to your tribe’15 – a gauche sort of
African solidarity. The elephants rapidly disappear from the
story, however, and Smith gets on with his usual globe-trotting
harum-scarum adventures, with little further thought about
conserving charismatic herbivores.
Much more central to the story are the elephants of another
South African novel, Dalene Matthee’s Circles in a Forest (1984).
First written in Afrikaans, the story centres on a traditional
woodcutter family living in an uneasy but deeply respectful
symbiosis with the elephants of South Africa’s Knysna forests.
Before the timber and gold-panning industries devastated these
huge yellow-wood forests in the early twentieth century, a sub-
stantial number of elephants lived there (they later virtually
vanished, and only in 2007 did dna sampling of dung deposits
confirm that five highly secretive individuals survive). Saul
Barnard, the novel’s hero, has a profoundly knowledgeable and
ecologically sensitive relationship with the forest and its huge
inhabitants, especially the greatest bull, Old Foot, and this
rather moving story narrates his largely futile attempts to save
it all from over-exploitation and death.

Since that first day when Old Foot stood in the open, he
had dreamed up an imaginary bond between him and
the elephant. When he became a man and his boyhood
dreams began to blur, a feeling of respect, of an intense
awareness of the old forest patriarch started taking the
place of dreams. No, it was more. There was something
between him and Old Foot that the most sober thinking
could not always staunch.16

Even more central are the elephants of Canadian novelist

Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1998), mentioned earlier. This

96
is a beautifully written and sophisticated, if not wholly convinc-
ing, attempt to relate the world from the elephant’s point of
view, imagining a whole elephant history and culture, with its
independent language, naming practices and memories trans-
mitted down the generations. But it plays dangerously along that
borderline where anthropomorphism – always a sticky point for
the more scientific types – spills over into the improbable.
The elephant-as-speaker is more generally encountered in
children’s literature, where such fantasies are, for some reason,
regarded as more legitimate. Of this literature there is a such
an elephantine amount, from Disney’s Dumbo to Dr Seuss’s
Horton to A. A. Milne’s elusive heffalump, that I’ll not even
attempt to survey it here. But we can’t pass over Babar, one of
the most famous of all animal characters, and surely the most
popular fictional elephant. Created in French by Jean du
Brunhoff in 1931, the little elephant, after witnessing his moth-
er’s slaughter in Africa, finds his way to Paris, imbibes all the
treasures of French civilization, including his trademark green
outfit, and returns to Africa to persuade all his animal friends
(literally) to follow suit. De Brunhoff wrote half a dozen stories
before his premature death at the age of 37; his son Laurent has
continued the line with at least twenty more since 1946. A
movie was made in 1989; a tv series ran to 78 episodes and was
screened in 150 countries; 12 million copies of the books have
been sold; you can visit an online Babar Museum; and some-
one estimated that every second Japanese woman under 30
owns a Babar artefact. Babar-inspired music was composed by
Francis Poulenc, amongst others. Most recently, Raphael
Mostert, previously best known for music using Tibetan
‘singing’ bowls, has produced an opera for children based on
the 1936 Travels with Babar, the second of the books (it pre-
mieres in 2008).

97
Babar the elephant, Babar is, in short, a household name, though you won’t
created by Jean du
Brunhoff.
learn anything about real elephants from him. Some critics –
the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman for one – have condemned
the Babar series as being politically offensive beneath its charm-
ing surface, foreshadowing if not justifying the ideology of neo-
colonialism. Laurent de Brunhoff himself recognized this when
he declined to reissue one of his father’s more youthful, poten-
tially racist stories. But Babar has been adopted by almost every-
one else. The ever popular Enid Blyton produced an abridged
version of the early stories in the middle of the Second World
War: ‘Enemy action’, her editor noted, ‘while destroying many
less desirable records, has reduced to ashes a large proportion of

98
those delightfully coloured sheets in which the genius of Jean de
Brunhoff and the skill of the colour-printer had combined to
immortalize his career. But Babar is not easy to blitz.’17 Isabelle
Chevrel, a lecturer at the University of Rennes, probably speaks
for millions: Babar ‘belongs to the universe of children through
the innocence of his outlook and the supple roundness of his
shape . . . His world is one of love and wisdom, poetry and nos-
talgia. It is closed, rich and reassuring.’18 In the most recent
incarnation, the rotund suited creature is Babar le p’tit ecolo –
the little environmentalist, trying to make the world greener by
avoiding deodorants.
To return to the world of adults, many more elephant nov-
els exist, but the most frequently mentioned and anthologized
has to be Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven (originally Les
Racines du ciel, 1956, written in French, though Gary was born
in Lithuania). John Huston made a film of it in 1958. It’s a curi-
ous tale, set in French Equatorial Africa at that time when the
arrogance of hunting was clashing with new protectionist
movements, and at times seems almost a kind of existentialist
meditation rather than an elephant adventure. Morel, the
hero, having failed to make headway with a petition to save
the elephants, embarks on a crusade of low-grade terrorism to
protect the precious animals against ivory poachers and
hunters, getting mixed up with political rebels as he does so.
Elephants, Morel tells a barmaid at one point, were ‘the very
image of immense liberty’. When he was a miserable prisoner
of war in Germany, he goes on, he ‘tried to think of those big
animals marching irresistibly through the open spaces of
Africa, and it made us feel better’. This doesn’t quite gel with
what Gary wrote in an introduction to the 1964 Time-Life
reprint, but he nevertheless says a lot about the power of
elephant lore:

99
 . . . there has hardly been a critic who has not referred to
The Roots of Heaven as a symbolic novel. I can only state
firmly and rather hopelessly that it is nothing of the
sort. It has been said that my elephants are really sym-
bols of freedom, of African independence. Or that they
are the last individuals threatened with extinction in
our collective, mechanized, totalitarian society. Or that
these almost mythical beasts evoke in this atheistical
age an infinitely bigger and more powerful Presence. Or,
then again, that they are an allegory of mankind itself
menaced with nuclear extinction. There is almost no
limit to what you can make an elephant stand for, but if
the image of this lovable pachyderm thus becomes for
each of us a sort of Rorschach test – which was exactly
my intention – this does not make him in the least sym-
bolic. It only goes to prove that each of us carries in his
soul and mind a different notion of what is essential to
our survival, a different longing and a personal inter-
pretation, in the largest sense, of what life preservation
is about.19

The Roots of Heaven won the coveted Prix Goncourt, and

influenced at least some subsequent novels: Hammond Innes’s
The Big Footprints (1977), though set in the semi-desert of north-
ern Kenya, reads very much like a less philosophical version of
Gary’s novel.
And of course in innumerable, unlisted examples that one
will find only by pleasurable accident, the elephant will be used Among innumer-
able novels, Jules
as a metaphor for something else. Here are just three examples Verne’s Cinq
from famous novels. In Les Misérables Victor Hugo described Semaines en Balon
(1863) features an
the people of Paris building ‘an elephant forty feet high, made elephant dragging
of scaffolding covered with masonry, carrying on its back a his balloon along.

101
tower resembling a house’, which stood as some ‘sort of symbol
of the popular force’.20 Charles Dickens, in his great industrial-
age critique Hard Times, described how the ‘piston of the
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the
head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’;21 and in
Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, a circus elephant is one character’s
image of constriction: ‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its
foot chained.’22
I have yet to find many novels dealing with elephants from
Asia, although, given that India produces vast amounts of
printed material, they surely exist in numbers. Among recent
publications, a novel entitled Ashes for the Elephant God, by
one Vijaya Shartz, has more to do with Ganesh than with ele-
phants as such; Ashok Mathur’s Once Upon an Elephant
depicts the insertion of Ganesh worship into modern Indian
immigrant communities in Canada; and Rajikha Rao’s The
Elephant and the Maruti is premised on an accidental collision
between an elephant and a Maruti car, though again the ani-
mals aren’t central. (The best-advertised Indian text at the
time of writing is a non-fiction survey of modern India by
novelist Shashi Tharoor, tellingly entitled The Elephant, the
Tiger and the Cell-Phone.)
There is, however, a wonderful story in verse by Vikram
Seth, best known for his gargantuan novel A Suitable Boy. It’s a
modern folk tale in rhyming couplets, in which a community
of talking animals, led by the Tragopan – a species of pheasant
– invade the office of the local human bigwig to protest against
the planned building of a dam. There’s a scuffle; the Tragopan
dies tragically; and the elephant does little more than pour a
pot of hot tea over the Great Bigshot. The tale deliberately
refrains from pushing a single moral, though the ecological
sensitivity is clear enough, and the elephant mourns that man

102
 Stamps bear
elephant images
from the world
over.

is paradoxically both ‘mild and vicious’, both ‘sane and mad’,

ravaging the world in a state of ‘uneasy selfishness’.23
There are any number of poems depicting the elephant,
from the earliest Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Rig
Veda, to Heathcote Williams’s illustrated eulogy. Few surveys
of elephants omit Jonathan Swift’s quip about imaginative

103
cartographers popping in an elephant ‘for want of towns’ to fill
an empty space, or John Donne’s verse in The Progress of the
Soul about ‘Nature’s master-peece, an Elephant, The onely
harmlesse great thing’. Edward Lear’s elephant portrait from
‘An Animal Alphabet’ is of course irresistible, just because it is
so inconsequential:

The Enthusiastic Elephant,

who ferried himself across the water with the
Kitchen Poker and a New Pair of Ear-rings.

But here are two less well-known, yet more substantial,

southern African examples. Both take as their background the
worldwide destruction of the elephant and its ultimate depend-
ency on the whims of humans. Harold Farmer wrote his poem
‘Absence of Elephants’ in Zimbabwe; given the renewed
upsurge in elephant-poaching there, it’s unhappily prescient.

Poems about elephants are better than elephants.

Survival, what’s that? The uprooting of trees, who cares?
The slow, residual thickening of the forest floor
with the accumulated detritus of elephants,
the harried, panicky ants staring at logs in their path,
the abrupt awakening of owls by crashing tusks,
the collaboration upsetting the repose of the river,
are only the outward and visible signs of the poem.

The poem in the elephant is the breath of the elephant.

Do elephants breathe? We never think of it like that,
of the imperceptible suspiration of lesser beings.
The elephants march through stanzas, cantos, epics.
They dash their feet against the glossy, black boards

104
 of continental circuses. ‘Ah!’ the crowd cries.
They take their place in the stone carvings of St Jerome,
and breathe a soft undertone to the sighs of worshippers.

The elephant is minister to the soul’s grandeur . . . 24

Rather more amusing, but no less disturbing in its implications,

is South African poet Douglas Livingstone’s ‘One Elephant’:

About that time arose one elephant

from all the herd who stopped and cleared his throat
and said: I can’t for all the world at all
remember what it was I had to say;
I only know it was of great importance.

He shook his ears; looked puzzled; slapped himself

with gusto on the back and raised the dust;
shifted capacious businessman’s hindquarters
in their ill-fitting pants; harrumphed and glared
at the innocent thorn trees – his audience.

Ah yes! There comes a time when one commits,

despite oneself, the ultimate! And sick
of selfish beasts, their egos and their stench,
their cunning cruelty, destructivity,
one turns, despite oneself, grimly to Man . . . 25

It’s most fitting, perhaps, to end with a sobering extract from

Heathcote Williams’s book Sacred Elephant. He ends his long
poem by asking how seeing the power of a real elephant affects
that age-old question, ‘Who am I?’

105
 In collaboration with their distant disposition,
A sense of their gathered power,
The child’s awareness expands,
Before its attention is turned away
From the animal to the machine;
Before its passage is forced into a man-made society
With its elephantine surrogates:
Tower-blocks, juggernauts and trampling multinationals,
Monster markets, jumbo jets, and motorways . . .
Before it is crushed by the elephantiasis of technology,
Where there is less and less room for any mammals
Larger than rats.
And where, henceforth, the elephant may exist
Only in a scratched nature-film,
A destitute freak in a video zoo . . . 26

Poetry is closely related to music, and elephants feature there,

too – and not only the Thai Elephant Orchestra (we’ll meet them
again in chapter Four). Camille Saint-Saëns most famously incor-
porated the elephant into his Carnival of the Animals, though it
was never performed before the composer’s death in 1921. The
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky collaborated in 1942 with cho-
reographer George Balanchine to produce a ballet for 50 ele-
phants for Balanchine’s circus-owner friend John Ringling North.
Nowadays, any number of more or less obscure music groups
and businesses use the elephant name and image, only a few of
which seem to have the welfare of elephants in mind. Some at
least seem to have chosen the elephant as an icon of strong inde-
pendence: the rock group Japonize Elephants from Bloomington,
Indiana, is led by the idiosyncratically named ‘Emperqq Zerlock’;
the Czech musicians Pocket Elephants decline to submit to any
label that might ‘limit their illimitable souls and music feelings

106
inconveniently’;27 and ‘Elephants in the Room’ deliberately
broaches uncomfortable topics. But there’s no coherence to be
discerned in the welter of other appearances: among bands,
labels and tracks you’ll find elephants in Amsterdam, in the Attic,
and in Love; Baby, Rushing, Frozen, Purple, White Onyx and
Flying Pink elephants. You can fantasize about being ‘Raped by
Elephants’; relax with Hot Elephant Music’s range ‘e.a.s.y.’ (Even
Elephants Are Sometimes Young); or mull over Andrea Shea’s
more politically conscious ‘Where Elephants Weep’, which refers
to the horrific aftermath of Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia.
Clearly here we are venturing – as Heathcote Williams
warned – into that area of mass-produced meaninglessness that
is the advertising industry and related commerce. (One blogger
has even characterized ‘evil advertisers’ as ‘the elephant in the
room’!) Startling imagery is all. Owning a snapshot (or even bet-
ter, posting a home-made video on YouTube) is more satisfying

Music and
elephants often
coincide; O. V.
Schubert of
Cleveland created
this poster for the
‘Original Georgia
Minstrels’ in 1876.

107
than actual experience. What might once have been uniquely
significant examples of shamanistic rock art, like a Bushman
cave painting, or of worshipful religious importance, like
Ganesh in the Far East, have now proliferated through the touris-
tic marketplaces into millions of cheap commercial baubles. I
can go into the shop at my local Addo Elephant National Park,
for example, and buy elephant images in the form of keyrings,
mugs, t-shirts, caps, writing paper, postcards, postage stamps or
dvds, and figurines in blown glass, ceramic, grass, paper, wood,
soapstone, steel, batik, watercolour or oil paint.
Even where elephants have never trodden earth, they pop up
everywhere in advertising – nowhere more than in the us. The
symbol of the Republican Party is only the most obvious one.
Ironically, the same man invented the symbols for both main
parties. Thomas Nast, in a cartoon that appeared in Harper’s
Weekly in 1874, drew a donkey clothed in a lion’s skin, scaring
away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the ele-
phant, was labelled ‘The Republican Vote’. That’s all it took for
the elephant to remain associated with the Republican Party.
Now, of course, they claim that it means strength and dignity.
Such associations are used in every imaginable field today.
Just in my own area, I’ve noticed elephant symbolism used to
push cement, a transport company, an estate agent, coach tours,
an ale and heavy lifting equipment. The Elephanteria website lists
dozens of uses of elephant imagery in advertising anything from
printers to carpets, from silent floors to courier services – never
advertising elephants, of course, but playing on the stereotypical
attributes of flawless memory, strength, weight and reliability.28
Elephants, for obvious reasons, are often associated with
enormous appetites, and are therefore used to advertise restau-
rants. Badly built statues of elephants clutter the entrances or
interiors of diners across the United States, from ‘Elephant Walk’

108
 ‘Third-term panic’:
Thomas Nast’s
cartoon of 1874
inaugurated the
elephant and
donkey symbols
for the main
American political
parties, to be
reinforced by
hundreds of
cartoons down
to the present.

in Boston to a pink extravagance in Shelton, Florida. Another

pink elephant, this one plastic, adorns the Jumbo Liquor Store
in Johannesburg’s Hillbrow area, and is lampooned in Ivan
Vladislavić ’s novel The Restless Supermarket: its ‘eyes like saucers,
with painted pupils black as draughtsmen rattling in them’, its
‘pointed ears [that] stood on end like wistful wings’. As the novel
opens, a drunk is trying to mount its ‘shocking pink buttocks’.29
No one seems quite sure why ‘pink elephants’ became associat-
ed with the hallucinations of drunkenness, but at least by 1913
Jack London could write in John Barleycorn:

There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is

the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose
brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks gener-
ously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the
gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice
and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes
in funny papers.

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 In 1932 Guy Lombardo had a popular hit with the song ‘Pink
Elephants’, composed by Mort Dixon and Harry Woods:

Pink elephants on the table.

Pink elephants on the chair.
Pink elephants on the ceiling,
Pink elephants ev’rywhere.
Now I’m through making whoopee,
Elephantine I raised my hand and swore
strength for a That I never intend to see
cement company.
(The frond just Those pink elephants any more.
discernible at the
top is Portulacaria,
a favourite elephant
As one commentator pointed out: ‘It should be noted that the
food.) song also referred to a lavender alligator, a purple cow, a polka-
dot boa constrictor, a beetle, a monkey, and a whippoorwill.
But it was the pink elephant that stuck.’30 Hence, probably,
sundry beers feature elephants: amongst them Heiffer’s from
the us, Tusker from Kenya, Rogue from South Africa,
Windhoek from Namibia, Elephant Stout from Singapore, Malt
Liquor from Denmark. More sweetly, a well-known tv advert
narrated how a little Indian boy created an ‘elephant tower’,
using the elephants’ alleged desire to drink Pepsi.
Apart from the contemporary cult of ‘branding’, film is
undoubtedly the most powerful medium of our time. Elephants
feature regularly in television advertising, too, at least in my
part of the world in southern Africa, where real elephants are
readily available for photoshoots. And, naturally, elephants
have been an attractive subject, or just an accoutrement for
screen goddesses and macho heroes alike, almost ever since film
was possible. One website lists well over a hundred elephant
films produced up to 2004, the earliest being Frank Melville’s
Trick Elephant of 1899.31 This was made to sell Brothers’s and

110
Forepaugh’s circus, and showed an elephant walking over the
prostrate bodies of two ponies. Such clips gave way to feature
films. A quasi-documentary film by Merian C. Cooper and
Ernest Schoedak, Chang (1927), set in Thailand, substituted
rampaging elephants for the usual barbarian hordes: the ani-
mals end up captured and tamed. Robert Flaherty’s Elephant
Boy (1937) was based on Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘Toomai’ from
The Jungle Book. There was the 1954 Elephant Walk, featuring
the sultry Elizabeth Taylor as wife of a tea baron in Ceylon, her
illicit love playing out against the backdrop of ‘the hovering,
ominous menace of the hostile elephants’ who have a ‘grudge’
against the plantation.32 More ecologically sensitive to elephants
was one of Clint Eastwood’s less well-known directing-acting
efforts, the 1990 White Hunter, Black Heart. Based on a book
by Peter Viertel, it’s a thinly disguised account of director
John Huston and his making of The African Queen in 1951. In
Eastwood’s retelling, the director character is consumed by a
desire to kill a particular tusker; he eventually decides not to
shoot it, but with tragic results. Both films were shot in

Amarula Cream
liqueurs are made
from marula fruits,
which are also
choice elephant
snacks.

111
 Zimbabwe, and Eastwood reused the same little steamboat that
Huston had. The tusker was ‘acted’ by a wild elephant living in
Matusadona National Park in the north of the country.
And of course there are dozens of children’s films and animat-
ed cartoons, following the lead of Disney’s Dumbo of 1941. David
Lynch’s black-and-white film Elephant Man (1980), incidentally,
had nothing to do with elephants, beyond the allegedly elephant-
like appearance of poor John (in real life Joseph) Merrick’s
hideously wrinkled and bulbous medical condition, and the
appalling manner in which he was displayed as a circus freak.
India produces more feature films than any other nation on
earth, so it’s not surprising to find elephantine examples among
them. They often appeared in earlier mythological or historical
movies, but gained greater prominence in 1971, in Hathi Mera
Sathi (‘My Companion the Elephant’). The young protagonist
Raju, played by Rajesh Khanna, is repeatedly rescued by ele-
phants – they chase off a leopard, engineer the central love-
match by towing a broken-down car, help Raju work his way out
of poverty by performing stunts, fetch a doctor, and one finally
sacrifices its life by taking a bullet intended for Raju.33 A cele-
brated filmaker from Kerala, N. Balan, made a film called The
Eighteenth Elephant (2003), which lamented the destruction of
his region’s elephants. And we can end a little heart-warmed by
the film Larger Than Life (1996), in which a vagrant acquires an
elephant and walks it home from America to Thailand.
A stylized ‘T’ from
Kipling’s Jungle Finally, there are documentaries now too numerous to
Book. encompass here. Cynthia Moss’s films of Echo of the Elephants,
the matriarch of her Kenyan study, have to count as hugely
influential pioneers in the field. There has been Africa: Kingdom
of the Elephants, National Geographic’s Reflections on Elephants
and Elephant Rage, David Malakoff ’s The Urban Elephant (about
Bangkok’s elephant orphans), Angela Bassett’s Whispers: An

112
 A window card for
the motion
picture, derived
from Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s
famous Tarzan
novel, c. 1921.

Elephant’s Tale, and many others. Now the techniques of the

genre have become so sophisticated that we can view an ele-
phant baby alive in its mother’s womb; or, in another venture,
from a camera hidden in a strategically placed elephant turd (at
least one bull sensed a problem and booted the offending instru-
ment into the nearby river). Probably no medium has been so
influential in forming environmental attitudes globally, but I
know of no study of elephant documentaries that might begin to
gauge this. And even if we can know and understand elephants
through film better than ever before, nothing can substitute for
seeing them in person, as it were, in their natural spaces, or at
least such spaces as we have contrived to leave to them. So in the
final chapters we can turn from art back to life, and explore the
realities of elephant lives and conservation today.

113
4 Using Elephants

‘An elephant mounted by a king is radiant; a king mounted on

an elephant is resplendent . . . Thus elephants should be pro-
tected like the life of a king.’1
So ran an early Indian book of elephant lore. The symbiosis
between elephant and ruler implied there is not necessarily
untrue, but humans have generally protected elephants only in
order to use them in some way, and have generally used them
only in order to glorify themselves. This has, broadly speaking,
not been to the elephants’ benefit: panic captures, hurtful tam-
ing, terror in the front line of battles, appalling sea journeys,
stifling cages, confrontations with tigers, demeaning perform-
ances in unnatural postures, the drudgery of logging operations
– this has been the lot of most captive elephants. Little of this
has visibly bettered the fate of those few left in the wild. Perhaps
only in the modern era of conservation have those glorified
zoos, the game reserves, allowed elephants to approximate a
natural life while still earning their human captors revenue.
Not that compassion and caring have been totally absent
from human–elephant relations. Deep mutual affection, admi-
ration, even reverence, is a persistent thread in a 5,000-year-old
history – but there is almost always the underbelly of chains
and cages, the sharp ankush or bullhook tugging at ear or foot
to direct movement, the final glum submission.

114
 On the ninth day of the Desara festival when Hindus honour
their animals, to see an elephant advancing down a New Delhi
street all but invisible under caprisons of extravagant gold,
festooned in damask and copper bells, painted in fantastic
patterns, its tusks ringed in silver – is to wonder whether the
elephant is really being honoured in itself, or is merely being
used as a canvas for human art.
Some uses require an elephant to be both alive and (or then)
dead. When a hunter thrills in his chase – it is almost always
‘his’, testing his manhood and valour by confronting the great-
est of all land mammals – it is only to prove that valour by
killing it. Bits of dead elephant provide the boastful evidence:
ivory carvings, a foot made into an umbrella stand or, in one of

An extravagantly
adorned elephant
with howdah.

115
the more grotesque examples, a whole preserved ear, painted
with a charging elephant, mounted amongst United States
presidents’ memorabilia (see the website tellingly addressed
hailtothechiefs.com). ‘Abysmal kitsch’, one writer called it.
Dead, of course, elephants have always provided meat, hides
and – pre-eminently – ivory. But in this chapter I want to focus
on the utilization of living elephants.
We have evidence of the taming of elephants almost from
the beginning of powerful civilizations: elephants as symbols of
royal and imperial power; as weapons in wars and hunts; as
pack animals, logging workers and bridge-builders; as enter-
tainers in games, zoos and circuses; most recently, as semi-wild
spectacles for tourists. As early as 3000 bc the Egyptians, pre-
sumably using the African elephants that ranged across North
Africa until hunting and the desertification of the Sahara elimi-
nated them, were fashioning hieroglyphs that distinguished
between wild and trained elephants. A Sumerian terracotta
carving representing an elephant with rider dates from 2000
bc. Contemporary with Sumer and Babylon, at Mohenjodharo
and Harappa in Pakistan’s Indus Valley, an advanced urban
civilization was using trade seals carved in steatite. One shows
an elephant clearly bearing a saddle-cloth.
The elephant is unlikely to have played a major role in these
earliest societies. However, by the time the Aryans arrived in
northern India, invading from the steppes of Turkestan in waves
between 2000 and 1700 bc, they found in places a well-devel-
oped culture of elephant taming. This did not include domesti-
cation: there appears never to have been a programme of captive
breeding, losses being replaced by new captures from the still-
extensive wild populations. The evidence surfaces mainly in the
books of the Vedas, a series that continued to be produced
between 1200 and 600 bc, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and

116
the Jataka stories. Prior to the first millennium bc the chronol-
ogy of these books remains obscure and the documentation
occasionally controversial. However, it seems that although the
Aryans retained the horse as their primary animal (the chariot
of their fiery god Indra originally was pulled by horses), they
gradually took over local ‘elephant technology’.
Little wonder that Aryan kings and their successors also
wished to ride the elephant, to incorporate the beast, both
actual and mythological, into their expressions of power. The
Dravidian peoples’ use of the elephant as a war machine was
adopted by the Aryans and by the more powerful and central-
ized kingdoms and republics over the course of the first millen-
nium bc. Very early totemic beliefs combined with new political
power structures; political patronage in turn ensured that the
magnificence of the elephant became central to emerging reli-
gious belief systems.
As the Brahman and Hindu cosmologies evolved, the Aryan
Indra, god of war, thunder and rain, came to be depicted riding
an elephant named Airavata. Elephants were associated with
the beginning of the world. The elephants Mahapadma – ‘great
forest’ – and Saumanasa – ‘keeper of soma, the sacred juice’ –
supported the whole world like two pillars. Elephants also rep-
resented fertility. Conventionally associated with rain-giving
clouds as well as the stormy onset of musth, Indra mutated into
Gajalakshmi – Lakshmi of the elephants. As Stephen Alter
describes her statuesque presence at the temple of Kailash,
Lakshmi ‘emerges out of a lotus, containing the seeds of life
within her, a vision of beauty and perfection, her breasts
swollen, her gestures inviting elephants like clouds pouring
water down on her, ‘an active and essential part of creation’.2
Central to these religious developments was the creation of
such traditional deities as the ever popular Ganesh or Ganesa.

117
So widespread is the worship and presence of Ganesh – from
India to Indonesia, from Cambodia into China – that it’s sur-
prising to learn how late the figure emerged. Moreover, the evo-
lution of Ganesh involves a bizarre transformation of early and
rather malevolent deities known as vinayakas into their exact
opposite. Vedic texts outlined several elephant-related deities,
some of which involved epithets such as Vighnesa and
Vighnesara, derived from vighna, an obstacle. These vinayakas
were in places absorbed into a single, elephant-headed ‘Lord of
Obstacles’ – who became, around the fifth century ad, Ganesh,
the ‘Remover of Obstacles’.
The development of the Ganesh figure was accompanied by
a spreading taboo on the eating of elephant meat in northern
India; both were tied directly to ecological realities. On the one
hand, expanding agricultural societies were facing increased
competition with elephants, and only an elephant-god could be
called upon to defend them (hence Ganesh figures are usually
accompanied by icons of sugarcane or a radish). At the same
time, wild elephant populations were increasingly being divert-
ed to military activities. Raman Sukumar therefore speculates
that marginal societies found it economically more attractive
to capture elephants for sale than to kill them for food or in
defence of crops: the worship of Ganesh was first practised by
the elite and only grudgingly accepted by the general populace.
The ‘religious’ practice may, in short, have started as a power-ploy
designed to make possible continued use of living elephants.3
Hence wherever elephants were tamed, kings and emperors,
many of whom claimed divine rights, rode into ceremony and
battle on their backs in gaudy pomp – a tradition that continued
for another couple of millennia. In some early representations,
it’s hard to say whether the elephants are carrying military
‘towers’ or ‘howdahs’, throne-like seating arrangements, which

118
became increasingly elaborate over time. A fine example is a
painting, in gouache and gold on paper, from Bijapur in ad
1645, depicting the Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah riding his
richly adorned elephant, with his prime minister, a former
Ethiopian slave, behind him. The sultan carries the ankush,
with its one straight and one hooked barb, both the instrument
of training and direction and the symbol of political clout. (But
it also depicts the chains around the elephant’s ankles.) One
such ankush is kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London, made in 1870 for the Maharaja of Jaipur, elaborately
fashioned in gold and set with diamonds and enamel, its two
hooks figured as snakes issuing from an elephant’s mouth.
It was a sign of the shifts in power that in April 1876 the
Prince of Wales would be seen climbing up an elephant’s flank
into a richly gilded howdah in order to proceed with his visit to
imperial India. When the Prince was crowned Edward vii,
Viceroy Lord Curzon organized the 1903 Delhi Durbar in cele-
bration, consciously using a romanticized version of India’s
own elephant pageantry to emphasize British superiority.
Curzon arrived impressively on a tusker adorned with a gold
umbrella – which also, impressively, nearly panicked Lord
Kitchener’s thoroughbred. It was, famously, this pompous
façade that George Orwell mocked in his brilliant essay
‘Shooting an Elephant’.
Another ugly dimension of imperial elephant power was
using them to hunt other animals. This practice has probably
been in existence for as long as tamed elephants have: Plutarch,
in his Indica (c. ad 100), wrote that to hunt mantichores (myth-
ical) and tigers (real), ‘men ride on elephants and shoot down at
them’.4 Better verified records are quite recent. The Mughal
emperor Babur was depicted killing a rhinoceros from elephant-
back in the early 1500s. His successor Akbar (1560–1605)

119
organized huge shoots: one hunt, in 1567, was said to have last-
ed several days, 10,000 soldiers surrounding a zone 60 miles in
diameter. Akbar ranged freely here, killing boars, tigers and
lions with both spear and musket. The tiger hunt also carried
over into British imperial times: Edward, Prince of Wales, wit-
nessed a tiger attacking an elephant while on a hunt, during
which he himself shot indiscriminately at bears and rhinos as
well. Though the practice of hunting with the help of elephants
is usually associated with India, it happened in Africa too.
To use an elephant for hunting, work or warfare obviously
means having to catch it first. Capturing wild animals, each
weighing several tons, is a dangerous and nasty business.
Methods have changed little over the centuries. The earliest
were probably derived from Palaeolithic methods of cornering
mammoths: herd the target into a marshy area and harpoon or
lasso it. This would be done during the rainy season: an ele-
phant trapped in rising water by parties of harpoonists would
have to swim in circles until exhausted enough to be tethered.
Both Africans and Asians are known to have used pitfalls to cap-
ture elephants, but this method often fatally injured the ani-
mals. Methods of lassoing also varied. Lassoing by men on foot
was obviously extremely hazardous; some people, like the pan-
nikians, a Muslim sect in Sri Lanka, made it their speciality.
Lassoing with the help of tame elephants – a process apparent-
ly alluded to by Aristotle in his Historia animalum and called
mela shikar in India – was safer, but also could deal only with
isolated individuals.
Much more efficient, and less lethal, was to harry a small
herd into a staked enclosure, when selected animals could be
drawn off and calmed by being tethered, starved and teamed up
with already tame elephants (koonkies in India). Sometimes,
females in oestrus were used to lure bulls into such traps: the

120
 Always a brutal
business; bagging
a baby elephant
in Ceylon.

historian Arrian (ad 95–175) relates how females were at least

once used to tempt some bulls onto a bridge from which they
could not retreat. Even this process took its toll: animals would
naturally try to escape, counter-attack or try to help each other,
and it has been estimated that for every North African elephant
that reached the Roman arenas, nine died. It is always a stom-
ach-turning process: ‘Babies are wrenched from their mothers,
bulls thrashed by the tame ones if they resist the nooses,
maddened members of the same herd butting each other in a
frantic bid to escape.’5

121
 In Asia, the herding technique or kheddah became more
refined – though it was far from always being successful. Hyder
Ali, a ruler of Mysore, had tried to entrap elephants in India’s
Biligirirangan Hills, but had to leave a chastened monument to
his failure: a stone marker on which he inscribed a curse on any-
one else who tried to capture elephants. Into these same hills
came, in 1873, one G. P. Sanderson, who persuaded British
authorities to let him attempt a kheddah. An initial failure was
followed by a success, which was then emulated throughout
Asia. Sanderson went on to manage kheddahs in Burma, then
returned to Mysore to be appointed ‘Officer in Charge of
Government Elephant Catching Establishment’. In fact, similar
Four elephants
pulling a carriage
methods had been refined by Portuguese and Dutch colonials,
in India, c. 1922. too: figures from just one area of Sri Lanka record, amongst

122
many, 96 elephants captured in a single Dutch kraal in 1666,
270 in 1681, 160 in 1690 and 400 in an English capture in 1797.
Hundreds of elephants must have been exported as a result of
these operations. The last Sri Lanka kheddah occurred in 1950;
there, as in India, it has been superseded by gentler, chemical-
tranquilizer forms of capture.
The taming of a young elephant, once also cruel and injuri-
ous, can take a matter of mere weeks if done with sensitivity.
Further education has also been refined, though modern meth-
ods are only somewhat less soul-destroying than in the past. It
took considerable training to override the elephant’s fear of so
primordial an enemy as a tiger or lion: from the era when sabre-
toothed tigers predated upon mammoth calves, to modern
Botswana, where one pride of lions has specialized in taking
down even mature elephants, the big cats have always been the
elephant’s main predator – man excepted, of course.
Paradoxically, training almost always depends on relationships
of extraordinary closeness between elephant and handler –
mahout in India, oozie in Burma – and a judicious mixture of
rewards with food and goading some 85 known nerve centres
with the ankush; eventually, most commands can be transmit-
ted verbally or by the subtlest of movements of the rider’s body
on the elephant’s shoulders.
Not that this was always effective under battle conditions.
Everybody knows the story of Hannibal and his war elephants,
but in fact he was one of the least successful and significant of
elephant generals. The use of elephants in battle preceded him
by at least a thousand years, mainly in India and China.

Pitiless and powerful are the elephants as a sword . . .

They do not give up their lives easily; elephants have
magnificent bodies. Man or horse will die from an

123
Elephants have ax-blow, but an elephant may survive a hundred ax-blows
been used in sport
from the Roman
in battle. A warrior who abandons an elephant in battle
gladiatorial contest treads the path to hell which lies in wait for the murder-
to modern polo. er of a Brahman . . . Where there are elephants, there is
Two fighting
elephants, Kotah, victory.6
Rajasthan, India,
c. 1720.
So raves one slightly unrealistic early Indian account from the
Vedas, which outlined the basic military unit or patti as consist-
ing of one elephant, a chariot, three horses and five infantry-
men; a typical massed formation might consist of 45 pattis. The
elephants would lead the charge, throwing the enemy into con-
fusion; each elephant, it was said, was worth 6,000 horses.
It was only with the advent of Western encounters with
Asian war elephants, however, that any great detail was docu-
mented. It really began with eyewitness accounts of Alexander
the Great (336–323 bc) and his confrontation with Porus’s Asian
elephant corps in the battle of the Hydaspes. Alexander had

124
briefly encountered elephants at Gaugamela (331 bc); now, five
years on, he even had 100 of his own, though they were not yet
battle-trained. As it happened, even Porus’s 200 elephants
would not save him: Alexander’s troops outflanked them, iso-
lated them, slashed their trunks, targeted their mahouts, and
drove them onto their own troops ‘like ships backing’. Porus
himself, it was said, started to slide from his elephant’s back;
the mahout ordered the elephant to kneel, whereupon so did all
the others, as they had been trained, and so were captured. The
elephant was even said to have tried to draw the spears from the
king’s body, and to defend him against those who tried to strip
his armour.
Despite the elephants’ limited effectiveness, the squabbling
successor warlords who carved Alexander’s ramshackle empire
up between them – notably the Seleucids and the Ptolemies –
continued to use elephants in battle. Perdiccas, the nominal
regent, used elephants to execute some of his opponents by
crushing their heads underfoot. He also attacked Ptolemy on
the Nile, using elephants to tear down palisades, and even try-
ing to use a row of them as a breakwater on the river: they were
washed away, however, and many were eaten by crocodiles.
Inevitably, various generals began to develop anti-elephant
technology; when Cassander besieged Polyperchon in
Megalopolis, a kind of primitive minefield was laid using nail-
studded frames to puncture the elephants’ feet, so immobiliz-
ing them and making them more vulnerable to archers.
Ptolemy did something similar at Gaza, Egypt, when attacked
in 312 bc. The writer Diodorus noted of the elephants that ‘on
smooth and yielding ground they display an irresistible
strength in a direct attack, but on rough and difficult ground
their might is useless because of the tenderness of their feet.’
Hence, though elephants continued to play a part in various

125
struggles, they were seldom decisive, and were used as much to
overawe as actually to attack. This seems to have been the gam-
bit of the famous Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, when he introduced
elephants to Italy, as much later immortalized in verse by
Macaulay:

The Greek shall come against thee,

The conqueror of the east;
Beside him stalks to battle
The huge earth-shaking beast,
The beast on whom the castle
With all its guards doth stand,
The beast who hath between his eyes
The serpent for a hand.

Pyrrhus performed perhaps the longest transport of ele-

phants by sea to date, when in 281 bc he crossed the Adriatic to
Tarentum with twenty animals. Using them, he turned the tide
of battle against the inexperienced Romans at Heraclea, and
again at Apulia in 279 bc. In a final battle at Beneventum, how-
ever, his defeat was said to have been precipitated by a lost or
injured elephant calf driving its mother mad with concern.
Having been turfed out of Italy, Pyrrhus continued to use ele-
phants in various Greek and Spartan adventures, including the
siege of Argos. By this time, the use of elephant-back towers
housing armoured bowmen seems to have been perfected; in
this case, however, the city’s gates were too low to admit them,
and they had to be dismantled and reassembled inside. The
delay was Pyrrhus’ undoing; stunned by a rooftile, he was
decapitated on the spot. Where his body was burned – said the
traveller Pausanias 400 years later – a tomb was erected bearing
relief-carvings of elephants.

126
 Antiochus was another proponent of war elephants. In 275
bc he shocked the unsuspecting Gauls into undignified retreat,
but rebuked his troops: ‘Shame, my men, whose salvation came
through these sixteen beasts. If the novelty of their appearance
had not struck the enemy with panic, where should we have
been?’ When he invaded Syria almost half a century later, he
found his elephants opposed by others. Polybius wrote of the
battle at Raphia:

Only some few of Ptolemy’s elephants came to close

quarters with their opponents, and the men in the towers
on the back of these beasts made a gallant fight of it,
lunging with their pikes (sarissas) at close quarters and
striking each other, while the elephants themselves
fought still more brilliantly, using all their strength in the
encounter and pushing against each other, forehead to
forehead . . . With their tusks firmly interlocked and
entangled they push against each other with all their
might, each trying to force the other to give ground, until
the one who proves the strongest pushes aside the other’s
trunk, and then, when he has once made him turn, he
gores him . . . 7

The result was a truce; as would be learned repeatedly, ele-

phants seldom decided a battle. Antiochus also used elephants
in an ongoing quarrel with the Jews; in the same sphere of oper-
ations, as recorded in i Maccabees, Judas advanced on the
Syrians’ royal pavilion, which was defended by elephants:

The elephants were roused for battle with the juice of

grapes and mulberries. The great beasts were distributed
amonst the phalanxes; behind each were stationed a

127
 thousand men, equipped with coats of chain-mail and
bronze helmets. Five hundred picked horsemen were
also assigned to each animal. These had been stationed
beforehand where the beast was; and wherever it went,
they went with it, never leaving it. Each animal had a
strong wooden turret fastened on its back with a special
harness, by way of protection, and carried four fighting
men as well as an Indian driver.

Judas’s brother Eleazar, mistaking a richly decorated elephant

for the royal one, ran in beneath it and stabbed it through the
belly, but the animal collapsed on top of him and crushed him.
Once Pyrrhus had retreated from Italy, the main regional
conflicts were Roman–Carthaginian. Carthaginian forces from
North Africa had faced Pyrrhus’ elephants in Sicily, and followed
the fashion. Perhaps for the first time, North African elephants
were now captured and trained like their Asian counterparts
(though they had long been hunted). Contrary to popular belief,
they are no less (or more) tractable. A Spartan mercenary,
Henri-Paul Motte,
c. 1890, depicted
the Carthaginians
taking elephants
into the battle of
Zama in 202 bc.

128
 H. Leutemann
dramatically
rendered Hannibal’s
passage through
the Alps in a
coloured wood
engraving, c. 1865.
The truth is, of
course, that no
elephants fell.

Xanthippos, successfully used elephants to hasten the retreat

of a Roman invasion; the Carthaginian generals Hasdrubal,
Hanno and Hamilcar all used elephants, though with mixed
results. Hasdrubal lost a small herd to the Roman Metellus,
who shipped his elephant captives back across the Straits of
Messina on earth-covered rafts. But as H. H. Scullard writes in
his classic study of this period, The Elephant in the Greek and

129
J. H. Williams
escapes from
Burma with his
elephants in 1943,
an illustration from
his book Elephant
Bill (1954).

Roman World, ‘One thing is clear: the Romans apparently decid-

ed that they provided too double-edged a weapon for adoption
in their own army.’8
Taking over the Carthaginians’ invasion of Spain in 221 bc,
the famous Hannibal pushed across the Rhone with 37 ele-
phants, eluded the countering force of Scipio, and embarked on
his renowned Alpine trek over the 8,143-foot (2,450-m) Clapier
Pass. Despite being held up for three snowy days by a landslide,
he crossed into northern Italy without losing a single elephant.
When he joined battle on the River Trebia, however, only seven of
the elephants involved survived. Hannibal fought on, losing more
elephants to cold in the Appenines, but became increasingly

130
besieged in the south of Italy. In a vain effort to relieve him,
Hasdrubal used elephants but, at a battle in the valley of the
Metaurus, they panicked and caused equal havoc to both sides.
The last poor survivors of Hannibal’s Alpine crossing had to be
killed by their own mahouts driving chisels into their necks
with mallets. When the Third Punic War began fifty years later,
the Carthaginians had no elephants at all.
Hannibal’s trek nevertheless remains the classic story of
war-elephant adventure. When in 1943 J. H. Williams – the
famous ‘Elephant Bill’, colonial Burma’s number one elephant
organizer – had to make an epic escape into India with women,
children and elephants ahead of the Japanese invasion, he
explicitly compared his trek across precipitous mountains to
Hannibal’s. In September 1979 some intrepid circus-elephant
owners and their animals even repeated Hannibal’s feat, finding
the descent of the Col de Clapier the most hazardous section.
The Romans, for their part, liked to have some elephants
around, but seldom used them in battle. Julius Caesar was
rumoured to have brought an elephant into Britain (some
thought the word caesar was in fact Moorish for elephant), but
it seems unlikely. Certainly, however, he was escorted back into
Rome with a triumphal retinue of 40 elephants; he, like many of

Elephants on coins
were used by
Julius Caesar and
many other
Romans to convey
power; this shows
Quintus Caecilius
Metellus Pius,
c. 81 bc.

131
his predecessors, had coins minted using elephant motifs as
symbols of imperial power. The main demonstration of Roman
power, however, would be using the hapless elephants in vari-
ous, usually bloody, arena entertainments, rather than in bat-
tle. As Livy succinctly put it: ‘elephantomachae nomen tantum
sine usu fuerunt’ (‘the elephant-fighters were a mere name with-
out practical effect’).
The disappearance of elephants from the post-Roman
European consciousness, as well as the lingering allure of ele-
phants as war-machines, is much later reflected in J.R.R
Tolkien’s fantasy The Lord of the Rings. Sam the hobbit recites a
rather silly poem about ‘oliphaunts’, which have in his society
become entirely mythical. Tolkien doubtless derived the name
from the Middle English olifant or olifaunt, which could mean
both elephant and a horn made from elephant ivory – the most
famous example of which was used (too late to save the battle)
at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in ad 778 by the eponymous
hero of the Chanson de Roland. In Tolkien’s epic, the adventuring
hobbits do later encounter actual oliphaunts and mammoth-
like mûmakil bearing, like their real-life originals, siege-towers
and warriors, with ‘great legs like trees, enormous sail-like ears
spread out, long snout upraised like a huge serpent about to
strike’.9 Tolkien, again echoing the real world, strikes an elegiac
note in the final book of his trilogy about the disappearance
from ‘Middle Earth’ of these vast monsters.
Elephants continued to be used as a vital component of bat-
tle formations in the East, however. The most prominent king of
the second great Persian or Sassanid empire, Shapur ii (ruled ad
309–79), used elephants both against the Romans and to crush a
Christian rebellion at the city of Susa, which he razed to the
ground. When Timur and his Mongols attacked Delhi in 1398,
he faced not only 30,000 Indian foot-soldiers, but a fearsome

132
phalanx of war elephants; he scotched them, however, by load-
ing buffaloes and camels with hay and setting them alight
amongst the elephants, which understandably panicked. Babur
(1483–1530), founder of India’s Mughal dynasty, used elephants
alongside his cavalry, and left a remarkable autobiography in
Turkish, the Baburnama, which included a knowledgeable
chapter on Asian elephants. Babur’s grandson Akbar (ruled
1560–1605) became more famous still for his elephant-taming
skills, claiming to have a God-given gift for handling even bulls
in musth ‘which had killed their drivers and were man-slayers’.
The Akbarnama, written by Abu Fazl, trumpeted his praises:

When India was made illustrious by his blessed advent

[Akbar] gave special attention to elephants, which are
wonderful animals in both form and in ways. If in respect
of size I liken them to a mountain . . . I do not succeed in
my attempt . . . If I compare them in foresight, intelligence
and sagacity to the horse the real thing is not said.10

Akbar inherited, captured and stabled thousands of elephants

in his time. He left also some remarkable painted miniatures of
his elephants in both war and entertainment; he was particu-
larly celebrated for subduing the fortress of Muslim rival Uday-
Singh, Chitor, in 1567 and two years later that of Ranthambhor,
using elephants on both occasions. They were his primary
symbol of power, as Abu Fazl recorded:

The biggest and strongest of the imperial elephants bears

the title of ‘Elephant General’. When he appears at court
adorned with costly caparisons, he is awaited in great
pageantry by a line of elephants and honoured with flutes,
trumpets and cymbals, and a great show of flags . . . 11

133
An elephant
accompanies
warriors to battle
in the Belur-
Halebid stone
relief from the
Hoysala Empire
of southern India,
c. 1200.

War elephant on
a stone relief at
Ankhor Thom,
Cambodia.

Elephants thereafter seemed more prominent amongst the

Mughals as ceremonial accoutrements than as war machines,
right up to the advent of British rule. Further south, in Ceylon
or Sri Lanka, which had supplied elephants to the northern
kings since Alexander’s time, armies also used war elephants at
times. The Ceylonese royal chronicle tells the story of one
Kandula, a war elephant instrumental in fending off attacks

134
from a South Indian Tamil invader, Elala. Kandula, it is said,
head-charged the gates of Elala’s fortress. Temporarily repelled
by red-hot iron balls and boiling pitch, Kandula went off to a
pool to cool his wounds before returning to the attack with
renewed energy, succeeding at last in staving in the doors.
Further east still, Burma (now Myanmar) and neighbouring
countries had a highly developed elephant culture, including
war elephants. Carvings on the walls of Cambodia’s Angkor
Wat, dating from the early twelfth century, show elephants in
battle. In 1283 a Chinese mounted army under Kublai Khan
annihilated the King of Burma’s forces, including routing and
capturing his hundreds of war elephants. The traveller Marco
Polo, who left a vivid account of this battle, also noted how
prominent elephants were in the Chinese Middle Kingdom’s
ceremonials, even though the elephant as wild resident had
long disappeared from almost the whole of China. Polo
described Khan’s massive command post:

Kublai sat in a large wooden structure, carried by four

elephants whose bodies were covered with armour of
thick leather hardened in the fire; the armour, however,
was covered with cloths interwoven with gold. Many
crossbowmen and archers were posted in the structure
and above fluttered the imperial standard . . . 12

South-east Asian leaders persisted in using elephants: as late

as the mid-nineteenth century the king of Siam possessed a
force of 400 battle-trained elephants, clad in hardened leather
and iron-plate armour and carrying small howitzers on their
backs. Thereafter, however, the use of elephants as participants
in battle declined everywhere, increasingly sidelined by the
advent of firearms and mechanized transport. Nowhere was

135
Elephants have
from time to time
been recorded
pulling ploughs:
this is perhaps the
earliest, a medieval
illustration for an
edition of Pliny’s
Historia naturalis.

this more obvious, perhaps, than in the war of 1824, when

Burma, embroiled in French–British conflicts, attacked Assam;
its elephants proved no match for British guns. Nevertheless,
before and after the 1886 incorporation of all Burma into the
British Empire, elephants were used by all sides to haul guns,
build roads and bridges, and transport men over terrain where
horses and vehicles were useless. The British Army in India
used elephants similarly, as well as to overawe minor tribes,
notably deploying an Anglo-Gurkha elephant squadron on the
border with Afghanistan.
As and when conflicts developed, working elephants were
regularly dragooned back into war service. J. H. Williams, as he
recounts in his classic book Elephant Bill, found himself using
his logging elephants to assist the Allied war effort against the
Japanese invaders, who themselves used an elephant corps to
force their way through the Malaysian jungles. They captured
each others’ animals, and many died or were wounded in
firefights. These uses continued into the modern era: the

136
Vietnamese king used elephants for jungle transport during
Vietnam’s earliest struggles for independence, and in the 1960s
elephants were instrumental in opening up the ‘Ho Chi Minh’
trail so vital to Vietnam’s resistance to American attack.
Cambodian troops also used elephants against the Viet Cong.
Odd individuals also found themselves absorbed into
theatres of war elsewhere. During the First World War the
German army commandeered an Indian elephant from the
Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg. ‘Jenny’ was deployed to the
French front, where she moved tons of matériel and building
timbers and helped plough fields. Another of Hagenbeck’s
elephants was deployed to Belgium, and was photographed
moving logs in 1915 for T. P.’s Journal of Great Deeds, under the
alarming headline ‘The Forests of France and Belgium: How War
is Destroying Them’. Another Asian elephant, ‘Unofficially
Attached to Mr Lloyd George’s Department’, was photographed
in Sheffield’s grimy railyards, hauling some daunting-looking
piece of machinery.
Elephant working
with logs in India,
date unknown.

137
 This kind of work is, in fact, how most living elephants have
been used: to move heavy objects, mostly logs, and to open up
roads in marshy or mountainous conditions. Early rulers used
elephants to haul materials for their extravagant building proj-
ects. Timur, for instance, is said to have employed a permanent
contingent of 95 elephants when building the mosque at
Samarkand. They are best known, however, for their involve-
ment in the destruction of their own habitat under British rule
in South-east Asia. There, throughout Siam, Burma and
Sumatra, imperialist, and then multinational, logging opera-
tions have been responsible for the denudation of hundreds of
thousands of square miles of hardwood forest. Some 250 mil-
lion hectares of tropical hardwood forest extant in 1900 have
now been reduced to less than 60 million hectares, and this
figure is falling. Much could not have been achieved without the
help of elephants. J. H. Williams recorded that one of his log-
ging elephants, Bandoola, in one season ‘extracted three hun-
dred tons of teak an average distance of two miles from stump
to floating-stream’.13 Hundreds of thousands of wild elephants
inhabited the Asian forests at the beginning of the twentieth
century; today there are less than 35,000. At the same time,
compared to the 100,000 tamed elephants of Thailand in 1900,
only some 4,000 still work, though new opportunities open up
from time to time. An additional pressure is that very little
captive breeding occurs, so that replacements still have to be
obtained from the wild.
Whatever the hardships of rolling and dragging massive logs
– some weighing up to 4 tons – the logging elephants’ lives are
not wholly deprived. At best, they are carefully tended, work
limited hours, get a supplementary diet of rice balls mixed with
fat, sugar-cane and bread, spend hours bonding with their
mahouts in extended and necessary bathing times, and often

138
are permitted some time wandering, albeit hobbled, in their
natural forest habitat. The best tended certainly have a better
time of it than their counterparts in Western zoos, and perhaps
even in the various elephant orphanages and reserves that have
tried to absorb the growing population of elephants discarded
by the logging industry. Raman Sukumar found three working
elephants that had lived beyond 75 years, ‘unthinkable in a zoo’.
The freer communities in Tamilnadu and Myanmar also show
higher breeding rates and slower demographic decline than
anywhere else in captive populations. (In Western zoos, by con-
trast, elephant numbers – unless replaced from outside –
decline at a rate of 8 per cent, since they scarcely breed; and
fewer than 30 per cent live beyond 40 years of age.)
In perhaps the most recently celebrated example of helpful
elephants, Sri Lankan and Thai animals helped in rescue efforts
when the 2004 tsunami hit their coastlines. According to
mahouts at Khao Lak beach resort in Thailand, the elephants
‘cried’ quite uncharacteristically before the tsunami struck,
then ran for the hills, pausing only to pluck up some fleeing
tourists. Much scepticism has been expressed about the more
heroic stories of elephants selflessly snatching people to safety.
Scientists noted that radio-collared elephants, close to shore in
Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park, had exhibited no tendency to
move inland when the tsunami arrived. But there seems little
reason to doubt that many of the elephants, along with birds
and dogs, displayed some sense of impending change. At any
rate, elephants proved useful in various places to help remove
debris and search for bodies before mechanized lifting gear
arrived.
In 2003 Sukumar estimated that 14,500–15,000 elephants
(about a third of the Asian total) lived in various forms of cap-
tivity in their range states, broken down roughly as follows:

139
Myanmar 5,000, Thailand 4,000, India 3,500, Laos 1,350,
Cambodia 300, Sumatra 362, Sri Lanka 227, Nepal 171, and
Vietnam 165. Everywhere, as Mark Shand has pointed out in
Queen of the Elephants, his lively account of an elephant trek
across India with woman mahout-extraordinaire Parbati Bihar,
the elephants (and the authorities) are caught in a double bind.
As demand for captive elephants falls, wild populations increase,
but habitat is still being denuded, so that conflict with humans
increases. There are simply fewer and fewer places for elephants,
wild or captive, to go. Outside Asia, perhaps a thousand Asian
elephants subsist in zoo or circus situations (one organization
estimates that there are 90 elephants in German circuses alone).
If you google ‘elephants in circuses’ you will be faced with a
welter of sites attacking the abuse of elephants – and scarcely a
site defending their use. There is arguably a narrow line
between adorning elephants for controlled parades in religious
worship and adorning elephants for controlled entertainment
in a circus ring, or being used for a game of ‘elephant polo’. In
the West, however, compelling elephants into tortuous posi-
tions – balancing on their heads, on bicycles, or on tiny stools –
has reached its peak of exploitation. It began, no doubt, with
the Roman games, where elephants were goaded into fighting
gladiators, lions or each other for the bloodthirsty hordes in the
Circus Maximus. But even then, if Pliny’s first-century bc
account is to be believed, one courageous elephant’s bearing
had the crowd on its feet in sympathetic uproar. Pliny also
recorded that elephants were already being taught to dance,
balance on tightropes and fling pebbles.
It was the Americans who were primarily responsible for the
razzmatazz of the modern circus act – beginning symbolically
with P. T. Barnum’s notorious ‘theft’ of the London elephant
‘Jumbo’ in 1882 (poor Jumbo didn’t last long, dying at 25 in a

140
train accident). Circuses proliferated into the twentieth centu-
ry, and you can now view online any number of sickening video
clips of circus handlers thrashing performing elephants into
compliance with a bullhook (ankush), electrified cattle prod or
simple iron bar. Celebrated cases recently have been the ‘escape’
of Janet, a terrified circus elephant who ‘ran amok’ in Palm Bay,
Florida, in 1992, with a mother and five children on her back –
a traffic officer had to kill her, taking 34 inexperienced shots to
do it – and that of the Ringling Brothers circus group being
brought to court in 2006 for elephant abuse. Some 40
Americans, mostly handlers, have been killed by captive, osten-
sibly tamed elephants (not to mention many Asian mahouts).14
The most absurd example recently was of one Friedrich Poster for the
Ringling Brothers’
Riesveld in Paderborn, Germany, who fed his constipated ele- elephant brass
phant Stefan 22 doses of animal laxative, berries and bushels of band, c. 1899.

141
Music cover illus- prunes, before resorting to an olive oil enema – which abruptly
tration depicting
worked, burying and suffocating the surprised keeper under
the famous
‘Jumbo’ of the 200 pounds of dung.
Barnum circus, The litany of such examples might testify to the energy of the
c. 1882.
animal rights lobbyists more than to the actual scale of the
problem. One researcher, while noting that the traditional prac-
tice of picketing or chaining elephants resulted in higher inci-
dences of stereotypic weaving or rocking behaviour and more
erratic performance, still concluded that elephants were as well
treated as other species in stables or kennels.15 This ignores, of
course, the massive differences between an elephant and a
horse or dog. There seems little reason to doubt that circus acts
serve next to no educational purpose, and that the lives of trav-
elling elephants, obliged to perform physically unnatural and
demeaning tricks, caged or chained when at rest, and boxed in
for many hours while on the road, live a pretty miserable life
compared to those in the wild.
At least some circuses have tried to develop more humane
methods of gaining compliance from their elephants. Ralph
Helfer, for one, became a well-known trainer to animals in an
astonishing 5,000 Hollywood movies. He used gentleness and
reward as his primary tools, even with lions and elephants.
Helfer’s book Modoc (and the spin-off film, starring Kevin
Costner) is not exactly ‘the true story of the greatest elephant
that ever lived’ that its subtitle proclaims. One acute reviewer
noted that Ringling Brothers – for whom Helfer worked for a
time – had had at least three elephants named Modoc, none of
whom had lived very long. Still, as a novel, Modoc is a tear-jerk-
er that has stimulated a number of readers to make the journey
to the real elephant sanctuary at Hohenwald, Tennessee, in
which Helfer has also been involved. Among others, Helfer
purchased and took to Hohenwald an abused and dangerous

142
elephant named Misty, whose story recalls that of ‘Modoc’ in
that she had been passed from circus to circus before finding
sanctuary at Hohenwald. Hohenwald, with its 2,700 acres, is
one of the few places in America where discarded elephants
from circuses and zoos can go and experience something resem-
bling a free life.
A considerable number of elephant sanctuaries have
sprung up, both in the West and in Asia, to take in the orphans
and the retired of the shrinking numbers of both zoos and log-
ging camps. Even here, it’s difficult to avoid the sense that the
elephants are being exploited for mere entertainment, whatever
the arguments that educational and conservation purposes are
being served, or that the elephants are helping pay for them-
selves. One example is the elephant xylophone band, concocted
by Richard Lair and David Soldier at the Thai Elephant
Conservation Centre – buy the cd! They claim the elephants
choose the notes themselves. This is not, incidentally, so new;
the great French essayist Montaigne, in An Apologie of Raymond
Sebond, reminds us that the historian Arrian (here in a 1603
translation)

protesteth to have seene an Elephant, who on every thigh

having a cimball hanging, and one fastened to his
truncke, at the sound of which, all other Elephants
danced in a round, now rising aloft, then lowing full at
certaine cadences, even as the instrument directed them,
and was much delighted at the harmony . . . Some [ele-
phants] have beene noted to konne and practice their les-
sons, using much study and care, as being loath to be
chidden and beaten of their masters.

There’s the rub, of course.

144
 Another, avowedly gentler example is the Asian Elephant
Art and Conservation Project in Thailand, which pays for tend-
ing its elephant orphans partly with funds raised from sales of
the elephants’ own paintings – an idea that, as their mission
statement proclaims, certainly ‘pushes the boundaries of art as
charity, while questioning our notions of artist and intent’! For
$400, you can buy a non-toxic painting – and the elephants do
seem to develop individual styles.16
And then there are all the ‘elephant-back safari’ operations
that have recently proliferated – what has been a commonplace
in Asia for millennia is still more of a novelty in Africa. I found
communing with elephants through eye and fingertip contact,
in both Zimbabwe and South Africa, a soulful and awe-inspir-
ing experience, but riding on top of one taught me nothing fur-
ther, and seemed to me just another extension of our smug
notions of superiority and control. This is so even if it provides From a Japanese
Menagerie,
actress Cameron Diaz with a spectacular opportunity to pro- Elephant, 1871–89,
mote conservation issues, and reaches its nadir when elephants signed Kyosai ga,
seal: Issho keiko
are used as backdrop and carriage for bikini-clad models for (‘All my life just
Sports Illustrated. Many are now arguing against elephant-back practising’).
safaris. Capture methods have been widely challenged, and Rick
Allen, head of the nspca’s wildlife unit in South Africa, has said:
‘Any claim that this type of capture and training for commercial
use is in the interests of conservation is stretching the point to
fairytale proportions.’17 Late 2007 saw a landmark legal decision
when a South African court found in favour of an spca suit to
prevent a tourist park acquiring and training elephants specifi-
cally for riding ‘safaris’; and in February 2008 South African pro-
tocols were legislated banning the capture of any elephants for
safari or circus use. (It’s not even terribly comfortable, as racon-
teur Peter Ustinov once quipped: ‘There’s more room on a Vespa
than there is on the back of an elephant.’)

145
 These captive-elephant operations are sometimes not far
removed from those rather older sites of animal captivity: zoos.
Zoos of one description or another have existed for thousands
of years, too, and elephants are naturally quite a prize. Early

146
 Most elephant
paintings are
‘abstract’; Tukta,
a 13-year-old
female, produces
more naturalistic
images.

Egyptian pharoahs may have included elephants in collections of

wild animals. Around 1000 bc the legendary Solomon – apart
from his extravagant throne made of ivory – may have possessed
elephants. Certainly Ashurbanipal of Assyria, ruling around 630
bc, had more than one elephant in one of the earliest known
‘zoological gardens’. Alexander the Great sent elephants back
to Macedonia for his tutor Aristotle to study, and a number of
Greek city-states had animal collections that might have includ-
ed elephants. Around 280 bc Ptolemy ii built up a zoological
collection in Alexandria that was the largest the world had
known; ceremonial parades took a whole day to pass by, and
typically included 96 elephants. The early Chinese also estab-
lished zoos: Wen Wang, ruling around 1000 bc, established a
1,500-hectare so-called Garden of Intelligence or Lu-Ying.
Though elephants probably were always centres of attraction, it
is only with Kublai Khan, as witnessed by Marco Polo, that we
have unambiguous evidence for their presence in Chinese zoos.
As we’ve seen, in the West elephants receded into almost
mythical realms, until real elephants began again to be imported,
at first as gifts to rulers for private menageries. Charlemagne’s

147
 elephant, given to him by Harun al Rashid, was perhaps the
most celebrated, followed by those acquired by Frederick ii,
Lorenzo the Magnificent and Louis xiv, among others. By the
late sixteenth century, a number of elephants were present in
captivity in Europe and England, occupying ‘an ambiguous sta-
tus between fighting animal and grand curio’.18
The transition from royal menagerie or ‘seraglio’ and travel-
ling fair to modern zoo has been traced in detail by Eric Baratay
and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier in their excellent book, Zoo.
Suffice it to say here that only in the nineteenth century did the
zoo acquire its modern form – that is, as a publicly funded insti-

At least some
elephants reached
Japan: ‘Big import-
ed elephant’ is
a woodcut on
paper by
Yoshitoyo Utagawa
(1830–1866).

148
tution aimed not merely at entertaining the public, but also with Poor substitute
for a river: an
species-preservation and research roles. As zoos mushroomed, elephant in an
along with both new urban wealth and scientific curiosity, so American zoo,
did captive elephant numbers. Members of the International c. 1926.

Species Information Systems listed 100 bulls and 378 cows

worldwide in 2002; one website lists 296 Asian elephants in
European zoos in 2006, and 144 in North America.19 (No one is
sure how many illegal animals are being held.) Numbers of
elephants in public institutions have thus remained fairly stable
over the last few years.

149
 Justifications for keeping them, however, are being increas-
ingly challenged. The educational argument was put succinctly
by Peper Long of the National Zoo in Washington, dc: ‘For the
1.8 million people who come to the National Zoo each year,
there is no replacement for a living elephant.’20 Many assert
that film footage is now so wonderful that keeping elephants in
captivity is scarcely warranted. Today, although knowledge of
elephant physiology and behaviour is better (indeed, often
available only through zoo animals) and the architectures of
captivity have gradually improved, the situation for the ele-
phants themselves is not pretty. One zoo director, quoted recent-
ly in Time magazine, has ‘come to the conclusion after many
years that it is simply not possible for zoos to meet the needs
of elephants’.21
Another commonly expressed justification – that captive-
breeding programmes are going to be essential to replenishing
elephant stock threatened in the wild – remains rather dubi-
ous. They are not yet self-replenishing. Replacement elephants
have always had to be captured from the wild: Carl Hagenbeck,
one of the most famous performing-elephant entrepreneurs,
found himself ‘too often obliged to kill’ female elephants trying
to save their babies from capture22 – and this remains largely
true. Though today more babies are being born in captivity,
most are stillborn or die before they are six years old. There are
no captive families of viable size; artificial insemination is pos-
sible but still difficult; shipping males to females elsewhere is
prohibitively expensive and stressful. Hence one researcher
titled his article on the subject: ‘Asian Elephants in Zoos Face
Japanese
Menagerie: Global Extinction: Should Zoos Accept the Inevitable?’23
Elephants at Play, Nevertheless, the controversy-dogged Ringling Brothers circus
Fourth Month,
a woodblock
can carry on its website a notice that is at once defensive and
print of 1863. boastful:

150
 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey is the finest circus
in the world. It is important to note that Ringling Bros.
maintains the largest breeding herd of Asian elephants
in the world outside of Tampa (Fla.). Without some of
the work that Ringling Bros. has done with the Asian ele-
phant, right or wrong, the Asian elephant might not be
here 50 or 100 years from now. That’s just a fact.24

What ‘might be’ is not yet a ‘fact’, and there is certainly argu-
ment about whether such a programme is ‘right or wrong’; this
ad neatly sums up the dilemmas and mixed feelings affecting
elephant domestication. But here we are encroaching on the
topic of our final chapter: the conservation of the elephant in
today’s increasingly crowded world.

152
5 Conservation

The present-day situation for the wild elephant – like almost

any other ‘charismatic megafauna’ that you could name – is
generally dire. The recent efforts to reverse the trend by zoos
and national parks, international conservation agencies and
government legislation, are rearguard actions; they are all but
overwhelmed by human population growth, which now addi-
tionally unfolds against the backdrop of deleterious climate
change. The reasons are simple: people have killed too many
elephants for their ivory; and too many people have robbed the
elephants of their historical habitat. As we have seen, elephants
have always been hunted and used by humans in a multiplicity
of ways, some uncaring, some worshipful. But the number of
elephants captured alive for warfare, for circuses and zoos, for
food, logging and religion, while widespread, pales into
insignificance against the numbers killed for their tusks.
Human lust for ivory is the elephants’ curse; trade in ivory
is almost as old as trade itself. Probably killing for ivory grew
out of utilizing naturally deceased animals; ancient Siberians
used mammoth tusks to prop up their tents before they dis-
covered they could sell them to the Chinese. Eventually, this
trade flourished: between 1825 and 1914 an estimated 2,000
tons exited the port of Yakutsk alone. Although the Soviet
Union gradually clamped down on it, the mammoth ‘fossil

153
ivory’ business remains a complicating mask for trade in ele-
phant ivory to this day.
Various peoples centralized elephant ivory trading over the
millennia: the Harappans, the Phoenicians, the Romans and the
Parthians. Each in turn controlled the main routes into Europe
and the Middle East, or along the Silk Road into China. Most
likely North African elephants were driven into extinction by
ivory hunters by the end of the Roman empire; Pliny com-
plained of a shortage of ivory in ad 77. In the rest of Africa, out-
side traders turned light and natural local use into a massacre.
Arab slavers, Portuguese merchantmen and Swahili middlemen
drove the trade out of East Africa – mostly to India, oddly,
African ivory being considered finer than Asian. Asian ivory
was often burned in religious ceremonies, too, so European
carvers supplemented walrus and hippopotamus ivory with ele-
phant ivory from Egypt, Ethiopia and later West Africa.
In Europe’s Middle Ages ivory was reputed to have come
from the mythical realms of the Queen of Sheba; another myth
was that it was the horn of the unicorn, the symbol of virginity.
Hence it was particularly used for religious icons devoted to
the Virgin Mary. Crucifixes, diptychs and triptychs depicting
biblical scenes, reliquaries, crosiers, rosary beads and other
religious objects and statues abounded. (Dante, oddly, wrote
of ivory as symbolizing falsehood.) The fourteenth century saw
expanded use of ivory in a wealth of secular objects: cobblers’
measures, spindles, hourglasses, belt-buckles, plaques depict-
ing newly rediscovered classical scenes, casket lids and mirror-
cases, covers for writing-tablets, dagger-handles, falcons’
hood-rests, saddle cantles and dice-boxes, harp frames and
spoons and powder-flasks, even shoes and ice-skates.1 Many
examples have to count amongst the finest examples of carving
anywhere in history.

154
 Between 1500 and 1700, in one estimation, an average of more
than 100 tons of ivory left Africa annually; in the later years, India
alone imported over 250 tons a year, a lot of it finding its way
back from Mughal workshops, fetchingly carved, to the West.
Fifteenth-century Benin was transformed by Portuguese entre-
preneurs, who fostered a remarkable tradition of local carving,
particularly associated with royalty, as well as expanding demand
from enriched Europe for combs, knife-handles, chessmen,
inlays for furniture and a hundred other luxuries.2 The Japanese
developed a unique tradition of ivory carvings in the form of tiny
netsuke for attaching items to men’s sashes. (These can be valu-
able: if you visit the Los Angeles Police Department website,
you’ll find in the Art Theft section the photo of a stolen beautiful
nineteenth-century netsuke depicting Chinese children playing
with an elephant.) Whole communities from Scotland and
Dieppe to Samarkand and Hong Kong, Kyoto and Osaka, would
eventually be founded on ivory-carving specialities.

Slaughter by the
thousand: an East
African ivory ware-
house in the early
20th century.

155
An uncomfortable-
looking ivory
‘saddle’, from the
World’s Columbian
Exposition,
Chicago, 1893.

It was eighteenth- and nineteenth-century increases in

demand from America, Europe and China that had the most
dramatic effect. European colonization, coupled with the pro-
gression of firearms from muzzle-loading muskets to breech-
loading rifles, made it possible to meet the fantastic demand for
– amongst other things – piano keys and billiard-balls.
American production of pianos rocketed from 9,000 in 1852 to
350,000 in 1910. All used porous, tactile ivory – a pound and a
half in every keyboard. Between the same years, Britain alone
imported around 500 tons of ivory annually, about half of the
world’s demand. This entailed the deaths of maybe 65,000 ele-
phants every year. African middlemen, like the infamous Tippu
Tip, flourished. Zanzibar was the main channel for thousands
of tusks, brought in literally on the back of slaves, out to the
East, where ivory in vast quantities was used for Indian mar-
riage bangles and Chinese carvings and inks. The inherent vio-

156
lence of slaving and ivory extraction together had dramatic
effects on both ecologies and societies inland of Africa’s coasts,
being implicated, to take just one example, in the rise of Shaka’s
Zulu state as early as the 1810s. When Henry Morton Stanley
crossed the Congo towards his legendary rendezvous with
David Livingstone, he made the following reckoning:

Every pound weight [of ivory] has cost the life of a man,
woman, or child; for every five pounds a hut has been
burned; for every two tusks a village has been destroyed;
every twenty tusks have been obtained at the price of a
district with all its people, villages, and plantations.3

Aside from pure profit, the male ego was involved, too. The
lure of the ‘tusker’ – immortalized in that ugliest of records,
African slaves were
forced to carry
ivory to the coasts,
as depicted in
Henry Rider
Haggard’s novel
Maiwa’s Revenge
(1888).

157
Rowland Ward’s compendium of trophy sizes – drew the early
hunters: the bigger the tusks, the braver the man, was the mes-
sage. In the course of a century, in short, elephant populations
were decimated, to the point where hunters themselves began
to warn of impending extinction in many regions. In 1881 that
most archetypal of Great White Hunters, Frederick Courteney
Selous, noted ‘every year elephants were becoming scarcer and
wilder south of the Zambezi, so that it had become almost
impossible to make a living by hunting at all’.4 In a curious, not
entirely defensible way, hunters like Selous also prided them-
selves on providing ‘specimens’ for European museums. This
almost accidental but educational aspect to their depredations
was the precursor to more scientific investigation of the animals
in situ. As an example of this shift, on 6 December 1905 the
director of the Natural History Museum in Paris gathered a
number of luminaries, including the composer Camille Saint-
Saëns, to found the Society of the Friends of the Elephant – the
first of many such. One Paul Hippeau enlivened proceedings
with some doggerel, which sang in part:

The elephant, it’s a notorious fact,

In Africa is disappearing.
If we don’t hasten to look at that,
How can we remedy it?
The elephant is a friend to man;
More than the dog, it’s constant.
And now indeed our turn has come
To be the friend to the elephant.5

Along with the demise of many other species as observed by

more and more biological scientists, the plummeting number
of elephants helped to stimulate the development of new

158
conservationist approaches. In East and southern Africa in
particular, it fed into the establishment of dedicated game
reserves around the turn of the twentieth century, notably
Kruger National Park in South Africa. Other countries were
slower to legislate protected areas. In Kenya, Tsavo was pro-
claimed a reserve only in 1948 and Serengeti in 1951 (the same
year, incidentally, as the first national parks were established in
Britain). In Asia, too, reserves began to be designated: India’s
Kaziranga National Park in 1905 and Jim Corbett in 1936, for
instance. Generally, progress was slow here, too: India’s pri-
mary elephant park, Nagarahole, was proclaimed only in 1955.
In Thailand, the first national park, Khao Yao, was set up in
1961. Laos is even further behind, establishing its National
Biodiversity Conservation Areas (some 21 per cent of the coun-
try) as recently as 1993. This means that frameworks for pro-
tecting individual species such as elephant have for too long
been of slender effect.
This explicitly conservationist development did not stop the
ivory trade, but gave it a different spin. For poachers, concen-
trated populations of elephants in reserves became handy
resources. Though global demand for ivory crashed after the
First World War, and elephants began to make something of a
recovery, the danger was not over. In the 1970s and ’80s a wave
of ivory poaching shattered the complacency of game reserves
throughout Africa. Much of the demand came from China and
from newly prosperous Japan, where ivory hanko (signature
seals) were enjoying huge popularity (two million made in 1988
alone). Ivory prices soared from us$5.50 a kilogram in 1969 to
$74 in 1978, to $300 in 1989. Demand by the rich at one end,
local poverty at the other, and multiple opportunities for lucra-
tive middlemen in between conspired to generate a murderous
momentum. David Sheldrick in Kenya’s Tsavo reserve, amongst

159
 other wardens, found himself engaged in – and often lost – pro-
tracted gun battles with raiders heavily armed with automatic
weapons. By 1976 he figured he had lost half of Tsavo’s ele-
phants, adding to losses incurred in a particularly bad drought
(6,000 died in 1969–70). Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, who
in the course of their pioneering studies in Manyara had devel-
oped closely personalized relationships with the elephants,
were devastated in the mid-1980s to find their precious herds
massively depleted. These experiences (recounted in their book
Among the Elephants) were parallelled across the continent.
(And the threat, albeit much reduced, continues: seven elephants
were killed by ivory poachers in Tsavo during the month of
June 2007.)
The governments of the range states were largely either too
weak to act effectively or were actually complicit in the ivory
trade. Moreover, Western agencies that wanted to help were at
loggerheads over the scale of the problem and what to do
about it. A dispute between Douglas-Hamilton and another
Kenya-based conservationist, Ian Parker, focused the problems.
One issue was knowing just how many animals there were.
Parker estimated almost twice the number that Douglas-
Hamilton did, underplayed the threat and argued for a con-
tinuation of the ivory trade under controlled conditions.
Although it turned out that Parker was wrong, his views pre-
vailed, with the result that the 1973-convened Convention on
Illegal Trade in Endangered Species (cites) took two years to
put African elephants even on Appendix ii of their listings,
A road sign in and another twelve years to recognize Douglas-Hamilton’s
one of the many
South African warnings of imminent extinction and to upgrade them to
private reserves Appendix i. (The Asian elephant had been placed on Appendix
to have recently
acquired trans-
i straight away.) This was too late for hundreds of thousands of
located elephants. elephants. Moreover, the composition of elephant societies

160
was becoming severely skewed by the selective offtake of
tuskers and large females.
A second sticking-point was that cites in any case had no
legal teeth, even amongst its 113 signatory nations. There were
too many loopholes in its regulations, and little chance of final-
ly distinguishing on the ground between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’,
‘worked’ and ‘unworked’ ivory. (A recent report estimated that
94 per cent of ivory merchandise sold on eBay, the world’s
largest online auctioneer, was in fact illegal; eBay has now
banned it.) More damagingly still, cites was at times partly
funded by, and therefore reluctant to alienate, ivory traders
themselves. Douglas Chadwick discovered, as he relates in his
excellent, frightening book The Fate of the Elephant, that in the
late 1980s Japanese ivory merchants were feeding a kind of self-
imposed tax on their products into cites coffers. The Japanese
were at that time particularly concerned to preserve an icon of
Japanese musical culture: the baachi, an enormous plectron for
the shamison lute, carved from a single tusk and producing an
allegedly unique, culturally sacrosanct sound. Moreover, cites
director Eugene LaPointe had for years been exploiting legal
loopholes to release tons of ‘stock-piled’ African ivory to Far
Eastern entrepreneurs. To this day cites is, rightly or wrongly,
regularly accused by its detractors of actively abetting the trade
rather than suppressing it. In July 2008 cites succumbed to
pressure from southern African nations and permitted them to
release large stockpiles of ivory onto the open market, in the
face of East African protests that this is likely to reinvigorate
poaching. As it is, recent estimates are that in Africa the ele-
phant death rate from poaching is already 8 per cent higher
than it was twenty years ago.6
That said, as a number of countries signed up, the 1989 cites
ban on ivory trading, though it may not have been the only

162
factor, seemed to result in a marked downturn in the volume of
trade. However, this is possibly to miscalculate the amounts
that inevitably circulate clandestinely, especially coming out of
war-torn zones like southern Sudan and southern Angola. In
the latter case, South African military forces in the 1980s took
advantage of the chaos to poach and sell tusks on the black mar-
ket. One report claimed that Angola’s unita forces killed
100,000 elephants in order to pay for South Africa’s military
support. There is ongoing argument, then, about the extent to
which an international ban merely drives the trade under-
ground, and to what extent the open economization of elephant
products, as has been practised to some local benefit in
Zimbabwe and South Africa, is a better option.
The Douglas-Hamilton vs Parker dispute also highlighted a
third problem: determining the extent to which other factors –
international prices, waves of fashion, local politics, cultural
inhibitions, modes of land use, poverty and both short- and
longer-term ecological changes – might also play a role in reduc-
ing elephant populations. Since elephant distribution is now
perforce fragmented, each population suffers and enjoys a
unique mix of influences, threats and benefits, so a blanket pol-
icy forged by international organizations is unlikely to cater
adequately for all situations. This underlies, on a broad scale,
the southern African/East African split. Asian elephant guru
Raman Sukumar, in his memoir Elephant Days and Nights,
captures the complexities succinctly:

We live in a world of contradictions, where there is an

obscene disparity between rich and poor, and where
there are tugs and pulls in every direction, where there is
a need for the have-nots to catch up with the haves, and
a need for both modernization and conservation. As we

163
 recklessly continue to assault the earth’s living systems,
our hearts are sometimes moved by the plight of the
more charismatic creatures – the whooping crane, the
tiger, the elephant. Often the plethora of issues, politi-
cal, social, economic and biological, involved in the
effort to save a species, makes us throw up our hands in
despair.7

On one issue, at least, almost all parties agree: an over-

whelming factor is the loss of habitat and freedom of movement
right across elephant ranges. In Asia, this has been much more
important than ivory poaching – though there, too, devastating
poaching has happened, and continues to happen. To highlight
this, we can note the remarkable career of the poacher
Veerappan in southern India. Armed with weapons spilling
over from the Sri Lanka conflict, this elusive gangster was long
wanted for several murders of police and rangers. He had a
more sophisticated intelligence network than the authorities,
and the status of a kind of local Robin Hood among some rural
communities. He and a network of poachers like him had a
marked effect on the proportion of large breeding males
amongst southern India’s elephant populations. Latest surveys
indicate that since Veerappan’s demise, the number of ele-
phants in his Kamataka stamping-ground has risen again from
about 4,500 to 6,000. On the other hand, recent reports char-
acterize ivory poaching in Jaipur province as ‘rampant’.
Loss of habitat has had a number of negative effects. One is
that increasingly isolated, inbreeding populations of elephants
may show genetic defects over time. In Asia, there has been very
little in the way of moving breeding elephants between groups.
In southern Africa it is more common, though tremendously
expensive. (This is not helped by loss of diversity even amongst

164
domesticated elephants, which are almost as much in danger of
extinction as their wild counterparts. In one estimate, Thailand
had around 100,000 domesticated elephants at the turn of the
twentieth century, but today there are a mere 3,800.)
Most importantly, habitat constriction has everywhere
entailed an increase in human–elephant conflict. Elephants
have, of course, always raided humans’ tasty crops. Who
wouldn’t be tempted by such handy concentrations of nutri-
ents? This is especially widespread in Asia, where human popu-
lations are highest and national parks both small and poorly
protected. In India’s Assam state, for example, some 7,000 out
of 20,000 square kilometres of forest reserve are occupied by
illegal settlers. Villagers – who otherwise venerate Ganesh –
resort to poison, gunfire or dangling live wires from overhead
electricity cables to try to deter elephantine raiders from their
rice paddies. One dead elephant was daubed with the angry
graffito, ‘Dhan Chor Bin Laden’ (‘Rice Thief Bin Laden’). In July
2007 one Assam headman, Rosan Sangma, reported 27 local
homes destroyed by elephants that year so far, and another dev-
astating raid by a 90-strong cohort of elephants. During this
same period, a number of incidents were reported involving ele-
phants in Nepal, either poached or killed by farmers. Indeed,
any given month’s reports show a dramatic, paradoxical oppo-
sition between those lamenting destructive agricultural incidents
in both Asia and Africa, and those sentimentally obsessing over
births or deaths of individual elephants in captivity in the West.
Hence, in many areas, a new emphasis in conservation is on
trying to manage human–elephant conflict, and to find ways in
which preserving wildlife that is otherwise dangerous can benefit
rural communities. As Kenya’s Richard Leakey has realized, the
welfare of human and natural populations are mutually reliant:

165
Two young Giving up natural spaces and killing animal species will
elephant bulls
practising
not bring prosperity . . . Clean air, clean water, plentiful
dominance forests, and a human population that is well fed, educat-
behaviour on ed, and reasonably affluent is our goal in Kenya. Saving
the River Chobe,
Botswana. the elephants is symbolic – a means to achieve these
greater objectives.8

The campfire project (Communal Areas Management

Programme for Indigenous Resources) in Zimbabwe was one
pioneering effort, directing hunting and tourism revenue
directly back into local schools and clinics. Successful in several
instances, the projects are now running foul of the collapse of
law and order under Robert Mugabe: none other than the
vaunted ‘Presidential Herd’ of elephants in north-western

166
Matetsi, ostensibly specially protected by Mugabe’s own presi-
dential decree, is threatened with poaching organized by local
warlords or even government ministers in cahoots with over-
seas hunters. Other efforts are being directed to deterrence –
using walls, trenches, electrified fencing or fields of repellent
chilli plants. The newest experiment is broadcasting recordings
of bee swarms, which elephants are said to abhor.
There are elephant victims of other kinds of territorial
conflict, too: those that inadvertently step on landmines in war
zones. This has surfaced particularly in Myanmar’s border
regions where rebel groups contest the ruling junta. In 1999 one
elephant in particular was rescued, named Motala. At the spe-
cialized elephant hospital in Lampang in northern Thailand,
Motala became a global media star as she underwent amputa-
tion after stepping on an anti-personnel mine. Six years later
the leg was able to take the world’s first elephantine prosthesis
–an ironic reversal, one might say, of the artificial shoulder of
ivory said to have been granted by the ancient Greek gods to
Pelops of Phrygia.
One thing is certain: worldwide, elephants have been
cramped into areas too small for them – and paradoxically,
where management and protection is successful, the pressure of
their own numbers is proving to be a major headache. It’s
difficult, though, to know what those numbers entail. As ele-
phant biologist Rudi van Aarde has said, ‘If we cannot agree on
the numbers we are dealing with in the first place, it is small
wonder that the debates surrounding elephant management
are clouded in uncertainty’.9 Before one can begin to debate
how many elephants there ‘ought’ to be in a given area, one
needs to know how many there already are. And that’s not as
easy to determine as it might seem. Not only are elephants
famously elusive, melting into thick vegetation or rough terrain

167
like great grey ghosts, but they also often wander back and forth
across international borders, making firm counts – which are
usually conducted country by country – particularly difficult.
In Asia, estimates of elephants left in the wild range from
40,000 to over 52,000. In some regions, monitoring has been
closer than in others. In South India, for instance, one can now
access the results of a close census done in 2002 area by area –
though even here researchers doubt the accuracy of their meth-
ods, and some leeway of doubt is built in.10 India as a whole
now harbours between 26,000 and 35,000 elephants in the
wild, distributed in fragmented habitats over some three mil-
lion square kilometres of range territory. This is an increase
since 1980, when there were an estimated 15,600 wild elephants
(though some of the increase may be due to advances in moni-
toring techniques). South India holds the most (some 15,000),
followed by the north-east (about 11,000).
Twelve other Asian countries still have small elephant popu-
lations, ranging from a probable maximum of some 4,500 in
Myanmar, 3,000 in each of Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Indonesia and
Thailand, down to only a hundred-odd in Vietnam. Nepal,
Bhutan, Bangladesh, China, Laos and Cambodia each probably
have only a few hundred wild elephants left. These are the tat-
tered remnants of a population that once presumably num-
bered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions: there are
simply no reliable estimates. So isolated are most populations
that there are serious implications for genetic diversity, and
ecologists are talking about applying principles of ‘island ecol-
ogy’ to them.
In this respect, the position in Sumatra can stand for the
whole. Already an island, it carries yet smaller ‘islands’ of threat-
ened elephant groups (which, you will recall, may have evolved
into a distinct subspecies). No reliable surveys were done until

168
recently. Now, of 44 separate elephant groups discerned in the
1980s – then estimated at maybe 4,500 individuals – several
seem to have disappeared. Counts in two of the main parks,
Bukit Barisan Selatan and Way Kambas, produced population
estimates of only 498 and 180 elephants, respectively. Though
there has been some poaching, the major threats remain habi-
tat loss to logging and other agriculture; the Wildlife
Conservation Society estimates that, at the present rate, 70 per
cent of Bukit park will be agricultural by 2010. The usual strat-
egy against crop-raiding elephants here is to ask the govern-
ment to remove them, and a number of Elephant Training
Centres have been set up to receive these captives. Researcher
Joanne Reilly once drove 1,500 kilometres with a three-month-
old elephant baby, left behind after a crop raid, to the Centre at
Sebanga Duri. Little Wiwin, as she was named, seemed to flour-
ish for a time, but finally died while being airlifted to a zoo in
Java. Her fate is depressingly symbolic.11 There is, in short, very
little effective safety for the remaining elephants, though
Indonesia has technically protected them since 1931.
As for Africa, there is general but vague agreement that,
despite everything, there were several million elephants left in
1900. Estimates were very rough then, and are only somewhat
less so today, despite extensive aerial surveys, dung counts and
variously sophisticated extrapolative models. Elephants range
over some 22 per cent of Africa’s 23 million square kilometres,
but only a third of that range falls within protected areas; only
half of their range has ever been actually surveyed, and even
there some of the data is already a decade old. iucn’s latest 2007
survey, then, lists its estimates under ‘definite’, ‘probable’, ‘pos-
sible’ and frankly ‘speculative’, coming up with a total of some
472,000 elephants, Africa-wide. Of these, southern (300,000)
and East Africa (137,000) account for the vast majority. In the

169
Man travelling on dense forests of Central Africa, elephants are not only more
an elephant, India.
difficult to find, but are also less well protected in law and in
practice. West Africa’s populations, down to around 7,500, are
in even worse shape.
Most West African elephants are in Ghana and Mali, but the
scattered populations, split between forest and savannah
dwellers, are often cross-border migrants: the largest single herd
spans Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso and Niger in its wanderings.
The semi-desert Sahel is now devoid of elephants apart from one
500-strong contingent, whose plight stands as symbolic of most
elephant groups. Until the 1980s, human–elephant conflict in
this region south of Timbuktu was manageable, since most
people were Tuareg or related nomads, moving, much as the ele-
phants did, over 500 kilometres or more, following seasonal

170
water and forage. Now, however, as the region dries out, human
and livestock populations are increasing and becoming more
sedentary around the rare oases, so that the elephant migration
routes are in danger of being cut off. As so often, governments’
capacity to coordinate and implement conservation strategies is
weak, despite various international conservation agreements
such as that signed under the local economic union, ecowas. So
it’s mostly Western agencies such as Save the Elephants that are
here tracking elephants with radio collars and spearheading
negotiations with human communities to keep those routes
open and the elephant population viable.12
Central Africa is covered extensively by equatorial forests,
harbouring mainly the cyclotis forest elephant. As a result, one of
the major threats is logging, both legal and illegal, which has
opened up once inaccessible areas to ivory poaching and the
bushmeat trade. A 2004 cites survey called mike (Monitoring
the Illegal Killing of Elephants) assessed most protected areas in
these countries, showing the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Gabon to have the bulk of Central Africa’s population. But the
actual levels of predation on elephants remains difficult to calcu-
late. It is certain, though, that the devastating civil war in the drc,
as in neighbouring Rwanda, has resulted in extensive habitat
loss, poverty-driven meat consumption, and a constant supply of
illegal ivory through the main entrepôts in the drc, Ivory Coast
and Central African Republic. (The entrepreneurial descendants
of Joseph Conrad’s infamous character Kurtz, in his 1899 novella
of the Congo, Heart of Darkness, continue to ply their trade.)
East Africa – mainly Kenya and Tanzania – has its own
conservation story. The names Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Masai
Mara and Tsavo are virtually synonymous with elephants; no
elephant picture, perhaps, is better known than that of peace-
ful pachyderms making their way across the yellow savannah

171
with the snow-capped dome of Kilimanjaro suspended airily
in the background. A large proportion of researchers and
activists have cut their teeth here and devoted themselves to
elephants in this region: the pioneering Douglas-Hamiltons;
Daphne Sheldrick, who continues to run her elephant orphan-
age near Nairobi; David Western; Joyce Poole and Cynthia
Moss; Katy Payne, who pioneered the recording of the ele-
phants’ infrasonic communications; and the redoubtable
Richard Leakey, who built up the Kenya Wildlife Service and
who titled his 2001 memoir Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save
Kenya’s Elephants.
Leakey’s account tells a grimly familiar tale: of poaching for
ivory and killing poachers; of corrupt and inefficient govern-
ments; of the pressure of human poverty coupled with habitat
erosion. Poaching concerned Leakey most: he witnessed Kenya’s
elephants reduced from perhaps 100,000 in 1979 to a fifth of
that in a decade. Tanzania’s Selous National Park held a similar
number, and suffered similarly devastating losses. After the ele-
phant was placed on the endangered list and ivory trading was
suppressed, however, the populations have partially recovered –
at least in Tanzania (numbering in 2007 some 108,000), Kenya
(23,000) and Uganda (2,300); fragmentary populations in
Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Rwanda remain in pre-
carious and poorly known conditions. Leakey’s efforts included
organizing a famous and controversial public burning of
Kenya’s huge stockpile of ivory in 1989 (emulated in 2007 by
Chad, with much less fanfare). Yet today, only Tanzania has a
coordinated elephant conservation strategy in place.
With the elephants’ partial recovery in many regions,
however, human–elephant conflict has increased. In some
areas, managers like Ian Parker began to argue that it was not
poaching that was the major problem, but habitat constriction;

172
it was not that too many elephants were being lost, but that
there were too many for the land available. Hence the contro-
versial policy of ‘culling’ was first instituted as a management
strategy in Tsavo in the early 1960s, and Parker himself organ-
ized culls in Murchison Falls National Park from 1965 onwards.
They called it ‘cropping for scientific purposes’, and generated
funds by processing and selling elephant products. Peter Beard
was one big-game hunter who joined these culls, documenting
them in his frankly gruesome book, The End of the Game.
Population issues are even more intense in southern Africa,
which has effected a remarkable turnaround in elephant popu-
lations. Here, too, the elephant has become the most prominent
‘keystone’ symbol of wider conservation efforts – just as it was
once the primary symbol of the hunter’s prowess. The allegedly
‘natural’ urge of hirsute male humans to hunt is being repack-
aged in one novel concept: ‘green hunting’. In a reserve adjoin-
ing Kruger, hunters are paying to dart tuskers with anaesthetic,
prior to radio-collaring them, instead of killing them.
Somewhat like their nineteenth-century forebear hunters, they
can both get their ‘bag’ and contribute to science. The ‘conver-
sion rate’ from lethal to green hunting is yet to become clear,
though, and some animal rights activists are opposed even to
this milder form of earning revenue from elephants.
Today, a big tusker signifies, rather than a potential dead
trophy, great age and great genes; its survival is therefore a
reflection of great conservation practice. In Kenya, the limelight
was captured by the legendary Ahmed of Marsabit; in South
Africa, the tuskers of Kruger have captured most imaginations
– as in Anthony Hall-Martin’s book The Magnificent Seven, illus-
trated with paintings by Paul Bosman, and the even more recent
Great Tuskers of Africa. The tuskers are named, tracked and
mourned when they die, almost as if they were people.

173
Paul Bosman is one
artist fascinated by
the ‘Great Tuskers’
of Kruger National
Park, South Africa.

The story of Addo, the reserve near my home which I men-

tioned at the beginning of this book, is a good example of the
southern African turnaround. During the course of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries the whole of the then Cape
Colony of South Africa, like much of the subcontinent, had
been denuded of elephant. A small population survived into the
twentieth century in the densest of Addo’s euphorbia thickets,
an understandably wary and aggressive group that periodically
raided the burgeoning citrus farms along the nearby Sundays
river. A professional hunter, one Major Pretorius, was hired
to eradicate them. By 1925 Pretorius had reduced them to (he
thought) 16 – others believed there might still be as many as 50.
At any event, both Pretorius’s stomach and public opinion were
turning, and it was decided rather to fence the surviving
elephants off into a reserve, enclosing them behind a robust
barrier of railway sleepers and cable.

174
 Today, Addo contains some 400 elephants, mostly scions of Among the
members of this
the original group, genetically leavened by some imports from allomother group
Kruger, and their range has been hugely expanded to some five in Addo, communi-
times the original area, as neighbouring farms have been bought cations by sound,
touch and gesture
up and added. In this respect, too, Addo reflects the wider history are enormously
of southern Africa’s wildlife parks, from shaky beginnings to complex – a factor
in the culling
present-day, tourist-driven expansion. Great efforts are being debate.
made today to create so-called Peace Parks, trans-frontier con-
joinings of existing reserves and corridors, which may do much
to relieve population pressures within the reserves.
South Africa’s flagship reserve, the Kruger National Park,
began in the late 1800s as a hunting preserve for the white
political elite. (It was not, as is popularly believed, instigated
by the crusty President, Oom Paul Kruger, but only named after
him; in fact, he was downright obstructive.) Only subsequently
was it expanded to an area the size of Belgium, displacing large

175
Elephants damag-
ing vegetation:
this ‘big-headed’
elephant, uproot-
ing a tree, from
an unknown
British journal,
c. 1890, preserves
inaccurate artistic
convention.

numbers of indigenous peoples in the process, and dedicated to

rebuilding animal populations rather than plundering them.
There were almost no elephants in Kruger at its inauguration
(there may never have been very many); there are now some
14,000. This, according to many ecologists, is more than the
ecosystem can bear. Managers and ecologists saw hundreds of
baobab and acacia trees being fatally stripped or knocked
down, sometimes more for display than for food, with obvious
knock-on effects on many other tree-dependent species, from
herbivorous bushbuck down to vultures and insects. Elephants,
the common cry became, were ‘environmental engineers’, capa-
ble of ‘reducing’ large areas to grassland in short order.
Hence, during the 1960s a notional ‘carrying capacity’ of
7,000 elephants was established for Kruger. This was admittedly
little more than a hazardous guess (one elephant per square
mile, more or less), since insufficient longitudinal studies exist-
ed upon which to base any figure at all. The whole notion of
‘carrying capacity’ was, arguably inappropriately, transferred

176
from domestic livestock models. No one really knows, for exam-
ple, to what extent elephants might self-regulate birth-rates
once suitable vegetation thins out or if artificial water points are
reduced, or to what extent biodiversity might really be dam-
aged in the long term. The roughly 250 scientific papers so far
published on this issue across the globe are split just about
down the middle between those that proclaim irreversible dam-
age to be blamed on elephants, and those that don’t. There is
simply no consensus.
You wouldn’t believe it, to listen to some adamant park
managers, and even some biologists. One problem is that, in
effect, park managers have a certain vision of what a given park
‘ought’ to look like, what other species it ‘should’ contain, and
want to manage the game accordingly. This view, though nowa-
days couched in the language of ‘biodiversity’, is fundamentally
static and aesthetic (an aspect once openly acknowledged in a
1989 booklet, Elephant Management in Zimbabwe). In fact,
ecosystems change radically over time; there is no single ‘right’
baseline. There is as yet very little understanding of longer-term
oscillations and changes, though pollen-based studies in Tsavo,
which give us some idea of vegetation regimes over a 1,500-year
period, look like a promising start. But it would appear that ‘the
growing awareness amongst academic and applied ecologists of
the dynamic nature of ecosystems has seldom been matched
amongst wildlife management authorities’.13 Moreover,
because the pressure to cull has so often been linked to the sale
of elephant products, ostensibly to raise money for further con-
servation, the suspicion has arisen that ‘culling’ is ‘essentially an
ivory harvesting programme operating at maximum sustain-
able yield’.14 Possible earnings in 2005 were estimated by The
Earth organization at r6.5 million for every 800 elephants
killed – a tidy sum.

177
‘It’s nature’s way At any rate, perceived overpopulation in Kruger precipitated
of keeping
numbers down!’:
an annual ‘cull’ of up to a thousand elephants a year, feeding a
cartoonist Rose huge but discreet processing factory on the edge of the park.
Rigden solves Some 17,000 elephants were killed between 1966 and 1995, when
the population
dilemma. animal rights activists forced a moratorium. At first, rifles alone
were used, then a muscle relaxant named succinylcholine chlor-
ide (Scoline), which downed the animal but left it conscious
until shot. Condemned for causing unnecessary mental distress,
it was discontinued elsewhere, but South Africa continued to
use it until the culling was stopped. Animal rights organiza-
tions like the International Fund for Animal Welfare (ifaw)
have maintained that the practice is ‘cruel, unethical and scien-
tifically unsound’.15 Since then, a more subtle and interesting
strategy has been followed, dividing Kruger into several zones,
each with a different approach, from hunting some elephants to

178
leaving them entirely alone. This reflects the emergence of
‘patchiness’ as a mantra for ecologists wishing to preserve bio-
diversity. It remains to be seen, however, what the long-term
outcome of this might be. In the meantime, the prospect of
culling has reared its head again and generated intense debate,
amongst politicians and philosophers as well as ecologists and
managers. On 1 May 2008 the eighteen-year moratorium on
culling in South Africa was lifted, albeit hedged about with
strict conditions. It is surely the saddest paradox in all conser-
vation history that while all over the world desperate efforts are
made to save individual elephants, there are places where it is
seen to be necessary to kill off literally thousands.
The culling debate is a complex business. It’s riven, first, by
a perceived gulf between the ‘pragmatic’, scientific, managerial
ecologists and the ‘sentimental’ (generally Western) animal
rights and public-opinion lobbies. The first group tends to
think in statistics, the second in terms of suffering individuals.
This division reappears everywhere. Richard Leakey, for exam-
ple, has been condemned as ‘emotional’ by some ecologists.
Early on, researchers like the Douglas-Hamiltons and Cynthia
Moss were scorned by scientists for daring to name their sub-
jects, rather than assign numbers. And here is Masakazu
Kashio, a forestry officer opening an important fao workshop
on domesticated Asian elephants in Bangkok in 2001, exhort-
ing the participants to be forthright, but asking that attendees

please keep in mind one important point, which is that

your statements should be scientific, logical, rational and
either supported by research works or facts that you have
directly observed or experienced. Please avoid political pro-
paganda, emotional arguments, and personal ego, because
these are neither appropriate nor constructive . . .16

179
It’s the division between Dame Daphne Sheldrick’s view that
‘the very human intelligence’ and compassion of elephants ‘is
something that the scientific community has always been slow
to acknowledge’ and ecologist Paul Manger’s warning that ‘ele-
phants are elephants, not big grey humans’. Manger advocates
instead ‘a detailed study of the elephant’s brain, which will pro-
vide a strong scientific platform for interpreting elephant
behaviour.’17 Progress in the debate seems unlikely unless some
way is found of overcoming this false dichotomy.
Scientists and managers are not, of course, entirely lacking
in emotion. It’s fascinating to see how culling methods have
changed over the years along with a deepening understanding
of elephant sensitivities. Not only was it recognized that killing
off selected males was not having the population-suppressing
effects the managers intended, but it was also observed that
the elephants left behind suffered ‘psychological trauma’ much
as humans do. (Such observations found their way even into
that most prestigious of scientific journals, Nature.18) Hence
managers adopted the tactic of slaughtering entire groups,
from the matriarch down to the smallest calf. Now even this
has been complicated by the knowledge that other groups,
sometimes tens of miles away, pick up the infrasonic distress of
the targeted families and can show signs of disturbance. It is
these ‘emotional’ characteristics that have also galvanized
wealthy animal welfare organizations to pressure governments
to halt culling, though a number of mainstream ngos like the
Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Wildlife and Environment
Society of South Africa continue cautiously to support it, if
only as a last resort.
One has to feel for the managers, who after all have to do
something – and making the decision to do nothing might mean
at some point, during a bad drought perhaps, the terrible sight

180
of hundreds of elephants visibly dying of thirst – what would
that do to the tourism business?
Much of the debate has focused on possible alternatives to
culling. These are limited: range expansion, translocation and
contraception. The opportunities for both expansion and
expensive translocations have already been all but exhausted
in southern Africa. Although private reserves have proliferated
recently, and a few hundred elephants have been moved to
parks like Addo or to private estates, ranging from forest sanc-
tuaries near Knysna to the semi-desert of the Karoo, there is
not much more space available. Not unless lots of people move
instead. It’s even tighter in Asia, where ‘elephant corridors’
between suitable habitats have been mooted, but seem unlike-
ly to be implemented.
Contraception remains a focus for intensive research.
Various drugs, particularly porcine zona pellucida (pzp), have
been proposed, but none has been adequately tested, and the
prospect of success remains dubious. Darting selected females
to prevent conception, for instance, would be stressful and have
to happen regularly: in an area like Kruger, where the animals
are difficult to find anyway, the close monitoring necessary
would be all but impossible, and the expense is prohibitive. No
one knows what the social consequences for the elephants would
be if, say, some females and not others were given contraceptives
or permanently sterilized. Contraception might keep birth rates
down, but would not reduce absolute numbers, so the problem
of impact on vegetation remains. It is probably viable only in
very small, tightly controlled populations. However, it is being
actively implemented, in conjunction with selective culling, in
South Africa’s Tembe Elephant Park, for one.
So what of the future? In some ways, the prospect for the
elephant isn’t wholly gloomy. In some places, populations are

181
 healthy, albeit only in relation to the resources within severely
restricted ranges. Scientific knowledge of elephants and their
needs has expanded exponentially. Hence better legislation is
gradually being implemented world-wide. Zoos and circuses
are having to clean up their acts radically. There are now more
dedicated organizations than one can wave a trunk at: Elephant
Care International, Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Founda-
tion, Friends of the Asian Elephant, Save the Elephants,
Elephants for Africa Forever, and dozens more. Awareness – of
alternatives to ivory, for example – is making headway, though
The ‘cute’ factor not yet sufficiently in the Far East. Domestication of African ele-
in the lightly furred
baby elephant can phants for touristic purposes, though itself controversial, is at
result in least making the electrifying touch of an elephant available to
accusations of
‘sentimentalizing’
more people, with some positive conservation spin-offs. In West
elephants. and Central Africa some progress is being made in establishing

182
and policing better-protected areas. More and more effort is
being devoted to finding workable ways of allowing elephants
and rural communities to coexist.
For all that, the juggernaut of human expansion seems
unstoppable; habitat loss and unsustainable exploitation will
remain continual threats to elephant survival for the foresee-
able future. While appeals to biodiversity and related scientific
observations are vital, it seems to me that it’s a simple compas-
sion for the fate of an extraordinary creature that will ultimate-
ly have the greatest sway. So I’d like to leave the final word to
novelist Romain Gary, from that odd mix of early conserva-
tionism and Gallic existential gloom, his oft-cited novel The
Roots of Heaven:

‘I defy anyone to look upon elephants without a sense of

wonder. Their very enormity, their clumsiness, their
giant stature, represent a mass of liberty that sets you
dreaming. They’re . . . yes, they’re the last individuals . . .’
‘No, mademoiselle, I don’t capture elephants. I con-
tent myself with living among them. I like them. I like
looking at them, listening to them, watching them on the
horizon. To tell you the truth, I’d give anything to
become an elephant myself.’19

183
Timeline of the Elephant
c. 60 million bc c. 40 million bc c. 24 million bc c. 3 million bc

Probiscidae and Oldest Proboscidae Miocene era produces Asian and African
hyraxes part from fossils deinotheres, elephant clades part
common ancestor stegodons and
gomphotheres

c. 3000 bc c. 1500–1000 bc 347 bc 221 bc

Asian elephants Mahabharata and Alexander the Great Hannibal crosses

first captured Ramayana mythic confronts Porus’ the Alps with his
and trained elephant tales elephants at elephants
compiled Hydaspes

c. 1880–1900 1882 1899

Heyday of Great ‘Jumbo’ taken Largest recorded

White Hunters from London to elephant tusks
like Neumann usa by Barnum collected from
and Selous circuses Kenyan bull
c. 2 million bc c. 25,000 bc c. 17,000 bc c. 11,000 bc

Mini Ice Age Earliest Bushman Mammoths Mammoths

prompts an elephan- rock art in southern painted on cave extinct in North
tid explosion Africa includes walls in France America, through
elephants combination of
climatic and
human influence

c. ad 600 1552 1811 c. 1850

Ganesh god-figure Elephant ‘Sulayman’ Family Proboscidae Piano production

evolves under given to Emperor formed by taxonomist rockets, launching
Aryan influence Maximilian Illger massive ivory trade

1931 1951 1973 1989

First Babar story Serengeti Park Asian elephant cites announces

published proclaimed, placed on cites ivory trade ban
parallelling that Appendix i
of other great
elephant reserves
 References

1 proboscidae

1 Haruo Saegusa, Yupa Thasod and Benjavun Ratanasthien, ‘Notes

on Asian Stegodontids’, Quaternary International, cxxvi–cxxviii
(2005), pp. 31–48.
2 Cited in Raman Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary
Ecology, Behaviour and Conservation (Oxford, 2003), p. 18.
3 Jeheskel Shoshani, ‘Understanding Probiscidean Evolution: A
Formidable Task’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. xiii/12
(1998), pp. 480–87.
4 Eric Scigliano, Love, War and Circuses: The Age-old Relationship
Between Elephants and Humans (New York, 2002), pp. 20–21.
5 Robert Delort, The Life and Lore of the Elephant (London, 1992),
p. 130.
6 Ibid., p. 131.
7 www.situ.ru/culture/museum/mamont/index_eng.shtml
(accessed February 2007).
8 www.science.psu.edu/alert/schuster12-2005.htm (accessed 3
August 2008).
9 www.exn.ca/mammoth/Gods.cfm (accessed February 2007).
10 Delort, The Life and Lore of the Elephant, p. 131.
11 Michael Oard, ‘The Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth: Was it a
Quick Freeze?’, Technical Journal, vol. xv/3, pp. 24–34,
www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/Magazines/tj/docs/tj14
_3-mo_mammoth.pdf.

186
12 Sukumar, The Living Elephants, p. 29.
13 Ibid., p. 43; Gary Haynes, ‘Mammoth Landscapes: Good Country
for Hunter-Gatherers’, Quaternary International, cxlii–cxliii
(2006), pp. 30–43.
14 ‘Were Mammoths Killed off by a Comet?’, Economist, 383 (24 May
2007), p. 94.
15 Shoshani, ‘Understanding Probiscidean Evolution’. See also
Shoshani and Pascal Tassy, ‘Advances in Proboscidean Taxonomy
and Classification’, Quaternary International, cxxvi–cxxviii,
pp. 5–20.
16 Josh Trapani and Daniel C. Fisher, ‘Discriminating Proboscidean
Taxa Using Features of the Schreger Pattern in Tusk Dentin’,
Journal of Archaeological Science, xxx/4 (2003), pp. 429–38.
17 Nancy E. Todd, ‘Reanalysis of African Elephas recki: Implications
for Time, Space and Taxonomy’, Quaternary International,
cxxvi–cxxviii (2005), pp. 65–72.
18 Sukumar, The Living Elephants, p. 52.
19 Ibid., p. 54.

2 an astounding physiology
1 Heathcote Williams, Sacred Elephant (New York, 1989), p. 78.
2 E. J. Raubenheimer et al., ‘Histogenesis of the Chequered Pattern
of Ivory of the African Elephant (Loxodonta Africana)’, Archives of
Oral Biology, xliii/12 (1998), pp. 969–77. See also F. Burragato et
al., ‘New Forensic Tool for the Identification of Elephant or
Mammoth Ivory’, Forensic Science International, xcvi/2–3 (1998),
pp. 189–96.
3 Katy Payne, Silent Thunder: The Hidden Voice of Elephants
(Jeppestown, 1998), pp. 13–14.
4 Paul Bosman and Anthony Hall-Martin, The Magnificent Seven:
And Other Great Tuskers of the Kruger National Park (Cape Town,
1994), p. 50.
5 Polly K. Phillips and James Edward Heath, ‘Heat Exchange by the
Pinna of the African Elephant (Loxodonta africana)’, Comparative

187
 Biochemistry and Physiology, Part a: Physiology, ci/4 (1992),
pp. 693–9.
6 Cited in Eric Scigliano, Love, War and Circuses: The Age-Old
Relationship between Elephants and Humans (New York, 2002),
p. 20.
7 J. H. Williams, Bandoola (London, 1953), p. 79.
8 Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an
Elephant Family (Chicago, il, 2000), p. 128.
9 Anthony Hall-Martin, ‘A Life Spent in the Conservation Game’,
Getaway (September 2000), p. 57.
10 See Milad Doueihi, ‘Elephantine Marriage: The Elephant and
Devout Table Manners’, Modern Language Notes, cvi (1991),
pp. 720–28.
11 ‘Making Magic Work’, amerindea.com/symbol-elephant.html.
12 Karen McComb et al., ‘Long-distance Communication of Acoustic
Cues to Social Identity in African Elephants’, Animal Behaviour,
lxv/2 (2003), pp. 317–29.
13 Chris Mann, Kites (Cape Town, 1990), p. 14.
14 Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, Among the
Elephants (London, 1975), p. 265.
15 ‘Elephants Recognize their Mirror Image’, New Scientist,
cxcii/2576 (4 November 2006), p. 17.
16 Daphne Sheldrick, ‘A Kindred Species’, Africa Geographic, xiv/3
(2006), p. 26.
17 Paul Manger, ‘Elephants are Elephants’, Africa Geographic, xiv/3
(2006), p. 25.

3 representing elephants
1 Michael Chapman, ed., The New Century of South African Poetry
(Johannesburg, 2005), p. 13.
2 Judith Gleason, ed., Leaf and Bone: African Praise-poems (New
York, 1980), p. 123.
3 Cited in Stephen Alter, Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian
Elephant (Orlando, fl, 2004), p. 38.

188
 4 Ibid., p. 34.
5 Robert Delort, The Life and Lore of the Elephant (London, 1992),
p. 48.
6 Ibid., p. 68.
7 Richard Carrington, Elephants (London, 1958), p. 249.
8 See ‘Heart of an Elephant’, Mail & Guardian [Johannesburg],
‘Friday’ section, 9–15 November (2007), p. 5.
9 Mordikai Hamutyinei and Albert Plangger, Tsumo-Shumo
(Gweru, 1987), pp. 5, 188, 234, 382.
10 African Affairs, liii /213 (1954), p. 332.
11 Alexander McCall Smith, The Girl Who Married a Lion (London,
1989).
12 Anon., in Words that Circle Words: A Choice of South African Oral
Poetry, ed. Jeff Opland (Parklands, 1992), p. 169.
13 Delort, The Life and Lore of the Elephant, p. 155.
14 Arthur H. Neumann, Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa
[1898] (Bulawayo, 1982), p. 107.
15 Wilbur Smith, Elephant Song (London, 1991), pp. 9–11.
16 Dalene Matthee, Circles in a Forest (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 71.
Matthee wrote several elephant-related novels set in the Knysna
forest.
17 Enid Blyton, ‘Preface’, Jean de Brunhoff: Tales of Babar [1941]
(London, 1947), n.p.
18 www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article602843.ece.
19 www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/
book_id/329.
20 Cited in Eric Scigliano, Love, War and Circuses: The Age-Old
Relationship between Elephants and Humans (New York, 2002),
p. 206.
21 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth, 1990), pp. 20–21.
22 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 6.
23 Vikram Seth, ‘The Elephant and the Tragopan’, in Beastly Tales
from Here and There (London, 1994).
24 Harold Farmer, Absence of Elephants (Harare, 1990), pp. 34–5.
25 Douglas Livingstone, ‘One Elephant’, in A Ruthless Fidelity: The

189
 Collected Poems of Douglas Livingstone, ed. Don Maclennan and
Malcolm Hacksley (Jeppestown, 2004), p. 99.
26 Heathcote Williams, Sacred Elephant (New York, 1989), p. 76.
27 See www.pocketelephants.com.
28 See www.himandus.net/elephanteria.
29 Ivan Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town, 2001), p. 1.
30 See www.creativepro.com/printerfriendly/story/20593.html.
31 See www.elephantcountryweb.com.
32 See www.dvdbeaver.com.
33 See Alter, Elephas Maximus, pp. 93–4.

4 using elephants
1 Karl Gröning and Martin Saller, eds, Elephants: A Natural and
Cultural History (Cologne, 1998), p. 134.
2 Stephen Alter, Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian Elephant
(Orlando, fl, 2004), p. 154.
3 Raman Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology,
Behaviour and Conservation (Oxford, 2003), pp. 72–4.
4 H. H. Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World, p. 34.
5 Lyn de Alwis, ‘Working Elephants’, in Illustrated Encyclopaedia of
Elephants, ed. S. K. Eltringham (London, 1997), p. 119.
6 Gröning and Saller, Elephants, p. 118.
7 Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World, p. 132.
8 Ibid., p. 151.
9 J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (London, 1979),
p. 336.
10 Alter, Elephas Maximus, p. 157.
11 Gröning and Saller, Elephants, p. 142.
12 Ibid., p. 193.
13 J. H. Williams, Bandoola (London, 1953), p. 128.
14 See www.deselephantsetdeshommes.com for regular updates on
such incidents.
15 Ted H. Friend, ‘Behaviour of Picketed Circus Elephants’, Applied
Animal Behaviour Studies, lxii/1 (1991), pp. 73–88.

190
16 See www.elephantart.com
17 Sharon van Wyck, ‘Back to Front’, cited in Earthyear, i (2004), p. 58.
18 Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of
Zoological Gardens of the West (London, 2004), p. 36.
19 www.asianelephants.net
20 ‘Zoos’ Pachyderms Pack a Challenge’, Herald-Times (20 June
2006).
21 Michael D. Lenswick, ‘Who Belongs in the Zoo?’, Time (19 June
2006), p. 50.
22 Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, p. 114.
23 Paul A. Rees, ‘Asian Elephants in Zoos Face Global Extinction:
Should Zoos Accept the Inevitable?’ Oryx, xxxvii/1 (2003),
pp. 20–22.
24 Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus, Columbus Zoo, from interview
with Centre Daily News on 15 September 2006:
www.asianelephants.com.

5 conservation
1 O. Beigbeder, Ivory (London, 1965).
2 See Ezio Bassani and William Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance: Art
in Ivory (Munich, 1988).
3 Cited in Heathcote Williams, Sacred Elephant (New York, 1989),
p. 156.
4 Cited in Martin Meredith, Africa’s Elephant: A Biography (London,
2001), p. 72.
5 Cited in Robert Delort, The Life and Lore of the Elephant (London,
1992), p. 176.
6 ‘Ivory Poaching at Critical Levels: Elephants on Path to Extinction
by 2020’, Science Daily (1 August 2008): www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2008/07/080731140219.htm.
7 Raman Sukumar, Elephant Days and Nights: Ten Years with the
Indian Elephant (Oxford, 1994), p. 163.
8 Richard E. Leakey, Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya’s
Elephants (New York, 2001), p. x.

191
 9 Rudi van Aarde, ‘How Many is Too Many’, Africa Geographic,
xiv/3 (April 2006), p. 38.
10 See www.asiannature.org.
11 See www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/310feature1.shtml.
12 Carlton Ward, ‘Restless Spirits of the Desert’, Africa Geographic,
xv/6 (July 2007), pp. 34–41.
13 Lindsey Gillson and Keith Lindsay, ‘Ivory and Ecology: Changing
Perspectives on Elephant Management and the International
Trade in Ivory’, Environmental Science & Policy, vi/5 (2003), p. 412.
14 Ibid., p. 417.
15 See www.ifaw.org/ifaw/dimages/custom/2_Publications
/Elephants/ElephantCullDebate.pdf
16 www.fao.org/docrep/005/ad031e/ad031e05.htm#bm05.1.
17 Paul Manger, ‘Elephants are Elephants’; Daphne Sheldrick, ‘A
Kindred Species’, Africa Geographic, xiv/3 (April 2006), pp. 25–6.
18 See for instance Nature, 433 (2005), p. 807.
19 Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven (London, 1958), pp. 108, 112.

192
 Bibliography

Alter, Stephen, Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian Elephant

(Orlando, fl, 2004)
Baratay, Eric, and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of
Zoological Gardens of the West (London, 2004)
Bosman, Paul, and Anthony Hall-Martin, The Magnificent Seven and
the Other Great Tuskers of the Kruger National Park (Cape Town,
1994)
Carrington, Richard, Elephants (London, 1958)
Chadwick, Douglas H., The Fate of the Elephant (London, 1992)
Delort, Robert, The Life and Lore of the Elephant (London, 1992)
Douglas-Hamilton, Iain, and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, Among the
Elephants (London, 1975)
Eltringham, S. K., ed., The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Elephants
(London, 1997)
Gary, Romain, The Roots of Heaven (London, 1958)
Gavron, Jeremy, The Last Elephant: An African Quest (London, 1993)
Gowdy, Barbara, The White Bone (Toronto, 1998)
Gröning, Karl, and Martin Saller, eds, Elephants: A Natural and
Cultural History (Cologne, 1998)
Hanks, John, A Struggle for Survival: The Elephant Problem (Cape
Town, 1975)
Künkel, Reinhard, African Elephants (New York, 1999)
Leakey, Richard E., Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya’s Elephants
(New York, 2001)
Meredith, Martin, Africa’s Elephant: A Biography (London, 2001)

193
Moss, Cynthia, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an
Elephant Family (Chicago, il, 2000)
Payne, Katy, Silent Thunder: The Hidden Voice of Elephants
(Jeppestown, 1998)
Scigliano, Eric, Love, War and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship
between Elephants and Humans (New York, 2002)
Scullard, H. H., The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (London,
1974)
Shand, Mark, Queen of the Elephants (London, 1996)
Smith, Wilbur, Elephant Song (London, 1991)
Sukumar, Raman, Elephant Days and Nights: Ten Years with the Indian
Elephant (Oxford, 1994)
––, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behaviour and
Conservation (Oxford, 2003)
Sykes, Sylvia K., The Natural History of the African Elephant (London,
1971)
Williams, Heathcote, Sacred Elephant (New York, 1989)
Williams, J. H., Elephant Bill (London, 1950)
––, Bandoola (London, 1953)

194
 Associations and Websites

elephant care international

166 Limo View lane, Hohenwald tn 38462, usa
www.elephantcare.org

friends of the asian elephant

687/2 Ram-Indra Road
Soi 32, Tharaeng, Bangkhen, Bangkok, Thailand
www.elephant-soraida.com

international elephant foundation

po Box 366, Asle tx 76098, usa
www.elephantconservation.org

international fund for animal welfare

411 Main Street, po Box 193
Yarmouth Port, ma 02675, usa
www.ifaw.org

iucn african elephant specialist group

po Box 68200, Nairobi, Kenya
www.iucn.org/afesg

iucn species survival commission

p/Bag x7, Claremont 7735, Cape Town, South Africa
www.iucn.org/ssc

195
save the elephants
po Box 54667, Nairobi, Kenya
www.save-the-elephants.com

www.asianelephant.net
Database of Asian elephants

www.blesele.com
Boon Lott’s elephant sanctuary

www.deselephantsetdeshommes.org
Includes up-to-date daily incident reports

www.elephant.chabucto.us.ca/
African elephant bibliography

www.elephantcountryweb.com
Treaties, conventions and legislation, including cites

www.elephant.elehost.com

www.helpingelephants.org
The Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation

www.helptheelephants.com

www.himandus.net/elephanteria/index.html
Collects elephant images in advertising displays and logos

www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/elephants/websites

www.natureartists.com/elephants.asp

196
 Acknowledgements

Robert Bieder, author of Bear in this series, persuaded me to submit a

proposal for Elephant. This book would not have happened without
him, and he has continued to take a keen interest in the project. Quite
apart from all the sources I’ve consulted, many people, some quite
inadvertently or unknowingly, have personally helped make this book
what it is. Those I can remember who have offered advice or support,
lent or given me books, pointed me to sources, made gifts, or wel-
comed me into parks and sanctuaries, I list here, with apologies to any
I’ve forgotten: Roy Bengis at Kruger National Park; Johan Binneman of
the Albany Museum; Harold Farmer, Jayne Glover, Jenny Gon, Ron
Hall, Pat Irwin; Malcolm Hacksley, Marike Beyers, Debbie Landman
and the staff of the National English Literary Museum; Chris Kruger of
the Elephant Sanctuary, Plettenberg Bay; Don Maclennan, Ben
Maclennan, Chris Mann, Goenie Marsh, Jamie McGregor; Wayne
Matthews and Bongani Tembe of Tembe Elephant Park; Dylan
McGarry, Sam Naidu, Katja Rathofer, Ann Smailes, Peter Smailes,
Mariss Stevens; Norman Travers of Imire, Zimbabwe; my mother, Jill
Wylie; and Professor Rudi van Aarde. Special thanks are due to
Professor Ric Bernard and Dr Dan Parker of Rhodes University for
reading and correcting parts of the manuscript. Grateful thanks to
Rhodes University for generous funding and professional support.

197
 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.

Courtesy Susan Abraham: p. 103; © Africa Geographic: p. 111; photos by

or courtesy of the author: pp. 8, 85, 103, 161, 166, 175; photo Greg Baker
/ap Images, courtesy PictureNet: p. 23; photo © Steve Bloom/
stevebloom.com: p. 36; courtesy the artist (Paul Bosman): p. 174; photo
© the Trustees of the British Museum, London: p. 8; photo by permission
of David Coulson/tara: pp. 66, 67; photo courtesy Sean Eriksen: p. 40
(foot); photo Eye Ubiquitous / Rex Features: p. 70; from William Fagg,
Nigerian Images (London: Lund Humphries, 1990): p. 80 (top and lower
left); photos courtesy David Ferris /Asian Elephant Art & Conservation
Project, New York: pp. 146, 147; photo Charles Haynes: p. 69; photos
Krishnanand Kamat/Kamat’s Potpourri (www.kamat.com): pp. 68
(top), 71; Killie Campbell Collection: pp. 52, 58, 176; photos courtesy of
the Library of Congress, Washington, dc: pp. 17, 28, 49, 72, 73, 77, 94, 107,
109, 113, 115, 121, 137, 141, 149, 156, 157; photo Herbert List: p. 80 (top and
lower left); photo James McCauley/Rex Features: p. 170; photos courtesy
John McKinnell: pp. 29, 30, 33, 35, 39, 42, 48, 55, 57, 110, 182; photo Ben
Maclennan: p. 63; photo © Marie Mathelin/Roger-Viollet, courtesy Rex
Features: p. 134 (foot); photo mdemon: p. 134 (top); photo courtesy Mana
Meadows: p. 40 (top); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – photo
Metropolitan Museum of Art Image Library: p. 75; photo A.E.W. Miles:
p. 22; photo Peter Oxford/Nature Picture Library/Rex Features: p. 6;
Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, Mumbai: p. 123; © Rose

198
Rigden, courtesy Footloose Enterprises: p. 178; photos © Roger-Viollet,
courtesy Rex Features: pp. 136, 155; courtesy of Royal bc Museum
Corporation: p. 20; from Sylvia Sikes, The Natural History of the African
Elephant (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971): p. 22; photo courtesy Patrick
Slavenburg: p. 32; photo snap / Rex Features: p. 41; from Raman
Sukumar, The Living Elephants, by permission of Oxford University Press
Inc.: p. 10; from the exhibit tusks! of the Florida Museum of Natural
History, photo by Jeff Gage © 2004: p. 14; courtesy Viv Bradshaw
Foundation: p. 15; photos © Zoological Society of London: pp. 24, 44.

reprint permissions
Extract from ‘The Graveyard of the Elephants’ published in Kites (Cape
Town: David Philip, 1990) © Chris Mann, by permission of the author.
Extract from ‘The Elephant’ in ‘New Yoruba Poems’ by E. A. Babalola
published in African Affairs (1954) by permission of Oxford University
Press. Extract from the eponymous poem in Absence of Elephants (Harare:
College Press, 1990) © Harold Farmer, by permission of the author.
Extract from ‘One Elephant’ published in A Ruthless Fidelity: The Collected
Poems of Douglas Livingstone, ed. Don Maclennan and Malcolm Hacksley
(Jeppestown, 2004) by permission of Monica Fairall.

199
 Index

Adams, Michael 14–15 Babur, emperor 52, 119–20, 133

Addo elephant park 8, 51, 108, Balan, P. 112
174–5 Balanchine, George 106
advertising, elephants in 26, Bapimbwe people 79
108–11 Barnum, P. T. 140–41
Aelian 54 Bassett, Angela 112
African art and artefacts 78–81, Bataista, Giovanni 76
80 Beard, Peter 94, 173
Akbar, emperor 84, 120, 133 Beku pygmies 65
alcohol 26, 109–10, 111 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 76
Alexander the Great 124–5, 147 bestiaries 82, 83
Angkor Thom 134 Bihar, Parbati 140
Angkor Wat 75, 135 blind men and the elephant 27,
Antiochus 127 28
Apulia, battle of 126 Blyton, Enid 98–9
Aristotle 147 Brehm, Alfred 15, 16, 75
Arrian 121 Brunhoff, Jean de 97, 99
Aryans 69, 117 Brunhoff, Laurent de 97–8
Ashanti people 79 Buddha and Buddhism 66, 72–5
Ashurbanipal 147 Burma (Myanmar) 43, 46, 58,
Auel, Jean M. 13 122–3, 130–31, 135–6, 138
Augustine, St 16 buildings 77–8, 101–2
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 113
Babalola, E. A. 88–9 Bushmen (San) 8, 63–4, 108
Babar 97–9, 98

200
Cambodia 75, 107, 118, 134, 135, Edward vii 119–120
137, 140, 168 Egypt 9, 75–6, 116, 125, 147, 154
Carrington, Richard 78 elephant behaviour
Catania 76–7 awareness of death 58–9
Chad 65, 172 brain and intelligence 48–9,
Chadwick, Douglas 162–3 57–60, 180
Chamberlin, Henry Harmon 45 communication 56–7, 180–81
Charlemagne 147 family dynamics 50–52, 53,
Chevrel, Isabelle 99 57, 175
China 11, 14, 23–4, 75, 118, 123, elephant evolution 9–26
135, 154, 156, 159, 168 elephant ‘graveyards’ 57–8
circuses, elephants in 13, 27, 30, elephant migrations 24–6, 47,
59, 102, 105–6, 111–12, 116, 170
140–53, 182 elephant physiology 27–43
cites 160, 162, 171 digestion 45–7
Clovis people 18, 19 diseases 19, 43
Conrad, Joseph 171 sexuality 53–6, 176
Cuba, Johannes de 84 teeth (molars) 33, 34
Cumming, Roualeyn 91 trunk 38–9, 35, 37, 39
Curzon, George Nathaniel, tusks 21, 22, 31, 32, 33–5
Marquis 119 elephant populations 138–40,
149, 160, 167–72, 175–6
Dalí, Salvador 86 elephant taxonomy 12–13, 21–5
Daniell, Samuel 24 elephants and humans
Dante Alighieri 154 capture and taming 116,
deinotheres 10 120–23, 145
Dickens, Charles 102 conflict with 164–6, 170–72
Diodorus 125 conservation and manage-
documentaries 112–13 ment 158–82
Dolgan hunters 15–16 contraception 181
Donne, John 104 culling 95–6, 172–81
Douglas-Hamilton, Iain 60, 93, hunting 19, 45–6, 64, 91–5,
160, 163, 179 94, 99, 115–16, 158, 166, 173,
Dumbo 41, 42, 97 175, 178
riding on 81, 83, 114–19, 145

201
 translocation 180–81 Hall-Martin, Anthony 51, 173
working 136–40 Hamilcar 129
elephants, dwarf 21 Hanabusa, Itcho 28
elephants, forest 25, 171 Hannibal 123, 129, 130–31
Elidoros 76 Hanno 129
Elkin, Mark 23 Harris, William Cornwallis 91
Ernst, Max 87 Harun al Rashid 148
Hasdrubal 129
Farmer, Harold 104–5 Haynes, Gary 19, 25
Fayoum depression 9 Helfer, Ralph 142
fiction, elephants in 60, 94–103, Hinduism 11, 66–72, 115–18
109, 111, 113, 142, 157, 171 Hohenwald sanctuary 142–3
films, elephants in 13, 41, 51, 59, Horton (created by Dr Seuss) 97
63, 99, 110–13, 142, 150 Hugo, Victor 101
Finaughty, William 91 hunting literature 91–4, 157, 173
folktales, elephants in 89, 90 Huston, John 99, 111–12
Folsom culture 18 Hyder Ali 121
fossils 10–22 hyrax (‘dassie’) 9
Frederick ii, emperor 148
Ice Age cartoon 13
Ganesh (Hindu god) 11, 54, Igbo people 79
69–72, 70, 71, 108, 117–18 Illiger, Carl 9
Gary, Romain 99, 183 Imire game reserve, Zimbabwe
Gaugamela, battle of 125 53
Giuliani, Rudi 47 India 23, 34, 36, 43, 52, 54, 59,
gomphotheres 11 66–9, 84, 87–90, 102, 112, 116,
Gordon-David, John 95 118–24, 131, 133, 135–7, 140,
Gowdy, Barbara 60, 96–7 154–6, 159, 164–5, 168, 170
Gray, J. E. 13 Indonesia 21, 118, 168–9
Gunderstrop cauldron 83 Indra (Hindu god) 67, 68
Guthrie, Dale 18 Innes, Hammond 101
Isidore of Seville 27
Hagenbeck, Carl 135, 150 Islam 75–7
Haggard, Henry Rider 94–5, 157 ivory 15, 33–4, 45, 76, 132, 147,
Haldane, J.B.S. 21 153–64, 171

202
Japan 11, 28, 145, 148, 150, 155, Lorenzo the Magnificent 148
159, 162 Louis xiv 148
Jataka stories 73–4, 117 Lozi people 79
Jeannin, Alfred 78
John iii of Portugal 81 Mahabharata 69, 103, 116
Judas Maccabeus 127 mammoths 13–22, 14, 15, 17, 20,
Julius Caesar 30, 131 63, 153
Jumbo (elephant) 143 manatees 9
Manifi’al-Hajawan 76
Kalidisa (Meghaduta) 68 Mann, Chris 58
Kandula 7, 8, 134–5 Marco Polo 135, 147
Kenya 13, 22, 46–7, 50, 61, 65, 95, Martin, Rowan 56
101, 110, 112, 159–60, 165–6, marula fruit 26, 46, 111
171–3, 184 Masson, Jeffrey 54
Khanna, Rajesh 112 mastodon 12
Kiltie, Richard 18 Matthee, Dalene 96
Kipling, Rudyard 37, 38, 111, 112 Maximilian, emperor 81
Knapik, Michael 62 Milne, A. A. 97
Kruger National Park 52, 95, 159, Minerva 76
173–6, 178, 181 Ming tombs 74, 75
Kublai Khan 135, 147 moeritheres 9, 10
Montaigne, Michel de 144
La Brea tar pits, California 12 Moss, Cynthia 50, 54, 57, 59, 60,
Lafferty, James V. 76–7, 78 93, 112, 172, 179
Lair, Richard 144 Mughals 52, 119, 133–4, 155
Leakey, Richard 93, 165–6, 172, Muhammad Adil Shah 119
179 music 97, 106–7, 144–5
Lear, Edward 104
Leonardo da Vinci 84 Nagarahole National Park, India
Leutemann, Heinrich 129 59, 159
Libya 65 Namibia 62, 64, 110
Lister, Adrian 21 Naqada ii 75, 76
Livingstone, Douglas 105 Nast, Thomas 108, 109
Livy 132 national parks 159–82
London, Jack 109 Ndlovu people 79

203
Ndovu people 79 Ptolemy 125, 127, 147
Nepal 75, 140, 165, 168 Pyrrhus 126–9
Neumann, Arthur 91–3
Niger 67, 170 Ramayana 69, 116
Nigeria 79, 80, 81, 88 Rao, Rajikha 102
Nilikantha 67 Rembrandt van Rijn 86
Noah’s ark 16 rhinos, elephants and 52, 52–3
North, John Ringling 106 Riesveld, Friedrich 141
Nyau people 79 Rig Veda 103
Ringling Bros circus 141, 150–51
Oard, Michael 16 Roca, Alfred 2
Odili, Chris 47 rock art 17, 18, 62–7, 63, 66, 67,
oliphaunts 132 68, 108
Orwell, George 119 Rogers, W. A. 17
Osborn, Harry 13 Romans and Roman empire 45,
52, 76, 83, 119, 121, 124–32,
Pachyderm journal 9 140, 154
Paris, Matthew 83 Roncevalles, battle of 132
Parker, Ian 160, 172 Rosny, J. H. 13
Pausanias 126 Rowland Ward records 158
Payne, Katy 39, 56, 60, 93, 172
Paynter, David 93–4 Saint-Saens, Camille 106, 158
Perdiccas 125 Sanderson, G. P. 121
Perthes, Jacques Boucher de 18 Saxe, John Godfrey 28
Physiologus 83 Schongauer, Martin 84
Pliny the elder 54, 140, 154 Schreger patterns 21–2
Plutarch 119 Schuster, Simon 15
poetry, elephants in 28, 29, 58, Selous, Fredrick Courtney 91, 93,
64, 65, 68, 88–91, 103–6, 126, 158
158 Seth, Vikram 102–4
Poole, Joyce 54, 60, 93, 172 Shaka 79, 157
Porus, emperor 125 Shand, Mark 140
Poulenc, Francis 97 Shapur ii 132
Pratchett, Terry 67 Shartz, Vijaya 102
proverbs 87–8 Sheldrick, Daphne 61, 93, 172, 180

204
Sheldrick, David 159–60 Urso, Bishop 81
Shepherd, David 86 usa 12, 14, 18, 19, 62, 108–9, 116,
Shoshani, Jeheskel 11, 13, 35 144, 149, 156
Siberia 14–16, 18, 153 Utagawa, Yoshitoyo 148
Smith, Alexander McCall 89
Smith, Wilbur 95 van Aarde, Rudi 167
Soldier, David 144 Veerappan 164
South Africa 46, 52, 63–4, 89, 96, Velikovsky, Immanuel 16
110, 145, 159, 160, 163, 173–5, Verne, Jules 100
178–82 Viertel, Pieter 111
Sri Lanka 24, 75, 88, 120, 122–3, Vladislavic, Ivan 109
134, 139–40, 164, 168
Stanley, Henry Morton 157 Webb, David 18
stegodons 11 Wen Wang 147
Stravinsky, Igor 106 Western, David 25
Sukumar, Raman 17, 24, 25, 43, white elephants 43, 72
118, 139, 163–4 Williams, Heathcote 29, 39, 103,
Sulayman (elephant) 81 105–7
Sumatra 21, 25, 138, 140, 168 Williams, J. H. (‘Elephant Bill’)
Swift, Jonathan 103 45, 46, 130, 131, 136, 138
Witsen, Nicolaas 15
temple art 69, 73, 74, 74–7, 84 Woolf, Virginia 102
Thailand 11, 74, 75, 111–12,
138–40, 145, 159, 165, 167–8 Yakutsk, Siberia 15
Tharoor, Shashi 102
Timur, emperor 132, 138 Zallinger, Rudolph M. 13
Tippu Tip 156 Zama, battle of 128
Tolkien, J.R.R. 132 Zimbabwe 7, 32, 53, 57, 64, 66,
tourism 66, 94, 166, 180–82 79, 81, 87, 104, 112, 145, 163,
Tsavo national park 47, 159–60, 166, 177
171, 173, 177 zoos, elephants in 7, 8, 15, 27, 56,
tsunami 139 59, 85, 114, 116, 137, 139,
Tungu people 14 144–53, 169, 182
Tutankamun 76 Zulu people 79

205