[Kabar-indonesia] NYT-1: An Elephant Crackup?

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The New York Times Magazine
Sunday, October 8, 2006

An Elephant Crackup? 
          
Attacks by elephants on villages, people and other animals are on the rise. 
Some researchers are pointing to a specieswide trauma and the fraying of 
the fabric of pachyderm society

Part 1 of 2

By CHARLES SIEBERT

‘We’re not going anywhere,” my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered to me one 
morning this past June, the two of us sitting in the front seat of a jeep just 
after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda. We’d 
originally stopped to observe what appeared to be a lone bull elephant grazing in a 
patch of tall savanna grasses off to our left. More than one “rogue” crossed 
our path that morning — a young male elephant that has made an overly strong 
power play against the dominant male of his herd and been banished, sometimes 
permanently. This elephant, however, soon proved to be not a rogue but part of 
a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations registered just before the 
emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees and brush. We sat there watching 
the elephants cross the road before us, seeming, for all their heft, so light on 
their feet, soundlessly plying the wind-swept savanna grasses like land 
whales adrift above the floor of an ancient, waterless sea. 

Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left 
bumper, a huge female emerged — “the matriarch,” Okello said softly. There was a 
small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the secure 
cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia leaves are an elephant’s favorite food, 
and as the calf set to work on some low branches, the matriarch stood guard, her 
vast back flank blocking the road, the rest of the herd milling about in the 
brush a short distance away. 

After 15 minutes or so, Okello started inching the jeep forward, revving the 
engine, trying to make us sound as beastly as possible. The matriarch, 
however, was having none of it, holding her ground, the fierce white of her eyes as 
bright as that of her tusks. Although I pretty much knew the answer, I asked 
Okello if he was considering trying to drive around. “No,” he said, raising an 
index finger for emphasis. “She’ll charge. We should stay right here.” 

I’d have considered it a wise policy even at a more peaceable juncture in the 
course of human-elephant relations. In recent years, however, those relations 
have become markedly more bellicose. Just two days before I arrived, a woman 
was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a fishing village nearby. Two months 
earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant at the northern edge of 
the park, near the village of Katwe. African elephants use their long tusks 
to forage through dense jungle brush. They’ve also been known to wield them, 
however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a 
victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust. Okello told me 
that a young Indian tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago in 
Murchison Falls National Park, just north of where we were. 

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of 
Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their 
natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and 
crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become 
so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant 
Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to 
monitor the problem. In the Indian state Jharkhand near the western border of 
Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the 
past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in 
northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same 
period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who 
have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their 
revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from 
Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated 
their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks. 

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is 
causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric 
term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, 
young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game 
Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this 
abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been 
reported in “a number of reserves” in the region. In July of last year, 
officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the 
killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In 
Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male 
elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate 
of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities. 

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the 
environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, 
where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a 
leading newspaper warned, “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.” 
“Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people 
has dramatically changed,” Bradshaw told me recently. “What we are seeing 
today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in 
relative peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the 
term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the 
aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of 
elephants.” 

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers 
studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and 
kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. 
Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high 
levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for 
land and resources between elephants and humans. But in “Elephant 
Breakdown,” a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued 
that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, 
a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat 
loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal 
relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, 
and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now 
witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture. 

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet 
is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely 
befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense 
of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going 
out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to 
which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are 
now beginning to pay close attention. 

Once the matriarch and her calf were a comfortable distance from us that 
morning, Okello and I made the 20-minute drive to Kyambura, a village at the far 
southeastern edge of the park. Back in 2003, Kyambura was reportedly the site 
of the very sort of sudden, unprovoked elephant attack I’d been hearing about. 
According to an account of the event in the magazine New Scientist, a number 
of huts and fields were trampled, and the townspeople were afraid to venture 
out to surrounding villages, either by foot or on their bikes, because elephants 
were regularly blocking the road and charging out at those who tried to pass. 

Park officials from the Uganda Wildlife Authority with whom I tried to 
discuss the incident were reluctant to talk about it or any of the recent killings 
by elephants in the area. Eco-tourism is one of Uganda’s major sources of 
income, and the elephant and other wildlife stocks of Queen Elizabeth National Park 
are only just now beginning to recover from years of virtually unchecked 
poaching and habitat destruction. Tom Okello, the chief game warden at the park 
(and no relation to my driver), and Margaret Driciru, Queen Elizabeth’s chief 
veterinarian, each told me that they weren’t aware of the attack in Kyambura. 
When I mentioned it to the executive director of the wildlife authority, Moses 
Mapesa, upon my initial arrival in the capital city, Kampala, he eventually 
admitted that it did happen, but he claimed that it was not nearly as recent as 
reported. “That was 14 years ago,” he said. “We have seen aggressive behavior 
from elephants, but that’s a story of the past.” 

Kyambura did look, upon our arrival, much like every other small Ugandan 
farming community I’d passed through on my visit. Lush fields of banana trees, 
millet and maize framed a small town center of pastel-colored single-story cement 
buildings with corrugated-tin roofs. People sat on stoops out front in the 
available shade. Bicyclers bore preposterously outsize loads of bananas, 
firewood and five-gallon water jugs on their fenders and handlebars. Contrary to what 
I had read, the bicycle traffic along the road in and out of Kyambura didn’t 
seem impaired in the slightest. 

But when Okello and I asked a shopkeeper named Ibrah Byamukama about elephant 
attacks, he immediately nodded and pointed to a patch of maize and millet 
fields just up the road, along the edges of the surrounding Maramagambo Forest. 
He confirmed that a small group of elephants charged out one morning two years 
earlier, trampled the fields and nearby gardens, knocked down a few huts and 
then left. He then pointed to a long orange gash in the earth between the 
planted fields and the forest: a 15-foot-deep, 25-foot-wide trench that had been 
dug by the wildlife authority around the perimeter of Kyambura in an attempt to 
keep the elephants at bay. On the way out of town, Okello and I took a closer 
look at the trench. It was filled with stacks of thorny shrubs for good 
measure. 

“The people are still worried,” Byamukama said, shaking his head. “The 
elephants are just becoming more destructive. I don’t know why.” 

Three years ago, Gay Bradshaw, then working on her graduate degree in 
psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara, Calif., began 
wondering much the same thing: was the extraordinary behavior of elephants in 
Africa and Asia signaling a breaking point? With the assistance of several 
established African-elephant researchers, including Daphne Sheldrick and Cynthia 
Moss, and with the help of Allan Schore, an expert on human trauma disorders at 
the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at U.C.L.A., Bradshaw 
sought to combine traditional research into elephant behavior with insights 
about trauma drawn from human neuroscience. Using the few remaining relatively 
stable elephant herds in places like Amboseli National Park in Kenya, as 
control groups, Bradshaw and her colleagues analyzed the far more fractious 
populations found in places like Pilanesberg in South Africa and Queen Elizabeth 
National Park in Uganda. What emerged was a portrait of pervasive pachyderm 
dysfunction. 

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A 
herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a 
somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young 
elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female 
caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. 
These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of 
established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their 
mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young 
females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off 
for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as 
mature adults. 

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and 
burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it 
with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the 
bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth 
of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm 
comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. 
This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication 
system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, 
from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with 
a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle 
anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — 
in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden 
change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a 
community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as 
several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet. 

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had 
effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with 
systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and 
translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and 
female caregivers (or “allomothers”) had drastically fallen, as had the number of 
elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In 
parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied 
contained no adult females whatsoever. In Uganda, herds were often found to be 
“semipermanent aggregations,” as a paper written by Bradshaw describes them, with 
many females between the ages of 15 and 25 having no familial associations. 

As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised 
by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, 
meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are 
coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional 
elephant life. “The loss of elephants elders,” Bradshaw told me, “and the traumatic 
experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain 
and behavior development in young elephants.” 

What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of 
anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various 
elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, wasn’t so 
compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched 
the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit 
behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other 
trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial 
behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various 
assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the 
perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families 
being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been 
tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be 
rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, “locales 
lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family 
structures.” 

In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to 
restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to 
the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently 
introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds 
in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature 
hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated. 

But according to Bradshaw and her colleagues, the various pieces of the 
elephant-trauma puzzle really come together at the level of neuroscience, or what 
might be called the physiology of psychology, by which scientists can now map 
the marred neuronal fields, snapped synaptic bridges and crooked chemical 
streams of an embattled psyche. Though most scientific knowledge of trauma is still 
understood through research on human subjects, neural studies of elephants 
are now under way. (The first functional M.R.I. scan of an elephant brain, taken 
this year, revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, a huge hippocampus, a seat of 
memory in the mammalian brain, as well as a prominent structure in the limbic 
system, which processes emotions.) Allan Schore, the U.C.L.A. psychologist and 
neuroscientist who for the past 15 years has focused his research on early 
human brain development and the negative impact of trauma on it, recently wrote 
two articles with Bradshaw on the stress-related neurobiological underpinnings 
of current abnormal elephant behavior. 

“We know that these mechanisms cut across species,” Schore told me. “In the 
first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain 
is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the 
infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these early 
experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like 
affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when 
these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a 
literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the 
emotion-processing areas.” 

For Bradshaw, these continuities between human and elephant brains resonate 
far outside the field of neuroscience. “Elephants are suffering and behaving in 
the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of violence,” she 
told me. “Elephant behavior is entirely congruent with what we know about humans 
and other mammals. Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain 
organization and early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar. 
That’s not news. What is news is when you start asking, What does this mean beyond 
the science? How do we respond to the fact that we are causing other species 
like elephants to psychologically break down? In a way, it’s not so much a 
cognitive or imaginative leap anymore as it is a political one.” 

Eve Abe says that in her mind, she made that leap before she ever left her 
mother’s womb. An animal ethologist and wildlife-management consultant now based 
in London, Abe (pronounced AH-bay) grew up in northern Uganda. After several 
years of studying elephants in Queen Elizabeth National Park, where decades of 
poaching had drastically reduced the herds, Abe received her doctorate at 
Cambridge University in 1994 for work detailing the parallels she saw between the 
plight of Uganda’s orphaned male elephants and the young male orphans of her 
own people, the Acholi, whose families and villages have been decimated by 
years of civil war. It’s work she proudly proclaims to be not only “the ultimate 
act of anthropomorphism” but also what she was destined to do. 

“My very first encounter with an elephant was a fetal one,” Abe told me in 
June in London as the two of us sipped tea at a cafe in Paddington Station. I 
was given Abe’s contact numbers earlier in the spring by Bradshaw, who is 
currently working with Abe to build a community center in Uganda to help both 
elephants and humans in their recovery from violence. For more than a month before 
my departure from New York, I had been trying without luck to arrange with the 
British Home Office for Abe, who is still waiting for permanent residence 
status in England, to travel with me to Uganda as my guide through Queen 
Elizabeth National Park without fear of her being denied re-entry to England. She was 
to accompany me that day right up to the departure gate at Heathrow, the two 
of us hoping (in vain, as it turned out) for a last-minute call that would have 
given her leave to use the ticket I was holding for her in my bag. 

“My dad was a conservationist and a teacher,” explained Abe, a tall, elegant 
woman with a trilling, nearly girlish voice. “He was always out in the parks. 
One of my aunts tells this story about us passing through Murchison park one 
day. My dad was driving. My uncle was in the front seat. In the back were my 
aunt and my mom, who was very pregnant with me. They suddenly came upon this 
huge herd of elephants on the road, and the elephants just stopped. So my dad 
stopped. He knew about animals. The elephants just stood there, then they 
started walking around the car, and looking into the car. Finally, they walked off. 
But my father didn’t start the car then. He waited there. After an hour or 
more, a huge female came back out onto the road, right in front of the car. It 
reared up and trumpeted so loudly, then followed the rest of the herd back into 
the bush. A few days later, when my mom got home, I was born.” 

Abe began her studies in Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1982, as an 
undergraduate at Makerere University in Kampala, shortly after she and her family, 
who’d been living for years as refugees in Kenya to escape the brutal violence 
in Uganda under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, returned home in the wake of 
Amin’s ouster in 1979. Abe told me that when she first arrived at the park, there 
were fewer than 150 elephants remaining from an original population of nearly 
4,000. The bulk of the decimation occurred during the war with Tanzania that 
led to Amin’s overthrow: soldiers from both armies grabbed all the ivory they 
could get their hands on — and did so with such cravenness that the word 
“poaching” seems woefully inadequate. “Normally when you say ‘poaching,’ ” Abe 
said, “you think of people shooting one or two and going off. But this was war. 
They’d just throw hand grenades at the elephants, bring whole families down 
and cut out the ivory. I call that mass destruction.” 

The last elephant survivors of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Abe said, never 
left one another’s side. They kept in a tight bunch, moving as one. Only one 
elderly female remained; Abe estimated her to be at least 62. It was this 
matriarch who first gathered the survivors together from their various hideouts on 
the park’s forested fringes and then led them back out as one group into open 
savanna. Until her death in the early 90’s, the old female held the group 
together, the population all the while slowly beginning to rebound. In her 
yet-to-be-completed memoir, “My Elephants and My People,” Abe writes of the 
prominence of the matriarch in Acholi society; she named the park’s matriarchal 
elephant savior Lady Irene, after her own mother. “It took that core group of 
survivors in the park about five or six years,” Abe told me, “before I started 
seeing whole new family units emerge and begin to split off and go their own 
way.” 

In 1986, Abe’s family was forced to flee the country again. Violence against 
Uganda’s people and elephants never completely abated after Amin’s regime 
collapsed, and it drastically worsened in the course of the full-fledged war that 
developed between government forces and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. For 
years, that army’s leader, Joseph Kony, routinely “recruited” from Acholi 
villages, killing the parents of young males before their eyes, or sometimes 
having them do the killings themselves, before pressing them into service as 
child soldiers. The Lord’s Resistance Army has by now been largely defeated, but 
Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for numerous crimes 
against humanity, has hidden with what remains of his army in the mountains of 
Murchison Falls National Park, and more recently in Garamba National Park in 
northern Congo, where poaching by the Lord’s Resistance Army has continued to 
orphan more elephants. 

“I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the 
elephants,” Abe told me. “I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. 
You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are 
over 200 displaced people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody 
lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were 
systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, 
and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are 
among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families 
there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our 
home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up 
with their parents killed — no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after 
them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No 
infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same 
thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are 
wild, completely lost.” 

On the ride from Paddington that afternoon out to Heathrow, where I would 
catch a flight to Uganda, Abe told me that the parallel between the plight of 
Ugandans and their elephants was in many ways too close for her to see at first. 
It was only after she moved to London that she had what was, in a sense, her 
first full, adult recognition of the entwinement between human and elephant 
that she says she long ago felt in her mother’s womb. 

“I remember when I first was working on my doctorate,” she said. “I 
mentioned that I was doing this parallel once to a prominent scientist in Kenya. He 
looked amazed. He said, ‘How come nobody has made this connection before?’ I 
told him because it hadn’t happened this way to anyone else’s tribe before. To 
me it’s something I see so clearly. Most people are scared of showing that 
kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing 
something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way 
I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But 
people are animals.” 

-End 1 of 2-

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