Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
This NY Times Magazine article about the breakdown of elephant society and the sudden surge of aggressively violent behavior (elephants are raping and killing rhinoceroses, and are increasingly responsible for killing each other) is one of the most fascinating pieces I have read in quite some time. It's long, too much so to excerpt effectively, so very much worth reading to the end, as it's simply packed with information and powerful stories. I was especially struck by this at the end, about a man who had been fatally gored in an elephant attack:
As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we've arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that after the man's killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it. [...]
When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man’s body for his family's funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge. Human remains, a number of researchers have observed, are the only other ones that elephants will treat as they do their own. In the end, the villagers resorted to a tactic that has long been etched in the elephant's collective memory, firing volleys of gunfire into the air at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away.
(via)
Yeah that article was pretty hard to bear. I kept picturing the faces of elephants I have seen in zoos.
Do you know about Komar and Melamid?
Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist at October 27, 2006 10:56 PMSo I guess elephants are pretty sentient? I only had a dim idea of this being true, but this article sure does bring clarity.
Can't bear to see elephants in chains or zoos now. The veil is lifted. They have rights, they cannot be enslaved or hunted down. Wow.
If the human race burned itself away, leaving behind nature, perhaps elephants would become the next moonwalkers in million years. Or not. What they are is simply beautiful as is.
Posted by: Jon at October 28, 2006 01:46 PMWhoa...
"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."
Really. It boggles the mind. You'd think if that were the case, then young Urban Americans of all ethnicities would be...
Oh...
And then C.A. had to go bring up one of the reasons I dropped out of Art School. Now I am, like, totally bummed out.
Posted by: Sterling at October 29, 2006 05:26 PMthe subtext for the movie "boys in the hood," while perhaps a little non-pc, is probably the most accurate reason to what happened to black urban america.
the male role models were either dead, in prison, or had fled.
and then you know what happened next.
Posted by: jon at October 29, 2006 06:12 PMAw, come on Apostropher! Surely you and others here are not buying the liberal line laid down by the NYT and so-called "scientists" in that article? If elephants are not dumb brutes, but sensitive and traumatized souls, then it's obvious that simply "understanding" and empathizing with them will surely do them no good.
The elephants are crying out for "tough love" and need to be held fully responsible for their behavior.
On the other hand, contrary to the suggestions by posters above, I strongly reject the broader implication that dominant human societies have any responsibility for their own behavior in enabling or provoking negative behaviors, either from animal "societies" or from minority groups at home or abroad.
This article is nothing more than an indirect, but predictible and contemptible, attack by liberals at the NYT against both the war on drugs and the war on terror, and in favor of a host of muddle-headed government welfare and accomodationist policies that will simply encourage more bad behavior.
Thank God the adults are still in charge in the US government!
Posted by: SlouchingTom at October 29, 2006 09:25 PMSome might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.
Posted by: darling at October 30, 2006 06:38 PMYes, but we are made in the image of our divine Creator. The rest are the spawn of Satan. Do not allow them to seduce you!
Posted by: SlouchingTom at October 30, 2006 08:39 PMIf the human race burned itself away, leaving behind nature, perhaps elephants would become the next moonwalkers in million years.
You mean a Michael Jackson moonwalk? No way an elephant could do that.
Posted by: Gaijin Biker at October 30, 2006 11:35 PMMaybe a shape-shifting robot ninja elephant could. We are talking about a million years here.
Posted by: apostropher at October 30, 2006 11:46 PMI would pay to see a movie about shape-shifting robot ninja elephants set a million years in the future.
Posted by: Gaijin Biker at October 31, 2006 12:20 AMThey don't need thumbs, they've got the prehensile penii.
Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist at October 31, 2006 08:54 AMThe author of this article also wrote a very interesting one several months ago about abortion laws in Central America and their impact.
Posted by: Tlazolteotl at November 1, 2006 07:22 PM"The author of this article also wrote a very interesting one several months ago about abortion laws in Central America and their impact."
Yeah, I read that. That`s why it`s clear that this "feel-bad-for-our-fellow-sentient-creatures" piece is part of the liberal/NYT agenda to destroy America.
Posted by: SlouchingTom at November 2, 2006 11:17 AM