The breakdown of elephant culture
25th October 2006
An excerpt reblogged from Dave Pollard, who refers to an original article in the New York Times Magazine:
“I can’t pretend to summarize this remarkable analysis in a short post, so all I’m going to do is provide some key excerpts to pique your interest, and then tell you what I think its most important lessons are. I’m not going to try to capture the arguments and stories underlying those lessons — you’ll have to read the article to appreciate them.
Siebert attempts to understand a recent global phenomenon: The huge increase in violence committed by elephants against humans, against other creatures in their ecosystems, and against other elephants:
In “Elephant Breakdown”, a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, [psychologist Gay] 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.”
