One
of the reasons a lot of readers like my blog is that I summarize,
synthesize, compact and distill the essence of long books and articles
into short, digestible posts. It's not often that I ask readers to read
something long, word for word, and carefully. But today I'm going to do
just that. You'll need at least an hour to read Charles Siebert's very
long (10 magazine/web pages) article An Elephant Crackup in the NYT Magazine. But set that time aside and do it. I think you'll find the investment worthwhile.
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.
The factors that
precipitated this collapse are eerily and ominously similar to those
that have shattered some of the most dysfunctional segments of modern
human societies:
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
elephant elders," Bradshaw told me, "and the traumatic experience of
witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and
behavior development in young elephants."...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.
UCLA psychologist Allan Shore explains the consequences of this:
"In
the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the
emotional brain is impacted by 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."
The result is psychological
breakdown, first of individuals and then as it cascades, of whole packs
and societies. Ugandan wildlife management consultant Eve Abe describes
the parallels between the behaviours of displaced and orphaned humans
and elephants victimized by violence during and since the time of Idi
Amin:
"The families there are
just broken. I know many of them...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."
Siebert
goes on to tell the story of Misty, an elephant treated cruelly by
American circuses for decades, as she is treated for both tuberculosis
and a horrific case of post-traumatic stress disorder that caused her
to become unmanageably violent. The story has a happy ending, and it's
a story that should be told to every child, and to every adult who
believes animals are incapable of intelligent thought and profound
feeling. It's a story of tremendous hope and understanding.
In
fact, Siebert's entire article will probably stay with you long after
you read it, haunting you with its significance not only for what it
tells us about our tragic modern disconnection from all-life-on-Earth,
but for what it bodes for the future of our profoundly psychologically
damaged species. Please, just read it, without judgement, and let
yourself think about it, absorb it. Let it change you, as it did me.
. . . . .
Wise
men have often advised us to study the lessons of history to better
understand how to cope with problems of the present. Now we have the
opportunity to study objectively what happens when a species that has a
peaceful, tens-of-millennia-old largely unchanged culture suddenly
faces the breakdown of that culture as a result of stress, and learn
what that means for our own species' fragmenting and
horrifically-stressed culture. I have posited that, in natural
environments, as illustrated in the graphic above, human population
increases with food availability, and decreases with prevalence of
natural predators. Usually that keeps numbers of humans and other
creatures in balance, a function of the carrying capacity of the land
and the interconnectedness of the entire ecosystem and food chain. When
numbers get too high, a stress response pulls them back down either by
increasing vulnerability to disease, or in extreme cases, as a last
resort, by increased violence against their own kind.
This is, I believe, what is happening to elephants, which have been shown, in research like that in Jeff Masson's When Elephants Weep,
to be very intelligent and very emotional creatures (much like our
species). The difference is that the stress is being caused not by an
unnatural increase in numbers, but by an unnatural decrease in their
livable habitat, due to relentless human encroachment. In a couple of
generations, we are witnessing in a noble and gentle species, one that
has thrived on this planet much, much longer than we have, the kind of
psychological and social breakdown leading to self-destructive and
massively violent behaviour that has taken tens of millennia to
manifest itself in our own species, because in our case it occurred
much more gradually.
There are important lessons here. I hope
enough people will take the time to learn them, ponder them, and act on
them. Our willingness and ability to do so will be a measure of our
humanity, and a barometer for our own species' future health and
survival.
Thanks to my KM colleague Howard Deane for the link. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
