Dale Peterson - Thirty-Three Ways of Looking at an Elephant

Trinity University Press

San Antonio, Texas 78212

Copyright 2020 by Dale Peterson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Title page image: Donovan van Staden / Alamy Stock Photo

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Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-59534-866-1 paperback

ISBN 978-1-59534-867-8 ebook

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To Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Cynthia Moss, Joyce Poole, Raman Sukumar, Andrea Turkalo, and all other heroes for their work on behalf of elephants

DONALD J. COSENTINO, JOYCE POOLE, COLIN M. TURNBULL, AND JAN KNAPPERT

FRANKLIN EDGERTON

ARRIAN

ARISTOTLE

PLINY THE ELDER

T. H. WHITE

ROUALEYN GORDON-CUMMING

W. D. M. BELL

U TOKE GALE

J. H. WILLIAMS

P. T. BARNUM

CHARLES EDWIN PRICE

CAROL BRADLEY

SHUBHOBROTO GHOSH

IAIN AND ORIA DOUGLAS-HAMILTON

IAIN AND ORIA DOUGLAS-HAMILTON

JOYCE POOLE

CYNTHIA MOSS

CYNTHIA MOSS

JOYCE POOLE

CARL SAFINA

CYNTHIA MOSS AND JOYCE POOLE

KATY PAYNE

JOSHUA M. PLOTNIK, FRANS B. M. DE WAAL, AND DIANA REISS

KAREN MCCOMB, LUCY BAKER, AND CYNTHIA MOSS

KATY PAYNE

LAWRENCE ANTHONY

LYALL WATSON

BRYAN CHRISTY

THE ECONOMIST

YUKIO TSUCHIYA

VU HUNG

ROMAIN GARY

For more than three decades, I have written about animals and conservation. A few years ago, it happened that a major publisher was planning to produce a large-format book of beautiful elephant photographs along with an informative background text. I was asked to write the text.

Thus began my education in elephants, which was among the most transformative experiences of my life. First, I sought the education of direct experience: to see, hear, smell, touch, and if possible communicate with elephants. The books photographer, Karl Ammann, and I traveled to Asia and across Africa in order to come into direct contact with individuals of all three species: Asian, African savanna, and African forest elephants.

We met Asian elephants by inserting ourselves into a teak-logging operation, in the northwestern mountains of Myanmar, that still used trained elephants to do things in places expensive logging machines cannot go. We rode elephants for two days out to the logging camp, and then we rode elephants for two days in return, so I got to know them up close, discovering, for example, that an elephants tongue is about the size and texture of a well-padded softball glove. I found that elephants are approximately as surefooted as mountain goats, which explains a good deal about how Hannibal crossed the Alps with war elephants in 218 BCE. I saw that when an elephant slips on one foot, there are still three left over to recover with. I learned that nothing in the world takes precedence over a baby elephants needs.

In Africa, the photographer and I followed and took pictures of savanna elephants in the magnificent savannas of Kenya (at Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park) and of forest elephants in the swampy ba (clearing) of Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the Central African Republic.

The three species (Elephas maximas in Asia, Loxodonta africana and Loxodonta cyclotis in Africa) are different enough in outward appearance that a nonexpert can soon learn to tell them apart, but individuals of all three are equally astonishing to see in real life. They have some almost magical qualities. They seem to exist behind their noses and ears, rather than behind their eyes as we people do, and they can move slowly enough to test the patience of most ordinary human beingsor run fast enough to challenge anyones fortitude. They can generate a deafening blast of sound, when the occasion calls for it, or they can be as quiet as a soft breeze for as long as they choose. They can appear when you least expect them, and they may disappear when you dont. They live in families with angelic babies, wildly playful youngsters, and fiercely protective moms, all guided by the sober leadership of grand matriarchs.

Among elephants most obvious features are their formidable size and strength. Their amazing intellectual, cognitive, and emotional qualities are less obvious and yet, I think, far more interesting and worth knowing about. And they are best learned not from direct contact but rather from indirect contact, through examining the writings of scholars, scientists, thinkers, and doers with elephant experience. Such an examination was, of course, the second part of my education in elephants, and it is what I recapitulate in this reader, which is, I believe, the only significant anthology of primary historical, cultural, and scientific writings about elephants.

I have included folktales from across Africa, sacred commentary from ancient India, historical recollections from Burma (now Myanmar), informed fiction from mid-twentieth-century Vietnam, childrens literature from post-World War II Japan, classical writings that originated in Greece and Rome, a piece translated from Latin by medieval scribes, exposs of abuse written by Indian and American journalists, colonial writings fresh from the pens of ferocious ivory hunters, and several samples of the scientific literature from the second half of the twentieth century. I have chosen all these selections based on literary and dramatic qualities as well their relevance in the long history of elephants, although it is, to be more accurate, the long history of elephants as people have seen and thought about them. The true history of elephantsdivorced as it must be from the bias and ignorance, greed and cruelty, hopes and dreams that so characterize our own specieshas yet to be told.

DONALD J. COSENTINO, JOYCE POOLE, COLIN M. TURNBULL, AND JAN KNAPPERT