As the incredible support that we at the Trust have from you, our stakeholders, proves, there is something so compelling about elephant – something iconic and almost alluring in their ways and the majesty surrounding them – that one can’t help but be drawn in by it.
This is nothing new. The elephant has been deified and adored by many varied and distanced civilisations. There are tribes in Kenya that consider elephant as the embodiment of past family members. The Hindu religion considers that elephant are the physical representation of their god Ganesh as the deity walks the earth. Even in Europe and the Americas, where elephantine species long ago went extinct, the elephant still acts as a mythologised representation of many qualities the varied cultures inhabiting there admire: long memories, careful and considered thought, patience, etc.
Perhaps because the elephant lives, for a western audience, more in this mythologised space than as a real and tangible living creature, Europeans and Americans find it easier than many of our neighbours here in Kenya to see just the majesty of these creatures, the majesty without the menace.
A huge amount of work that we do here with regarding elephant conservation comes in the form of community outreach programmes. Despite that many communities in Kenya share the same compulsion to see the majesty in the African elephant, this feeling can be overshadowed by the very real threat the species poses to human life, to livestock and to much-needed subsistence farms.
Increasingly, the Human-Wildlife Conflict is proving a tougher challenge for elephant conservationists than poaching. Stricter sanctions are being placed on poachers in Kenya and regular readers will know that these are having an effect. But conflict between elephant and increasingly large and widespread human populations are on the rise.
We use our community outreach programmes to educate on the value of biodiversity and how elephant conservation programmes can be profitable to local community groups.
We also spend a significant amount of our resources in developing innovative methods that protect communities in the Tsavo Conservation Area from the more damaging effects the iconic, but undoubtedly dangerous, animal can have. If you want to read more about some of our inventive fencing schemes, you can do so here.
Mythologising the elephant: What do we really know about them?
With western cultures so distanced from the elephant, some of the information we have on them has been caught up in the mythology around the species. Some of the ‘facts’ western readers will know about elephants aren’t, in fact, true. So, with this article, we thought we’d delve deep into the question of what we really know about elephant.
Elephant don’t, in fact, love peanuts
Perhaps promoted by Hollywood, in films like Dumbo, is this belief that elephant go mad for peanuts. It is, in fact, not true. Peanuts are found in neither the natural habitat of the Asian nor the African elephant. What’s more, apparently in attempts to test this theory, elephant living in captivity have been fed peanuts and most didn’t much like them.
Elephant aren’t (especially) terrified of mice
This mythologised piece of knowledge is a little more complicated to debunk despite that it does indeed need clarification. Elephant are spooked by mice certainly, and often. But it is not to any greater degree than they are spooked by any other small animals that dart about where they are hard to spot.
What’s interesting about this myth is that it has existed for a lot longer than might otherwise be presumed. The ancient Greeks reportedly peddled a fable of an elephant that was driven mad by a mouse’s climbing up its trunk. Perhaps, as it was told then, it was representative of some of the same messages interwoven into Christianity’s David and Goliath story.
Apparently, however, the fable spawned a very real study into why elephant are so afraid of mice. In the 1600s, a physician theorised that the elephant’s fear stemmed from the fact that elephant had no epiglottis (the flap of cartilage that cover’s a mammal’s windpipe when swallowing). And that the elephant was thus terrified of a mouse’s ability to cause its suffocation.
The elephant, it turns out, does have an epiglottis, just like every other mammal. The fact that this physician’s theory never questioned the whether its true aspect of the myth and only sought clarification on the why is testament to how enduring our ‘established’ facts are, even under a close eye. (And, perhaps, justifies this article’s existence)
Elephant are afraid of (the harrowing death squeals of) pigs
Elephant have a long association with warfare. Most famously, they played a part in the Carthaginian general, Hannibal’s, campaign against the Romans in the second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. But elephant had been used in warfare before then. One of Alexander the Great’s generals, Polyperchon, used them in Europe before Hannibal. What’s more, Ancient Chinese and Indian armies used them long before that.
Mice may not have been so useful a deterrent on the battlefields of the Shang dynasty or medieval Europe but pigs were. It was found that the squeals of pigs spooked elephant on the war path.
So, armies that came up against war elephant often tarred the backsides of pigs, fired them and then drove them toward elephant. The siege of Megara in 266 B.C., for example, “was broken when the Megarians doused some pigs in combustible pitch, crude oil, set them on fire, and drove them towards the enemy’s seemingly indestructible war elephants. As a result the elephants bolted in terror”.
Elephant do, in fact, have incredible memories
This is a very widely-known piece of knowledge on elephant and, unlike many other equally well-known ‘facts’ on this list, it’s true. The elephant, as the largest land mammal, also has the largest brain.
Absolute size cannot be directly equated to brain function. However, scientists use what is called encephalization quotients (EQ) as a measure of how size relates to intelligence. The EQ measurement compares an animals brain size with its projected brain size based off of its body weight. The higher the ratio between body mass and brain mass, the smarter the animal is considered to be.
Elephant have an EQ ration of 1.88. To put that into context, humans score a 7, chimpanzees a 2.5, and pigs get a low 0.27. They therefore score quiet highly in this estimate of intelligence.
What’s more interesting, perhaps, than this estimate of an elephant’s overall intelligence, is the fact that elephant have the largest temporal lobe compared to body size of all land mammals.
The temporal lobe is the portion of the brain that functions for the application of language and communication, spatial memory and cognition. This has often been suggested as evidence of the fact that, with regards to social intelligence and the elephant’s ability to remember watering holes other creature’s might have long forgotten, elephants are even more intelligent than we hominids.