elephant lost boys

[rm]

Elephants are raping rhinos and attacking villages and it's because we've destroyed their culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

Freaky intense article.

“I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,” Abe told me. “I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. 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.”

...

“I remember when I first was working on my doctorate,” she said. “I mentioned that I was doing this parallel once to a prominent scientist in Kenya. He looked amazed. He said, ‘How come nobody has made this connection before?’ I told him because it hadn’t happened this way to anyone else’s tribe before. To me it’s something I see so clearly. Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.”

...

I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past June. 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.

...

“The city of the dead,” as Lewis Mumford once wrote, “antedates the city of the living.”

Comments

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Jesus fuck. Am I nuts if that makes me think it's the end times?

[sykii.livejournal.com]

I started tracking this story a couple of years ago after seeing more and more rogues on nature shows. I'm -very- glad the Times is writing about this, for all the good that will do.
It's awful, and tragic, and frightens me in ways I can't really articulate.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Also, since he's mentioned in this article, I am again reminded that we totally need to go see The Last King of Scotland.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think that elephants, unlike say dolphins (a species with an intelligence and social structure that also fascinates us) seem less naive than us (I would say perhaps dolphins seem more so) and as such, may be indicative of where we are going, or, perhaps where we've already gone but have insisted on not noticing.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Something very like that, yes. Elephants and some of the larger whales, as well.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I've heard about the problems with elephants in zoos, but this is truly odd, especially the part about elephants treating human remains like their own dead.

[rm.livejournal.com]

And that man in question -- the elephants killed him.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Yep. If this were humans, I'd assume either guilt, a desire to make the death look natural, or some sort of ritual sacrifice. With elephants, who can tell... It's rather chilling to think what they would say if we could talk to them.

[raaven.livejournal.com]

Utterly amazing. I've always suspected elephants of being more like humans than most people thought...

Wow.