An old tale tells of six blind men and an elephant. The men, considered old and wise, had no idea of what an elephant was like, so they decided to go find one. When they did, each of them felt they knew what it looked like. One claimed it was a rope on touching the tail, one claimed it was like a snake on touching the trunk, another said it was a hard mud-baked wall, another said it was a fan on touching the ears, while one claimed it was like a spear on touching the tusks. The last man said it was like the trunk of a tree, tall and strong, on feeling the legs.
"For depending on how the elephant is seen, each blind man was partly right, though all were in the wrong".
It might be a parable about perception, but to me it also tells of how little we actually know of this magnificent beast, the greatest gardners, architects, engineers, teachers and guardians of our natural world.
Yes, they are the world's largest land mammals. Yes they are pachyderms, the last of the Proboscidea or animals with trunks and tusks. Their closest extant relatives are the sirenidea, the dugongs and manatees, mammals found in water and the hyraxes or Dacies, the largest of which weigh five kilos.
The mastodon and mammoth early ancestors of the Proboscidea family are as extinct as the dodos (the mastodon about 10,000 years ago and the mammoth about 4,000 years ago). While disease and grand climate events did most certainly contribute to their extinction , both species were also hunted extensively by people.
Today on World Elephant Day, 2014, we stare down the scope of the rifle at the last of the two elephant species on earth, the African elephant and the South Asian elephant of which our elephants in India are members.
About a hundred years ago, there were close to 4 million African elephants and about 200,000 Asian elephants. Today, we have about 450,000 African elephants and about 30,000 Asian elephants. This is mainly due to habitat loss, poaching and conflict with people.
A single African elephant can eat upto 400 kilos of food per day and drink about 300 liters of water. The large herds are nomadic, walking across vast landscapes, following the rain so as to not decimate their surroundings. In these grand walks, they feed, reducing forests to stubs, creating grasslands that then gave birth to and sustained numerous other species. Their dung nourishes insects, butterflies, whole colonies of animals while their big bodies, moving through forests, create massive natural firebreaks.
Their massive feet churn up the soil, allowing for growth and moisture to seep in, and their presence is a calm sustained blessing on the land. Their routes are called corridors and the matriarch who leads the group will know of every water and food source. Even in a drought, she will know where to go. Today, those corridors are mostly decimated, their habitats destroyed and fragmented, their paths criss-crossed with roads, mines, dams, villages, towns, fields, bridges and an endless sea of people.
Their tusks are in demand for an insatiable ivory market as if the entire magnificence of this great wise being can be reduced to jewellery or a carving.
Elephants love deeply. Their family bonds are unbreakable, their care for their young unending. They celebrate birth, mourn death, live life to the fullest and are deeply empathetic and caring. I have seen an entire herd stand and mourn their dead. I have seen a mother in rage rampaging when her child was trapped or killed. I have sat with villagers guarding their meager crop fields at night from starving herds and I have watched dead elephants pile up with dead people. It seems this world has no space for them anymore. Without them, wild landscapes would be unbearably altered, wild spaces tragically bereft and the last remnants of our human wild souls lost and tattered.
"We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self awareness and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the worst of human behavior", writes journalist Graydon Carter.
5 fascinating facts about elephants:
- Elephants sweat only at their toenails.
- Elephants have very advanced listening capabilities and can communicate over vast distances (as far as 4 km in normal conditions) using sound waves which humans are incapable of hearing.
- Elephants can stay afloat for a long time and swim well under water, using their trunks as snorkels
- Elephants have a special pouch in their throat from which they can suck out water with their trunk to use as a cooling spray
- A newborn baby elephant weighs 80-100kg and will stand up and be able to walk within two hours.
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