Chapter 11 nine elephants

man's most powerful servant ★Wild or domesticated There are two species of proboscis living on the earth: the Asian elephant and the African elephant.Elephants generally found in the forests of West Africa are sometimes called pygmy elephants, and some scholars have assigned them to a separate species, the round-eared elephant, although it is probably only a subspecies.In comparison, it is noticeably smaller in size and has rounder ears. In the past, mammoths and mastodons appeared in some parts of North and South America, Europe and Asia, but thousands of years ago, around the end of the Pleistocene era, most of these elephants were extinct, but some continued to survive, so humans or Human ancestors were able to hunt them.However, apart from the need for hunting, only the two extant elephants are important in terms of human use of animals.Humans neither rode mammoths nor used woolly mastodons as trail-blading machines to aid in logging.

However, what humans have done to the current two elephants mainly revolves around an important question: whether humans have ever domesticated these two elephants.Although there are countless documents that humans did do this, I personally have a different view; to some extent, humans did use elephants, but this is a completely different thing from livestock.Man has never been involved in the breeding of elephants, and so has not yet transformed the prototype of the animal he kept bringing back from the wild.An elephant that has been raised by humans and worked for humans for a year or two is still the same when it is released, and so are the offspring it has produced (which is the point).

Typically, when Asian owners wish to use a female elephant to produce offspring, they release her to mingle with nearby wild elephants.After an appropriate period of time, or after observing that it has mated, the female elephant is lured back to the pen by a professional trainer or mahour.This is a very high skill elephant riding expertise, not everyone has this ability. An important concept, however, is that breeding of elephants is entirely random, as far as the owner is concerned; female elephants mated.Relying on dominance relationships in wild elephant herds for mating between male and female elephants is not quite the same genetic manipulation through breeding as we know it in livestock.Jersey cattle don't look or act like aurochs, Polish Chinese sows don't look like European wild boars, and Chihuahuas and cocker spaniels don't bear much resemblance to North American gray wolves.A slave elephant, however, looks exactly like a wild elephant; it is the same animal that humans brought in from the wild to work.Therefore, elephants are only used by humans and have not been domesticated.

Why are elephants in pens not bred like other farmed animals?There are several reasons for this.There are very few male elephants that can cooperate with humans and breed in pens. Those male elephants that can take on the responsibility of breeding elephants are often extremely dangerous and difficult to control.There may also be draft bull elephants that are docile enough to serve as breeding elephants and tolerate human control, but I've never heard of them.There are about 30 breeding male elephants in American zoos, which is the maximum limit for elephants in pens.The only bull elephant I personally know of, at the Portland, Oregon Zoo, attempted to kill me, or anyone in his sphere of influence; he was just plain bloodthirsty.

Standard daily service elephants are by no means easy animals to control.A non-breeding bull elephant I worked with on a film in Sri Lanka killed ten victims in his lifetime; he killed nine drivers who more or less pissed him off, Then, on a particularly unlucky day, while passing a village street, it picked on a passer-by.At the time, both the passerby and the elephant were on their way to work. Rama is a handsome, tall, extremely cunning and very powerful long-toothed animal, and it also has bad tempers.Because of its extraordinary value, worth at least about five thousand dollars, when it did take the life of its mahout, a new trainer who may be smarter took the place of the previous mahout.If you correctly estimate the currency value at that time, the monthly salary of an elephant driver at that time was equivalent to US$12. In the jungles of Asia, no one would shoot an animal worth US$5,000 for a laborer with a monthly salary of US$12. .This is the real inside story of using elephants.Incidentally, Rama's owner probably never even saw Rama or the people it killed.It is usually a conglomerate of urban businessmen who own work elephants; they invest their money in work elephants and lease them to timber companies or wherever else they are needed.

The other job I was assigned was also in Sri Lanka, and right next to the bridge in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, I went to a sawmill that had just been razed to the ground by a bull elephant who was working there.The bull elephant wasn't an elephant, just a working animal that worked in the sawmill.Frustrated by something, he tore down the factory and damaged a few cars by stepping on or overturning the ground.When he had finished venting and felt satisfied, he strode over the flattened tin roofs and wandered leisurely into the jungle, whereupon an expert immediately chased the bull elephant and lured him back into chains. chain.

Working elephants can be extremely dangerous, and breeding male elephants found and captured in the wild can be even more dangerous.Another complication is that you cannot know in advance whether a male elephant will be able to breed in captivity.Since the vast majority of male elephants cannot be bred in captivity, and capturing mature male elephants is costly and dangerous, breeding elephants can only be done at random, without genetic selection or focusing on certain valuable, human-preferred traits , therefore, it is not a breeding behavior combined with real livestock breeding. The second myth about elephants in service to humans (the first is that elephants are domesticated for humans), regardless of how we describe the Asian elephant, is the only one that has ever involved elephant husbandry.In fact, African elephants were probably used by humans long before Asian elephants. At least, humans used African elephants as animals for service and war a long time ago. It may have been used near the Nile River Valley in the earliest days of the Egyptian dynasty. They are gone.Before the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle had been able to describe the situation of humans capturing and training wild elephants in Africa. At that time, this was considered an ancient tradition.

Also in the fourth century BC, King Ptolemy established camps for capturing and training wild elephants in present-day Sudan and Ethiopia.By 277 B.C. the Carthaginians were already using elephants for service.In 218 BC, Hannibal led thirty-seven African elephants across the Alps. Later, the Romans trained elephants for war use, which were also African elephants.These events, while all recent, are based on time-honored traditions. By the early 20th century, in the Congo, elephants were being trained by humans and pictured with local drivers.What is puzzling, however, is why they, unlike Asian elephants, have not become important economic drivers on their lands.When one considers the amount of work that trained elephants can provide, and the cultural wealth they can provide to humans, we are amazed that humans have somehow lost control of African elephants.Therefore, we must start in Asia to gain insight into the unusual relationship between intelligent, inherently dangerous, wild animals and the economic and cultural needs of human beings.

★Human's perception of elephants Elephants have been found in Asia for a long time, and they are regarded as a symbol of extraordinary intelligence.In Indian mythology, Ganesha (Ganesha) usually refers to the god of elephant head and human body. Rajas (Rajas) usually represents elephants or elephant gods, and all elephants in Asia are dedicated to the sun god. As for Buddha, He himself is said to be like a well-trained elephant.There have been thousands of descriptions of the elephant across Asia since ancient times; it is a permanent symbol of strength, memory, authority, wisdom and industriousness.

Humans are likely to over exaggerate the intelligence of elephants.Elephants are perhaps only marginally smarter than dogs, although they command a high degree of human attention and indeed display their cunning.A well-trained elephant for forestry work or related chores can recognize a set of 115 standard passwords and body signals; there are a total of 90 pressure points on it, and skilled trainers use pointed sticks Or stimulate these places with a prodded stick specially used for elephant taming in India, and then they can give orders.Whether the chores handed to the elephants are handling heavy loads, moving loads from trucks or sawmill benches, they can handle them admirably.In addition, they can also use their noses, tusks, limbs, mouths and foreheads to handle chores as the situation requires.Legend has it that elephants have a strong memory and they will never forget things. In fact, the so-called forever just means a long time.Elephants have a very long lifespan. A lifespan of 70 years is indeed quite long, but it is actually not a big deal.

Elephants are creatures of habit, and if they are trained to call it a day at 2:45 p.m. and walk to the river to be scrubbed with coarse coconut husks by their driver, then it is best for them to follow the rules. This schedule works and rests. In the past, elephants killed elephant drivers who did not play according to the rules.In fact, the connection between the mahout and the elephant is strengthened by the mahout's routine brushing of the elephant; brushing is not only good for the elephant's skin, but more importantly, It prolongs the life of the mahout. There are many techniques for capturing elephants, and the fact is that separating the super-strength animals from their wild herds yields not their genes, but the animals themselves.Keddah refers to a method of driving wild elephants that still occasionally occurs in remote areas such as Assam in India and the Chittagong Hill Tracts in eastern Bangladesh.The crowd beats drums, blows whistles and carries torches to drive the wild elephants into the stables. Once the wild elephants are quiet in the stables, there will be several special drivers riding the assistant elephants specially used for catching elephants. Note], select a few of them from the elephant herd to attack.These selected wild elephants are constantly abused and cannot rest until they lose the will to resist.Then, during the training process, the helper elephants are again used to guide the wild elephants, and within a few weeks they are domesticated and able to receive basic instructions.This kind of training process is extremely cruel, but with the size and strength of humans, it is not easy to torture and tame animals as big as wild elephants.I watched this training at a summer resort in Bangladesh, and the matriarch looked dejected, with deep, festering bruises.It is a brutal training indeed; humans use violence to gain dominance. [Note] koomkie or koonkie, a trained tame elephant (mostly female elephant) in India, used to trap and tame wild male elephants. Since elephants have not been bred by human selection, there is no such thing as a breed.However, humans still distinguish elephants into various grades and quality, and the value placed on elephants also strongly reflects these traditional and somewhat subjective classification methods.The names used to classify elephants are all expressed in dialects and vary from place to place. The makhana is a mature but tuskless Asian male elephant.Its value depends largely on the type of work performed.For elephants, tusks are an important tool for handling bulky tropical hardwoods.In contrast, there are more tusks in Asian male elephants than in African male elephants. The koomeriah is a majestic tusk that is prized in forests, sawmills, and in religious or secular processions.It received the highest rating of any elephant and is characterized by a pair of long, heavy and very straight tusks.It is dark gray in color with pink spots on its trunk and forehead.There are many wrinkles on its skin, the bottom of the trunk is wide and powerful, the part where the tail connects to the body is also very wide, and there are many thick hairs at the end of the tail.The important thing is its posture, the body is thick and square above the limbs, and it is not too high from the ground.When I was in India, I was told that Kumelia doesn't get much sunshine under her belly.The Cumelia's back is broad and flat, and the flatter the better.Its ears are huge, its head is massive, its eyes are clear and not much discharge.Its paws are hard, with smooth and often trimmed toenails. The next level of Kumelia is dwasala, since it falls to some extent from the ideal.Even if it had short tusks, a large body, long or thin feet, or an arched back, it would still count as an important working animal, though not so highly. Last in the elephant pageant is Mreega, best described as resembling a deer.While he's presumably strong and can do a whole lot of work, you don't want your mama honeymooning with her in the forest with him; you want her mama to have something better object. These ways of classifying elephants are indeed in line with the way of distinguishing domestic animal breeds, and they are extremely aesthetic, but they are also a practical way of classifying animals that humans regard as working machines.Unfortunately, the number of these elephant species is actually a matter of chance.During a Qaeda operation, people tried to drive many wild Cumelia into the stables, but the result is still a matter of luck. People who work with elephants in forests and sawmills, or who control elephants in parades, don't have the same affection for elephants as do people who watch and go home and write children's stories about elephants deep.The mahout's approach to their living trailblazers is quite practical, for they are well aware that these animals have minds of their own.Every working day, the mahout has to deal with the thoughts of these animals and their occasional thoughts.It is necessary for the mahout to have a moderate advantage, but too much or too little can be potentially fatal.Compared with the caretakers of other working or meat animals, elephant drivers are more on the edge of the razor. In circuses and zoos, elephants kill more trainers and caretakers than any other animal.People who work with elephants have to keep an eye on the ups and downs of the elephant's mood as long as they are working. The two species of elephants still alive today may be facing extinction.Clearly, the populations of both Asia and Africa are out of control.Take Kenya as an example, where the average birth rate per woman is 8.1 baby, so how long can the elephant herd survive?Poaching for ivory is perhaps the biggest threat to elephants, but the expansion of agriculture and encroachment on elephant territories also contributes to the threat. In fact, wild elephants are not easy neighbors.Since their digestive system can only absorb half of the food they eat, their appetites are surprisingly large.Each adult elephant needs about three to four hundred pounds (136 to 182 kilograms) of food and 60 gallons (about 227 liters) of water per day.Even a few elephants can wipe out a village's food overnight.When elephants get bored, they will knock down a tree that may take a century or two to grow back, chew some leaves, and then move on to knock down another tree.They move over a wide range, so they are both wasteful and destructive.However, because their indulgence is not concentrated in one area, the damage caused is less obvious. Elephants in captivity are almost impossible to reproduce and are so few in number that breeding programs using captivity may fail to save elephants.Once the elephant's wild gene pool is wiped out, the entire species will not last long.In addition, the demand for ivory (which acts like a hard currency in many parts of Asia), and humans' reluctance to control their own numbers have contributed to the extinction of elephants. 【Note】Refers to the international confidence to accept as a currency for transactions.Usually hard currency must be the currency of a politically and economically stable country and be freely convertible.