Exploring the World, the Legend of Elephants

One might fault veteran journalist and author Shana Alexander for being a bit hyperbolic in claiming “[t]he elephant fires the human imagination like no other beast.” (What of the bear that dominates Faulkner’s famous novella or the whale that inspired “Moby Dick”?) But most people who become involved with intelligent species like bears, whales, dolphins, apes, even parrots, tend to feel their animal is the smartest, the most human-like, the most amazing. Indeed, the more we learn about the many and various species still living on our increasingly inhospitable planet, the more remarkable they seem and the more appalling the prospect of their loss.

Alexander first became interested in elephants in 1962 when she was sent to a zoo in Portland, Ore., to cover the birth of a baby pachyderm for Life magazine. Ever since then, she’s kept up with developments in the field. In her hugely entertaining and informative book “The Astonishing Elephant,” she proves that these beasts are as fascinating in reality as in myth and legend.

Elephants, Alexander points out, have been long perceived as benevolent, often god-like, creatures, from the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha to the sacred white elephant of the Buddhists. In real life, however, these sensitive, highly intelligent, usually peaceable animals can sometimes be dangerous. In a rather lurid chapter chronicling the story behind the disappearance of male elephants from American circuses, we read of elephants that suddenly turned on trainers, handlers or even uninvolved bystanders and gored, crushed or threw them to their deaths. Such incidents usually resulted in equally gruesome fates for the errant elephants: electrocution, hanging, poisoning or shooting. By the mid-20th century, almost all elephants in American circuses were female. (And when one female circus elephant, Alice, gave birth in 1912, she tried to kill her baby.)

But, as Alexander also shows, elephants in captivity behave very differently from elephants in the wild. When a huge, powerful animal that is accustomed to roaming over a wide terrain is confined to a zoo or made to perform circus tricks, it is not likely to be “normal.” Scientists studying wild elephants in Africa, for example, consider the females extremely affectionate and devoted mothers. Like humans, young elephants need a lot of maternal attention. A baby elephant does not even know how to use its trunk. “The problem,” explains Alexander, “is similar to that of a human baby learning to use his hands, and nothing is funnier to watch than a baby elephant trying to feed itself the way its mother does.”

No wonder Alexander discerns a kind of sadness in these beasts! Both the smaller Asian and the hulking, big-eared African elephant are poised on the verge of extinction: decimated by hunters and poachers, and, worse yet, losing the habitat necessary for their survival. Alexander also describes some of the dedicated conservationists working everywhere from India and Africa to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida to try to save the elephant.

The poet D. H. Lawrence, as Alexander notes, understood the key to elephant mating behavior:

The elephant, the huge old beast

is slow to mate;

he finds a female, they show no

haste,

they wait

for the sympathy in their vast

shy hearts

slowly, slowly to rouse

Elephants are choosy: It seems they really have to like another elephant before mating with him or her. And scientists have learned a lot more about their reproduction: the length of gestation (about two years), the aggressive behavior of males during their hormonally enhanced period known as musth, their strange internal anatomy, even the pheromone that signals when an elephant is reproductively “hot to trot.”

But there’s more to elephants than sex and occasional violence. Scientists who study elephant “language” have learned a great deal about the sounds the great beasts make to communicate among themselves. Elephants have been seen to weep; to mourn departed family members; to bury their dead under leaves and branches. One circus elephant reportedly learned to read words on a blackboard, marching at the word “march,” stopping at the word “stop.” A captivating blend of anecdotes, reportage, research, facts and legends, “The Astonishing Elephant” offers a multifaceted look at these complicated, impressive and endearing creatures.