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For millennia, people all over the world have revered, adored, and exploited elephants. In Thailand, a pregnant woman ducks under an elephant's belly in hopes of having an easy delivery; a tycoon builds an elephant-shaped skyscraper; and pirate loggers feed amphetamines to their elephants to make them haul back-breaking loads. In India, milling worshippers dance with gilded tuskers at ecstatic temple festivals. From the steppes of Siberia to America's prairies, scientists have proposed restoring lost ecosystems by reintroducing the elephants and mammoths that once ruled them. And generation after generation of readers have delighted in Babar, Horton, and Dumbo.
In a kaleidoscopic account rich in historic lore, surprising science, and exotic adventure, Eric Scigliano traces an age-old, extraordinary relationship between species and shows how it still haunts and inspires us today. He explains how elephants may have been "nursemaids" to human evolution and how they have shaped history, art, religion, and popular culture as no other animals have. He joins a grueling chase after crop-raiding rogues in Sri Lanka and probes the bitter battles over the roles of elephants in zoos and circuses, revealing the enduring ecological importance and mythic fascination of these endangered giants.

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Describes the long-time historical relationship that has existed between elephants and humankind, discussing the ecological significance of elephants, prospects for their extinction, efforts to preserve the species, and the use of elephants in in warfare,

1

Human Nature and Elephant Nature

The people of India assert that the tongue of the elephant is upside down, and if it were not for that, it would have spoken.
— Muhammad Ibn Musa Kamal ad-Din ad-Damiri, Hayat al-Hayawan (ca. 1371)

By his intelligence, he makes as near an approach to man, as matter can approach spirit.
— Advertisement for “The Elephant,” 1797

Every creature, from a louse to a lyrebird, is a marvel of nature. But some marvels are just more marvelous than others — and none more so than an elephant. Look at one, a full-grown tusker, and see the image of the Other: huge and looming, weighing up to sixty times as much as a large man, by far the largest creature walking the earth today — “an animated mountain,” as the promoter Edward Cross boasted in 1820, when he offered Londoners their first exotic menagerie show. Its legs are pillars, its inch-thick skin a fissured topography, its dark eyes unnervingly tiny and remote. Its front teeth are gleaming tusks growing nearly as long as goalposts — the mightiest of fangs, fearsome lances in battle and powerful chisels and levers in work, borne by a creature that eats only plants. Weirdest of all its wonders, the elephant defies the laws of quadrupedalism and bilateral symmetry. Its nose and upper lip have fused to form a fifth limb, a trunk (or hasta, “hand,” in Sanskrit), the original multipurpose tool: a crane, forceps, whip, vise, noose, snorkel, shower, vacuum, jet blower, trumpet, bludgeon, and probe — a supple, writhing tentacle, moved by some sixty thousand muscles, which seems a thing of the sea, a precise but mighty instrument that can lift a log or a grain of rice and snap a man’s back — as John Van Couvering of the American Museum of Natural History puts it, “the ultimate in giant mammal design.” Indeed, the elephant stands for the entire world in a Buddhist parable that has spread worldwide. The Buddha’s disciples ask him to sort out the scholars’ endless debates over whether the universe is infinite and eternal or finite and created, and whether the soul perishes with the body. He replies that a rajah once gathered the town’s blind men and had each touch a different part of an elephant and say what he found. “A pot,” said the man who touched the dome of the elephant’s head. “A sail,” said another who touched its ear (or a fan, in one retelling). Others mistook the trunk for a snake, a tusk for a plow (or sword), the back for a mortar, the belly for a sack (or wall), the leg for a tree, the tail for a rope, and the tail tuft for a paintbrush. They began quarreling. Just so, the Buddha explains, are the preachers and scholars who, knowing one side of a question, claim to know the truth of it.
If a camel is a creature designed by a committee, what army of artists and engineers could have conceived all the elephant’s parts? Small wonder that when science-fiction pulp illustrators weary of bug-eyed insectoid monsters, they draw wrinkled, tentacled space elephants. Or that the fourteenth-century scholar ad-Damiri, in his treatise on the 931 creatures named in the Koran, noted that “if a woman dreams of an elephant, it is not a good thing, in whatever state she dreams of it.” Or that John Merrick, the “Elephant Man” of late-nineteenth-century London and twentieth-century Broadway and Hollywood, should be called thus to evoke his extreme deformity and lure the gawking crowds. Merrick himself, in a brief promotional “autobiography,” purportedly wrote, “The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my [pregnant] mother being frightened by an elephant.” This mumbo-jumbo was surely concocted by one of Merrick’s exploiters, but “Elephant Man” is apt nonetheless. Like the actual animals, he was a gentle soul and a sensitive intelligence in an outlandish body. And he was dragged about and displayed, a virtual prisoner, in tawdry sideshows.
Consider this monster again and all it shares with us. Elephants live sixty to eighty years, the same span as humans, if they are not killed by humans first and don’t wreck their health through bad habits; they also enjoy alcohol, and nineteenth-century captives were often given ale or whiskey to calm or reward them, and even as daily rations. The ploy sometimes backfired: some elephants were gushy, maudlin drunks and some turned mean — again, just like us. It’s recorded that Jumbo, the most celebrated elephant of all time, would share a large bottle of stout each night with his keeper, Matthew Scott, who pitched his cot by Jumbo’s pen. When Scott forgot himself and drank the whole bottle, Jumbo shook him awake and demanded his nightcap. Three of P. T. Barnum’s elephants once took a chill after some winteer labors and were given three bottles of whiskey each. The next day, now recovered, they put on the shivers to get more medicine.
A taste for intoxicanttttts suggests intelligence, and anatomy affirms what mahouts and trainers have long attested: elephants are very smart animals. Their brains are by far the largest among land animals — about twice the size of humans’, though much smaller as a share of body weight. Brain size alone is not a strict predictor of intelligence, but elephants’ brains are richly folded and convoluted, indicating sophisticated development, with expansive cerebral lobes, the seats of memory (at least in humans).More telling is the degree to which their brains grow after birth, an indicator of learning ability. Most mammals already have about 90 percent of their ultimate brain mass at birth. Humans have just 26 percent, and chimpanzees about 50 percent. Elephants have 35 percent.
From Aristotle’s day to the present, innumerable authorities have ascribed almost human “sagacity” and almost demonic ingenuity to elephants. When Seattle’s zoo elephants were kept in a dank old barn, one named Bamboo would sneak in pebbles each night, then methodically toss them through the glass windows that stood outside her bars. Keepers still puzzle over her motive: To get fresh air? To pass the time? (Elephants are famously restless at night, and sleep just two or three hours.) Or out of sheer mischief? A keeper at the Great Plains Zoo in Dubbo, Australia, once told me of the pleasure, or at least distraction, her elephants seem to find in turning their home into a shooting gallery: “Every morning we have to wash the feces off the whole elephant barn, starting with the ceiling and working down the walls. They toss it at the possums that crawl on the rafters at night.” A San Antonio keeper says his charges sling mud “whenever the gibbons next door make too much noise.” Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Williams, the legendary “Elephant Bill” who led elephant-borne refugees out of wartime Burma, spotted timber elephants plugging the wooden bells around their necks with mud, then sneaking silently into their masters’ gardens to steal bananas. Another domestic elephant, chained in the path of a flood, piled up broken saplings to make a dry perch. A wild South African elephant was observed digging a drinking hole, then plugging it with a large ball of chewed-up bark, concealing it with sand, and returning later to drink again. This suggests several behaviors once considered uniquely human: invention, foresight, deception, and making and using tools; elephants have also fabricated fly swatters, back scratchers, water sops, and poultices.
Even when they sleep, elephants resemble us. They snore, take siestas in the midday heat, and use hummocks and bushes as pi

Eric Scigliano, who has written for Outside, the New York Times, and many other publications, first became fascinated with elephants as a child in Vietnam.

The long history of human-elephant interaction has been a tug-of-war between adoration and abuse, as Scigliano's richly informative work ably demonstrates. Investigating the affinity that people around the world hold for these creatures, freelance writer Scigliano posits that humans may have more in common with elephants than any species other than apes. He explains how proto-man may even owe its descent from the trees to the world-changing power of elephants' ancestors. Elephants are second only to humans in their ability to transform the landscape around them and historically have spread over as much ground as we have. The author also notes that human life spans are similar to those of elephants. Early Europeans held the same racial prejudices against the African species as they did the humans of that continent, and the process of acquiring ivory helped usher in the slave trade. While pachyderms have been used in war and sent between nations as tokens of peace, they are now corralled in zoos and circuses, which, as much as they entertain, have sparked protests over animal abuse. In this clear and enjoyable work, Scigliano nicely balances this complex relationship using anecdotes from science and history, personal experience and research; he presents the many arguments of the fight for elephants' survival, spelling out the various positions taken by both supporters and detractors. (June 19) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.