the Incredible Elephant

Elephants are large, except for the pygmy elephant. Elephants are calm and easy going. Except when they are not. They are largely social animals and they are too big to attack, though a pride of lions occasionally brings down an elephant, and the Roc, mentioned in the tales of Sinbad the Sailor, ate elephants. An elephant never forgets and lives a long time. Let's hear it for the elephant. And hope they can survive the Ivory poachers.

The two main types of Elephant are the African and the Asian. The African Elephant is larger than the Asian Elephant and comes in two subspecies, the Forest Elephant and the larger Savannah Elephant. The Asian Elephant is smaller than the African elephant and has smaller ears.

There are reports of Pygmy Elephants living in Africa and Asia but the documented Pygmy Elephant is the Borneo Elephant which may be a new subspecies of elephant. Dwarf Elephants are all extinct. They were elephants that became dwarfs because they lived on islands. The reasons for this are unclear.

The Elephant's nearest living relatives are the Dugong, Manatee and the Hyrax. Since no other animal has developed a trunk like that of the Elephant the trunk has been cited as a problem for the theory of evolution and thus, through a leap of false logic, as prooof of the two biblical creation myths of the Old Testament. It is not considered good manners to raise the possibility that the uniqueness of the Elephant arises because God is an elephant.

Elephants, alone among land mammals, emit subsonic signals: These are between 14 and 25 hertz, below the threshold of human hearing. Around 1985 Katherine Payne, a research fellow of the New York Zoological Society, was observing elephants at Washington Park Zoo in Oregon when she felt unusual throbbing sensations in the air that lasted from 10 to 15 seconds. Payne and her colleagues found the sounds corresponded to a trembling on the elephants' foreheads where the nasal passages enter the skull. This trembling also accompanies audible vocal calls such as rumbles or purring sounds. Subsequent observations of Asian and African elephants indicated that the subsonic calls convey a variety of messages. If a calf screams, several adult females move towards it and start vocalising in low frequencies. Adults utter many subsonic calls as they begin to move as a group, or as they guide a stray baby back to its mother. Female elephants are only fertile for two days a month, when they may well be separated from males by several miles. It has been suggested that when bull elephants are in must. they listen for long-distance subsonic signals of females in heat.

Elephants communicate in infrasound ( but fortunately cannot emit sound at frequencies low enough to damage humans) while other animals emit ultrasound, sound to high for humans to hear – and young humans can hear sounds of a higher frequency than old ones. It is possible that we are surrounded by animals talking to each other at frequencies we cannot hear.

An article by Paul Sieveking in Fortean Times 47 described a number of cases where herds of (Asian) Elephants acted in concerted fashion as if waging war, or at least a vendetta against groups of humans. Some of these incidents may have arisen because Humans are invading and destroying the Elephant's habitat. At least one other arose because Elephants like alcohol and tried to steal beer from humans.

In 1974 150 elephants broke into an illegal still in West Bengal, drank a lot of moonshine liquor, and then proceeded to kill 5 people, injure 12 others, demolish 7 concrete buildings, 20 huts and several acres of corn. San Francisco Chronicle 20 July 1974. Just like football hooligans. One can assume they did not support the local team.

In November 1984 in Sumatra 60 Elephants burst out of the jungle and flattened the Village of Jawa. The inhabitants moved to another village several miles away. Two months later an elephant army, believed to be the same one, flattened their new village. The speculation was that the villagers has upset the herd in some way, but no one knew what it might be.

Elephants are clever by the way: In 1954 a herd of elephants was devouring a sugar cane crop in Terai, India, and a hedge was set on fire to drive them away. The elephants got water from a nearby stream, put out the fire and returned to the feast. Times 14 Aug 1954.

Elephants are more than just large grey quapdrupeds that can lift heavy weights and do circus tricks. They are intelligent social animals and have a sense of fairness and a concept of revenge. They communicate using sound too low for humans to hear and (this is speculation) may have a well developed language and oral culture of their own. Never underestimate an elephant.

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