"The much more enduring tradition is simple indifference. If we reject and dread our own advance of years and buy Harley-Davidson motorcycles in rebellion, when it comes to old age in the natural world we manage a striking lack of awareness. In 2009, Anne Innis Dagg published The Social Behavior of Older Animals, one of the rare academic titles dedicated to aged beasts. In it she admits that her own early fieldwork with camels and giraffes reported almost nothing about the elders of the species, an omission that she found to be widespread in scientific papers.
Ignorance tends to have consequences, and here we might revisit the pachyderms, this time in apartheid-era South Africa. In the early 1980s, the elephant population was swelling in Kruger National Park, and wildlife managers decided to dart numbers of adult elephants from the air and then shoot them to death on the ground, often in plain view of the juveniles. The youngsters were then rounded up and sent to other parks and reserves, with about forty ending up in Pilanesberg National Park, several hundred miles to the southwest. It must have seemed like a logical if gruesome act of conservation: reduce overpopulation in one place and spread the wealth of the species to others.
More than a decade later, field biologists in Pilanesberg noted what they termed a “novel situation” emerging. White rhinoceros, a species that had been bred back from the brink of extinction, appeared to be suffering, for the first time on record, high mortality from elephant attacks. Between 1992 and 1998, elephants were suspected in the deaths of forty-nine rhinos—a massacre.
The culprits turned out to be the orphaned young males from Kruger. The empathetic conclusion to leap to would be that the elephants’ berserk behavior was rooted in the trauma they’d endured as calves, and in fact there is no way to rule out that possibility. As in Tarangire, however, the investigation turned in time to a question of generations.
As they approach maturity, male elephants enter a rutting condition known as musth, during which testosterone floods their systems so fiercely that even their posture is changed. The adolescent males in Pilanesberg were entering musth too young and staying in it too long; one suspected rhino killer was finally culled after remaining in musth for as many as five months, a length of time that would be unusual even for a male twice its age. Under more natural circumstances—that is, in an elephant herd not composed of transplanted and possibly traumatized orphans—the adolescent musth periods are cut short by apparently withering encounters with larger, older males. After standing down to a dominant male, the rush of hormones stops, in some cases in a matter of minutes.
As a test, six older male elephants were introduced to Pilanesberg. The killing of rhinoceroses ceased, and the outbreak of elephantine violence was blamed on “a lack of adult supervision,” but more particularly, a lack of elders. Elephants are one of the few species in which the importance of older animals is coming to be acknowledged. Without them, the Pilanesberg orphans acted in a way so far outside of pachyderm norms that it seems fair to label it insane.
Evidence of the preferential hunting of the oldest animals—easy to find, meaty, often less dangerous than in their prime—reaches back at least to the Middle Stone Age, and today harvesting by humans is the leading cause of adult mortality in an increasing number of species. In the case of the African elephants, the “behemoths”—matriarchs and patriarchs in the sixth and seventh decades—have already been decimated, and the remaining elders remain the choice of poachers seeking larger ivory tusks."
- More Here
Ignorance tends to have consequences, and here we might revisit the pachyderms, this time in apartheid-era South Africa. In the early 1980s, the elephant population was swelling in Kruger National Park, and wildlife managers decided to dart numbers of adult elephants from the air and then shoot them to death on the ground, often in plain view of the juveniles. The youngsters were then rounded up and sent to other parks and reserves, with about forty ending up in Pilanesberg National Park, several hundred miles to the southwest. It must have seemed like a logical if gruesome act of conservation: reduce overpopulation in one place and spread the wealth of the species to others.
More than a decade later, field biologists in Pilanesberg noted what they termed a “novel situation” emerging. White rhinoceros, a species that had been bred back from the brink of extinction, appeared to be suffering, for the first time on record, high mortality from elephant attacks. Between 1992 and 1998, elephants were suspected in the deaths of forty-nine rhinos—a massacre.
The culprits turned out to be the orphaned young males from Kruger. The empathetic conclusion to leap to would be that the elephants’ berserk behavior was rooted in the trauma they’d endured as calves, and in fact there is no way to rule out that possibility. As in Tarangire, however, the investigation turned in time to a question of generations.
As they approach maturity, male elephants enter a rutting condition known as musth, during which testosterone floods their systems so fiercely that even their posture is changed. The adolescent males in Pilanesberg were entering musth too young and staying in it too long; one suspected rhino killer was finally culled after remaining in musth for as many as five months, a length of time that would be unusual even for a male twice its age. Under more natural circumstances—that is, in an elephant herd not composed of transplanted and possibly traumatized orphans—the adolescent musth periods are cut short by apparently withering encounters with larger, older males. After standing down to a dominant male, the rush of hormones stops, in some cases in a matter of minutes.
As a test, six older male elephants were introduced to Pilanesberg. The killing of rhinoceroses ceased, and the outbreak of elephantine violence was blamed on “a lack of adult supervision,” but more particularly, a lack of elders. Elephants are one of the few species in which the importance of older animals is coming to be acknowledged. Without them, the Pilanesberg orphans acted in a way so far outside of pachyderm norms that it seems fair to label it insane.
Evidence of the preferential hunting of the oldest animals—easy to find, meaty, often less dangerous than in their prime—reaches back at least to the Middle Stone Age, and today harvesting by humans is the leading cause of adult mortality in an increasing number of species. In the case of the African elephants, the “behemoths”—matriarchs and patriarchs in the sixth and seventh decades—have already been decimated, and the remaining elders remain the choice of poachers seeking larger ivory tusks."
- More Here
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