Zach Rana
Dr. Linda Haas
Writing 39C
29 May 2016
The History of Research on Elephants and How it Relates to Poaching
Introduction:
In North Central Kenya there exists a tribe named the Samburu people who maintain such close relations with elephants that any member of the clan can call upon the elephants for assistance when needed. Many cultures throughout history have respected elephants for their strength, religious symbolism, and intelligence; and for centuries, people have trained and used them for a variety of activities such as war and building big structures, as Sri Lankans did by harnessing the strength and intelligence of elephants to help them build an intricate irrigation system (Poole). However, the extent of the cognitive capacity of the elephant has not been researched until the past century, and truly started with two scientists in the 1960s. One of these scientists is Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, an English zoologist, who is considered the father of the scientific study of social behavior of elephants, and his research starting in 1972 with the book Among the Elephants, paved the way for all future research on elephant cognition. The other forefather of the field is Bernhard Rensch, a German evolutionary biologist who performed preliminary experiments on elephant cognition and found that elephants can visually distinguish objects and perform tasks such as opening a box to obtain a goal, usually food (Rensch 45). The pioneering work of these two scientists set the stage for elephant research and most articles written today still reference back to their initial research.
Literature review:
Older research conducted by the aforementioned fathers of elephant research as well as more recent literature documents examples of elephant behavior showing their complex social structures, their communicative abilities, and their overall cognitive capacity. The research done shows that elephants are much more intelligent and sentient than we once thought, and live in complex societies that we must be careful not to disrupt.
Dr. Douglas-Hamilton’s student, Cynthia Moss, is an elephant ethologist (ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior) who specifically studies African elephant family structure, life cycles, and behavior. She is also the director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, and has authored many famous books including The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal, and Echo of the Elephants: The Story of an Elephant Family. In these books she documents her work with elephants and the detailed lives and social structures prevalent in their societies. Joyce Poole studied under her and is now a leading expert in the field and creator of a non-profit advocacy company called Elephant Voices. Moss and Poole wrote an article together in 1983 called “Relationships and Social Structure in African Elephants” that summarizes their observations of a group of elephants at Amboseli National Park. Through observing Echo, the matriarch, and her family over long periods of time, Moss and Poole noted that Echo spent more amounts of time with families she was closer to. They measured the strength of the bond she and her immediate family had to other families based off of specific greeting behavior. If a female elephant is not particularly close to another, she will simply touch her trunk to the other's mouth and move on. If however, they are very close, they will engage in what is called an intense greeting ceremony in which they run towards each other, then intertwine trunks typically while urinating and defecating (Moss 320). With this information in mind, Moss and Poole observed that Echo and her family only carried out this ceremony with each other, and one other family called “family EA.” They also noted that Echo and her family, dubbed “family EB” spent a majority of their time with this other family. Moss and Poole then realized that due to similar ear and tusk structure, the two families were related, and that this was the reason for their closeness (Moss 321). This study proves that elephants have intricate social structures that are based on families and relatives similar to those of humanity.
Two decades later, Karen McComb, a Professor Of Animal Behaviour & Cognition at the University of Sussex, did research under Cynthia Moss at Amboseli National Park. In a 2001 study, she found that the knowledge of the oldest member of a group of elephants can influence the knowledge of the group as a whole, signifying the importance of a matriarch such as Echo (McComb 492). In this study, McComb gave playback calls from various females to an elephant family. These calls had different response indexes based on how well the elephants knew the female. Thus the various calls elicit different responses in elephants: one response is called a bunching response, which occurs when an unfamiliar call is broadcasted and causes the elephants to pack into a tight group to protect themselves. Another is called a smelling response, in which the elephants raise their trunks to gather olfactory information about the source, and do not feel threatened. The study showed that families with a younger matriarch (around thirty years of age) had a lower probability of carrying out these actions properly than those led by an older matriarch (up to sixty seven years of age) because of a lower association index held by the matriarch to the playback calls of the other females. This shows that “families with older matriarchs appear considerably more adept at using auditory signals to correctly discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar females in the vicinity and respond appropriately,” as the figure below shows (McComb 493). Thus, the matriarch plays an integral role in the lives of all who are part of her family because the information she stores is used by all members. If poachers kill the matriarch of a herd, all of her knowledge goes down with her and the herd has less of a chance of survival.
Figure 1. Elephant Association Index and Probability of Response Higher for Older Matriarch. McComb et. al.
Since elephants have such tight-knit families, Graeme Shannon, a young behavioral ecologist under the mentorship of Moss, Poole, and McComb, studied the effects of social disruption in African elephant communities in 2013. He observed that a severely disruptive event could lead to unnatural behaviors later in life such as constant fear, hyper aggression, and infant abandonment (Shannon 2). Also, due to lack of role models, young elephants may not learn how to respond appropriately in certain situations and may put themselves in danger because of this. To test these theories, Shannon used playback calls on two populations of elephants: one is the Amboseli elephants, which have been fairly undisturbed, while the other is the Pilanesberg elephants, who are all orphans that were relocated after their older family members were killed off. In the experiment, the two groups were played calls from familiar, unfamiliar, and alien members, and then played calls based on age. In each of these tests, the elephants were supposed to bunch more often when calls of unfamiliar elephants and calls signifying higher age (and thus higher social status) were played, and the Amboseli elephants did while those from Pilanesberg did not. The Pilanesberg elephants bunched up more often when given a familiar call and less often when given an alien one, which is the opposite of what they should have done. As Shannon states, “Responding appropriately to more dominant individuals within the social hierarchy, and thus avoiding escalated interactions, is fundamental to emerging as successful within complex fission-fusion societies where individuals may come into contact with hundreds of others in the population as they move and feed” (Shannon 3). Therefore it is imperative that elephants respond appropriately because otherwise they risk unnecessary social confrontations that could hurt their chances of survival and reproductive success (Shannon 4). Since the Pilanesberg elephants faced the challenges of culling and translocation to a new area, their decision – making abilities and therefore their chances of survival were impaired.
Philosophical Questions:
Based on the findings mentioned above, it is clear that elephants are highly cognitive beings in that they are adaptive communicators, and rely on intricate social structures to enhance their survival. If these structures are tampered with through traumatic experiences, it weakens the group’s communicative abilities and hence their chance of survival. Thus, findings from Shannon’s study provide valuable documented evidence for the harmful effects of poaching and capture for captivity. This clearly demonstrates the effect of loss of family members on disrupting adaptive familial survival patterns. Elephants are deeply sentient and social similar to humans, and because they can get traumatized from such experiences, it is our duty to advocate against the poaching and capturing of elephants.
While the research above provides solid evidence that elephant social orders are disrupted by poaching, some might counter the arguments against poaching by asking, “Why should we care about elephants in the first place? They are not human; and we should be more concerned with the well-being of humanity.” Many assert that since we are more intelligent and have higher moral standards we can treat other animals worse than we treat each other. While it is true that we should try to relieve human suffering, we should be careful not to prioritize ourselves over all other species because this argument employs the term speciesism, or the idea that being human gives us greater moral rights than animals. As Richard Ryder, the creator of the term speciesism reasons, intelligence is morally irrelevant because animals suffer pain just as humans do. He further asserts that to claim speciesism is a valid argument is to legitimize racism and preference of more intelligent or moral humans over others. For example, a professor shouldn’t get special treatment because he is more intelligent than everyone else, nor should a priest because he has higher moral standards than everyone else (Ryder). We are all human and deserve equal treatment and since animals can also feel pain they too deserve equal treatment and relief from suffering. The massacre of elephants for their tusks is unjust to their species because it prioritizes our desire for ivory over the value of their lives and disregards the suffering we inflict on the elephants that are killed as well as on their families because as proven above, the loss of a family member severely disrupts an elephant family just as it would a human one. Thus, it is clear that we have a duty to protect these magnificent creatures from suffering and looming extinction, which is what will become of them if we do nothing.
The Problem:
In 1800, an estimated 26 million elephants roamed Africa. However, the demand for ivory skyrocketed in the 1900s for products such as combs, statues, and piano keys, and in 1913 the US alone was consuming 200,000 tons of ivory a year (Larson). By 1989, there were only six hundred thousand elephants left and thus the Convention on International Trade on Endangered Species (CITES) formalized an international trade ban (Horne). This caused the demand for ivory to drop in Western countries because they realized that ivory market was decimating the elephant population. These countries made changes to their lifestyles such as using plastic as a substitute for ivory in piano keys, and thus dramatically reduced their consumption of the material. In the next ten years the elephant population rebounded to one million, and it seemed that the ivory trade ban was working. However, in 1999 and again in 2008 CITES allowed a one-off sale of legally stockpiled ivory from a few South-African countries to Japan and China (harvested from elephants that died of natural causes). While CITES thought this would flood the market with legal ivory and drop its cost, it instead did the opposite. China and Japan withheld most of the supply and only allowed a few tons into the market each year, prompting poachers to fill the gap between supply and demand (Narula). Thus the poaching of elephants once again skyrocketed, but this time CITES monitored poaching and observed a triple in the amount of confiscated ivory as shown in the figure below (Narula).
Figure 2. Ivory Transaction Index. Riccardo Pravettoni.
This increase in poaching caused the number of wild elephants to drop even lower than it was in 1989; so much so that elephants in the wild will go extinct in 11 years if we do nothing about this (Horne). As the figure below shows, elephants are in dire need of our support because thousands are dying each year due to poaching, and the number of wild elephants has dipped below 500,000; the lowest it has ever been (Larson).
Figure 3. Elephant Poaching. Pro Wildlife.
There is also another problem associated with poaching, and that is the funding of terrorism. The Lord’s Resistance Army, which is a rebel cult that operates in Uganda, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been deemed a terrorist organization. Its leader, Joseph Kony, uses the money earned from ivory trade to fund his army, which raids various regions of the aforementioned countries, killing the men, raping the women, and abducting the children, who are then forced into service. This awful organization is one of many in the West African region that uses the income from poaching to fund numerous atrocious acts throughout West Africa (Christy).
The Solution:
One of the solutions people have proposed is dying elephants tusks pink so as to reduce their value. However, this solution has multiple problems: One, the process of applying the dye is a difficult and traumatic process for the elephants, and two, because it is so difficult, it would be extremely expensive to dye the tusks of every single elephant (Putter). However, the idea of reducing the value of the tusks is a good one, but this can be done through other methods. By enforcing a complete ban on the trade and sale of ivory (including legally obtained ivory) there will be no way to obtain it except through illegal methods. Currently, people in China believe they are buying legally obtained ivory that was harvested from elephants who died of natural causes and sold in a legal transaction overseen by CITES (Narula). In truth however, the majority of ivory is illegally obtained but sold under the cover that it is legal. Since it’s impossible to tell the difference between legal and illegal ivory, officials in China are having a hard time enforcing the trade ban and consumers are unaware that the ivory they are buying was not legally obtained (Larson). If there was a complete ban, all consumers would be aware that the ivory they are buying is from poachers who killed endangered elephants for their tusks, and just as the demand for ivory dropped in the US and other Western countries, so it will also drop in China. Without demand for ivory, there will be no market for poachers and once again the elephant numbers will rebound. Thus, I propose a complete ban not only on the trade of ivory, but also its sale, especially in China and Japan, where it is still culturally acceptable to purchase this material.
One might argue that banning the sale of ivory would only encourage poachers more because without a legal form of ivory as competition to the poached ivory, poachers could theoretically increase the price of ivory and make the business even more lucrative than before. However, this opinion neglects the fact of public awareness. If countries such as Japan and China were to completely ban the sale of ivory, the public would of course be alerted, and would want to know the reason for this ban, just as the citizens of Western countries did at the time of the 1989 ban. Since consumers would be curious, this time would be a perfect opportunity to use social media to show the public that the ivory they are buying is mostly illegally obtained, and also funds terrorism. Through the use of powerful pictures appealing to pathos and ethos showing dead elephants and the immoral use of the money poachers make from the ivory trade, the people of China and Japan would quickly realize the effects of their participation in this trade and immediately stop purchasing ivory. Therefore, due to decreased demand, the price would drop giving poachers no incentive to continue killing elephants and the population would once again rebound.
Conclusion:
In Conclusion, this essay has shown that elephants are cognitive beings who have complex social structures that in the past century, have been severely disrupted by poaching. Poaching is a problem because it funds terrorism and causes suffering to elephants; both those that are killed and those that must live without a family member. Since elephants feel pain just as humans do, it is our duty to protect them as we should any other species and do everything we can to stop poaching, including advocating for laws that completely ban the ivory trade. We must act now for if we do not, these magnificent creatures may never again roam the wild plains of Africa.
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