Elephant Sense and Sensibility
Elephant Sense and
Sensibility
Behavior and Cognition
Michael Garstang
Photographers: Wynand du Plessis and Claudia du Plessis
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Foreword
A million years ago, a diverse array of elephants and their probisidian kin oc-
cupied all of the continents except Australia and Antarctica over a wide ar-
ray of different habitats. Today, they are found in sub-Saharan Africa and parts
of Asia. Multiple theories postulate the cause of the relatively recent demise
of this widespread, successful group of animals. Many archeologists and
paleo-ecologists indict human hunting pressures as a root cause, but competing
theories abound. Whatever the case may be for the past, there is little question
that modern humanity now manifests a horrific toll on the remnant elephant
populations. Tragically, much of the current pressure is propelled by elephant
poaching for trinkets—bits of carved ivory as objets d’art and jewelry; entire
tusks as symbols of different aspects of power and importance. Economics, the
dismal science, postulates as the rarity of a commodity increases, so too does
its price. This greatening incentive for poachers to illegally harvest diminishing
elephant herds for increasingly valuable ivory augers poorly for the future.
As a remedy to this gloomy view, Michael Garstang—with the help of the
spectacular photographs of his collaborators, Wynand and Claudia du Plessis—
illuminates the wonder of the African elephant, Loxodonta africana, in multiple
dimensions in this book. The amazing morphology of elephants includes their
impressive size since they are the largest animals to now walk the earth. In the
case of the African elephant, the trunk has the equivalent of opposable digits, the
same adaptations that differentiated our species from its near kin and allowed
complex manipulation of objects and eventually tools. Indeed, the elephant also
has a well-developed, large brain with a considerable portion emphasizing the
same parts of the human brain associated with higher thought processes. Along
with the physical adaptations in the elephant, there is an equal array of sensory
adaptations. The elephant’s trunk combines dexterity with a keen sense of touch
and smell in an organ that can both drink and expel water. The trunk of an ele-
phant is involved with sound production, lifting hundreds of kilograms or grasp-
ing and inspecting a leaf. The unrelated tapirs or the extinct and really unrelated
large marsupials in Australia, Zygomaturus trilobus et al. , feature prehensile
trunks, but nothing compared to the trunk of an African elephant. The multiple
uses of organs seem a standard feature of elephants, with their ears growing
larger flaps to shed heat in hotter environs and also hearing long-wave sounds
that most other animals cannot. As he discusses in his text, Professor Garstang
was an early discoverer of the capacity of elephants to communicate over tens
of kilometers, especially when meteorological conditions are right.
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viii Foreword
There is an anecdote on appreciating the importance of understanding things
as a whole that tells of four blind men encountering and describing an elephant.
One touches its trunk and says that an elephant is like a hose; another touches its
side and reports the elephant resembles a wall; touch the tail and it is like a rope;
touch the leg and it is like a tree. Directly true to parable, elephants are made
of remarkable parts but they are much more in toto: as an organism; as a herd;
as a population; as a controller of ecosystem pattern. Elephants are complex
creatures. So much so that the young have to learn how to be elephants. The rich
adaptations seen in their behaviors are a strong part of this book. The altruism
of the herd, the education of young elephants, and the richness of their behavior
would not be experienced by the four blind men of the parable nor by almost
anyone else unless it is pointed out. Professor Garstang’s text does that and more.
Michael Garstang brings a remarkable experiential kit to his discourse on the
African elephant. His boyhood in northern Kwa-Zulu in Natal, Republic of South
Africa, gave him a deep and personal appreciation of elephants and the ecosys-
tems of South Africa written large. It also gave him Zulu as a second language.
He later interwove elephant behavior and Zulu legend to produce a wonderful
children’s book of
the story of a young elephant, Ntombazana, and her life in the
same locale in which Garstang himself grew up. Another book, Observations
of Surface-to-Atmosphere Interactions in the Tropics, reflects his scientific re-
search. He is a scientist with a doctorate in meteorology and an enviable publica-
tion and professional reputation across his field. Dr. Garstang was appointed the
2012 Artist-in-Residence at the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological
Research Station in Oyster. He is a man of many talents and dimensions, all of
which coalesce in the present book Elephant Sense and Sensibility. T.S. Eliot
noted, “We must know all of Shakespeare’s work in order to understand any of
it.” Likewise, Dr. Garstang’s diverse intellectual toolkit is the prerequisite of un-
derstanding enough of the African elephant to understand any of it.
H.H. Shugart
W.W. Corcoran Professor of Natural History
Department of Environmental Sciences
University of Virginia
A SPECIAL NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHY
All of the photographs, with the exception of one by the author of the Nyala
antelope on page 84, are the work of Wynand and Claudia du Plessis (www.
claudiawynandduplessis.com; www.wildphoto-shop.com; www.photo-art-prints.
com). Born in South Africa and Germany, respectively, Wynand and Claudia are trained in ecology, environmental geography, and wildlife management.
They spent 10 years in the Etosha National Park in Namibia and are now accom-
plished wildlife photographers, publishing a book titled Etosha: Rhythms of an
African Wilderness and many images for international media including National
Geographic, Oprah, and Mercedes. They have won multiple awards at the BBC/
BG Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
Preface
The Bells of Heaven
’Twould ring the bells of heaven,
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs.
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers,
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.
Ralph Hodgson, 1927.
To sense, before you see, the shape of an elephant emerging soundlessly
from the gloom of an African night is to make tangible contact with the soul of
Africa. Here before you is an animal weighing more than 7 tons and perhaps
twice or three times your height. This alone causes you to gasp. Yet it is but the
beginning of a story that is full of mystery and surprises.
It is the purpose of this book to examine in both words and images the core
being of an elephant. To use what is known and what is only suspected to describe how elephants deal with the world they occupy, to document not how we think elephants think but how to think as elephants.
While we are shackled to our human perceptions, we make every effort in
this book to see the world through the senses of an elephant. Verbal description
of complex behavior provides the framework for visual representation of those
responses. A lifetime of experience is called upon to capture visual images and
to match these with behavioral states.
The accumulated evidence presented in this book shows elephants as sentient beings differing from humans not so much in kind but in degree. If elephants think, act, feel, and behave in ways we as humans recognize, how do we justify our dominion over these animals? The exercise of this privilege by
humans over animals becomes ever more evident as human populations continue to expand and less and less space is conceded to animals. Species are lost, contact with the natural world is diminished, and life becomes an artifact of our
imaginations. We are left with a cyber world to fill the void of lost species and
lost spaces. The hope within this vision of a sterile world is that despite conflict
ix
x Preface
between humans and animals, and in particular between humans and elephants,
Darwinian survival and evolution will prevail. Elephants can share this planet
with humans if only humans will allow them to do so.
To a large degree humans have separated themselves from the rest of the animal world. Philosophers as far back as Aristotle have debated whether animals possess emotions in the same sense that humans do. Darwin saw social interests
as the bonds that hold a group together and represent the beginnings of morality.
A number of presentday behavioral biologists see morality in evolutionary terms
with altruism, reciprocity, trust, empathy, compassion, sharing, and a sense of fair
play preceding by millions of years any human conception of these emotions.
A minority of presentday philosophers see animals as moral subjects who
can act on the basis of moral reasons. It is argued that moral reasons stem from
moral emotions, which are intentional states that possess identifiable moral content. The ultimate conclusion is that if animals can act for moral reasons then they are worthy of moral respect.
Most philosophers, however, from Aristotle to Kant to Korsgaard, think that
we humans created “the order of moral values” and decided to “ratify and endorse the natural concern that all animals have for themselves” even though it is a “condition shared by other animals.”
Is it not possible that it happened the other way around? Long before the appearance of any humanoid animals on this planet, animals existed who mattered to themselves, who pursued their own good, and who thus constituted value as
subsequently and much later recognized by philosophers. It did not take the emergence of humans to establish these values. They existed whether codified or not.
Even though value is seen as a human creation, made both possible and necessary by human rationality, the basis for moral behavior rests upon behavior that promoted survival. Elements of such behavior are present in all species,
most directly in the relationship between mother and child. Such behavior multiplies in species that demand protracted motherly care and is extended progressively in social species to reach our current perception of such behavior in a species capable of communication and rational thought. While admitting that
language and rational thought have refined moral codes, failure to do so does
not eliminate morality.
Sense in the English language is a complex word requiring in almost any
dictionary at least half a column of space to define. In general, sense is the
perception using sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch of the world around us.
Sense can be “a feeling of consciousness” generated by one or more of the
senses, whereas sensibility is the capacity to translate that vagueness of feeling
into an emotional feeling. In the case of elephants, as opposed to humans, it may
be possible that these animals are in many instances more finely tuned to detect
and translate more than one signal and that their sense and sensibility may equal
or even exceed ours. It is this capacity that will form the core of this book.
Michael Garstang
About the Author
Born and raised in remote northern KwaZulu-
Natal, South Africa, Michael Garstang claims
a distinguished career in meteorology, pub-
lishing groundbreaking findings on the role of
the tropics in the global atmosphere, discover-
ing how Saharan dust sustains the rain forests
of Amaz
onia, and finding out how the atmo-
sphere plays a crucial role in elephant survival.
Dr. Garstang is a Distinguished Emeritus
Research Professor in Environmental Sciences
at the University of Virginia.
xi
Elephant at waterhole at Etosha National Park, Namibia (water color by author).
Acknowledgments
The wide-open spaces of the Mzinyathi Plains and the towering kranzes of the
Drakensberg, together with Zulu folklore and legends, laid the foundation for
my enduring fascination with the natural world. For these early beginnings
I am eternally grateful and thank the known and unknown spirits who gave me
these gifts.
For those who have looked down on Africa from a high-flying aircraft,
the overwhelming sensation is that this is where the world began. Southern
Hemisphere geophysicists and paleontologists such as du Toit, Dart, Broome,
and Leaky brought the “bushman” paintings on the sandstone cliffs to life.
Family history of elephant herds together with early books on elephants by Iain
and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, Moss, Poole, and Payne consolidated my fascina-
tion with these great mammals.
Opportunities and knowledge granted me by Joanne and Robert Simpson
and Noel LaSeur, all of tropical meteorology and hurricane fame, established
my career and subsequent life.
Like any academic, classmates, colleagues, and especially students who
taught me more than I taught them are an integral part of my life. Of the many,
the few—Ross Houghton, Ed Zipser, Don Brown, David Fitzjarrald, and Bob
Davis—must serve to represent the many. Together with Mary Morris, my as-
sistant for many years, go my eternal but inadequate thanks.
My wife, Elsabé, made graduate school possible, raised a family and has
over six decades supported whatever current all-consuming project I indulged
in. Thanks are an inadequate expression of my gratitude.
xiii
Chapter 1
Introduction
The Namib Desert, stretching inland along the west coast of southern Africa,
contains the largest dune fields of all the world’s deserts. Fixed dunes rising to
over 100 m (320 ft) form formidable barriers between the interior of Namibia
and the Skeleton Coast. Despite this, desert elephants (Figure 1.1), tallest of the African savanna elephants ( Loxodonta africana), cross these dunes to reach
Elephant Sense and Sensibility Page 1