July 20, 2005
Originally published in iol.com
By: Duncan Guy, Independent Online
Lending
a supportive trunk: Fifteen-year-old
male Thai elephant Thong Tae reaches out to female Pook during an
'elephant wedding' celebrating Valentine's Day at Dusit Zoo in Bangkok
in 2002. Many scientists believe that elephants are capable of experiencing
emotions in the much the same way human beings do. Photo: AFP
Elephant
conservation should be considered in
much the same way humans consider plans for their own health and
well-being, an elephant management workshop heard on Tuesday.
Sociality, which is the conservation of social structures and
processes, has largely been ignored in conservation, according to
a paper by Gay Bradshaw of Oregon State University and Allan Schore
of the University of California.
It was read out in their absence at the Elephants Alive workshop,
held at Wits University in Johannesburg.
Elephants are social animals like human beings
"The implications for the emergence of post-traumatic stress
disorder in elephants make this oversight alarming," read the
paper.
"Culls, translocations and captivity create chronic stress,
decrease fitness and undermine socialisation capacity, thereby reinforcing
maladaptive behaviour."
The paper reads that culling is not a viable tool for elephant
conservation, reflecting a paradigm shift over the past decade or
more in the basic sciences that underlie principles of conservation
biology.
"Recent interdisciplinary research has revealed that all
vertebrates share the same underlying structures and mechanisms
that dictate properties once considered uniquely human: culture,
personality, language and emotions."
Neuroscience has put animals and humans on an equal scientific
footing, reads the paper.
Culls 'create chronic stress' and 'undermine socialisation'
"Stress, trauma and other social disruptions - what biomedical
research has identified as having profound
influences on human psychology, physiology and behaviour - holds
for other social animals such as elephants."
Bradshaw and Schore wrote that like humans, young elephants show
an extensive period of developmental dependency on adults that facilitates
post-natal brain development.
"The mammalian infant's environment is dominated by maternal
care but can, as in elephants, include multiple care takers, where
males participate in a second phase of socialisation outside the
natal family - that of older bulls."
They pointed out that young male elephants may suffer from surviving
culling in their herd for two reasons.
"Male mammal brain development occurs at a significantly
slower rate than females, and orphaned males lacked the second developmental
phase of all-male socialisation."
This all-male socialisation period serves the same purpose in
elephants as it does in human adolescents when they experience a
second phase of major brain re-organisation, read the paper.
"Increases in human pressures imply that elephants will continue
to live in landscapes dominated by disturbances.
"Conditions of trauma, chronic stress and disabled rearing
- such as occurs with culls, restricted resources and herd breakdown
- result in hyper-aggressive behaviour."
Melissa Groo
Save the Elephants News Service Researcher
For further information on elephants
please see Save the Elephants' web site
at http://www.savetheelephants.org
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This project is supported by the International
Elephant Foundation.
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