speared his tricep, tearing through the flesh and muscle like a hot knife through butter. Jay’s body crumpled, and the only thought he could muster was that it might be better to play dead. He curled into a ball and hoped above all else that he might survive.
The elephant calmed down, her bloodlust perhaps satisfied by the thought that he no longer posed a threat, but she still loomed over him, her weight crushing his chest. Then, as the creature was about to stamp on his lifeless form, the other soldiers began to fire their weapons in its direction. Despite the fact there were no actual bullets flying, the noise seemed to do the trick. The elephant, startled by the bangs, raised her trunk and trumpeted again, reversing backwards and flicking her head in disgust. The men jolted forwards, shouting and firing more shots into the air, until the creature backed off and slinked away in the direction of the rest of the herd. A few seconds later they had disappeared, and all was silent.
Luckily for Jay, he survived. The other soldiers ran to his side and held his smashed arm together, applying a tourniquet and stemming the flow of blood until the medics arrived at the scene ten minutes later. He was rushed to hospital in Nairobi, where doctors managed to put his mangled arm back together, and now he’s left with only an impressive scar and a good story to tell. One thing’s for certain, though, he won’t ever think of elephants as merely part of the furniture again. And it’s a lesson that anyone who walks on foot through Africa is advised to keep well in mind: those tusks are not just for show.
Apart from their tusks, the other defining feature of elephants is obviously their trunks. Formed by the fusion of the nose and upper lip, trunks are truly amazing appendages. Imagine having a six-foot-long nose that doubles up as a hand.
Trunks are used for gathering and picking up food and other things with remarkable precision. African elephants have two pincer-like ‘fingers’ at its tip, one at the top and bottom, whereas Asian elephants have only the one at the top. Trunks can be used to push over and break up large food items, sometimes as big as whole trees. They’re also handy for trumpeting, dusting, scratching, bathing and snorkelling, as elephants are born swimmers. It’s an enchanting sight to watch young elephants tumbling around in a watering hole, as they learn how to spray water and play with each other.
As Jay found out, the trunk is also a formidable weapon with which to smash others, and even to launch projectiles: elephants can throw things like sticks and stones, and with pretty good aim. And, of course, elephants use their trunks to drink with, sucking up litres of water before pouring it back into their mouths.
Trunks are used almost continuously to check on the rest of the social group, either in a tactile way – reaching out and touching others by way of greeting or reassurance – or by sniffing others to get information. Because above all else, trunks are fundamentally a nose – a highly mobile and phenomenally sensitive nose, at that.
The mobility and precision of the boneless trunk comes from the 40,000 or so muscles it contains. By way of a comparison, the whole human body contains just 639. The muscles of the trunk are divided into more than 100,000 fibre bundles, each served by a mass of nerves and connective tissue. And to illustrate how sensitive a nose it is, consider that elephants have five times more olfactory receptor genes than humans and more than twice as many as dogs. These are the genes associated with our sense of smell and while this does not necessarily mean that an elephant is twice as good at smelling stuff as dogs are, it certainly means they have more sensitivity to a broader range of scents.
In fact, recent experiments with Asian elephants have shown they can smell the difference between buckets containing either one or three scoops of sunflower seeds, correctly choosing the bucket with more food. Clearly, we could do the same by looking, or feeling the weight of the buckets. But by smelling only, through a sealed lid? I don’t think we’d stand a chance.
The importance of scent and smelling to elephants becomes very apparent when we begin to look at their brains. Elephants dedicate a huge area of their large brains to perceiving and processing smells. The size of various brain parts shows us that hearing sounds and producing vocalisations is also of considerable importance to elephants, whereas vision seems to be much less significant, with the areas of the brain that process visual signals being much smaller than those that deal with smell and sound.
This confirms an important point about elephants: they must perceive the world in a rather different way to us. As a species, we rely heavily on sight to get information about the world around us, but for elephants, smell and hearing are the dominant senses.
When you scale the brain against body size, humans win out. We have the largest brains relative to body size with bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees coming after. An average person is seventy-five times smaller than an adult male savannah elephant, yet our brain is only three or four times smaller than that of an elephant. That said, when it comes to absolute terms, there is no brain bigger on land than that of the elephant. They weigh in at up to 5.5 kg in males and slightly less in females. Sperm whales and orcas do have larger brains than this – at around 7 kg – because water can support a heavier head and body. Humans by contrast have a brain that weighs just 1.3 kg.
Compared to many other mammals, the brain of the elephant is located low down in the head – in line with the eyes – while the upper skull is formed of a honeycomb-like bone structure with air pockets that reduce the weight of the head, but keep structural integrity in place. This adaptation has been the fatal undoing of many a novice hunter, who has aimed too high when attempting to kill an elephant, succeeding only in wounding and enraging the poor animal.
Aside from the enlarged olfactory and auditory regions, the elephant brain also has an especially well-developed cerebellum. All mammals have a cerebellum, which is mostly involved in overseeing and coordinating movements and voluntary muscular activity. But in elephants it is huge, with many more neurons, organised in a much more complex way, compared to other mammals – including us. This makes sense, given the complexity and range of movements that the trunk is capable of performing. So elephants have brains that are specialised for smelling and hearing, with very fine motor control.
Most mammals are born with brains that already weigh around 90 per cent of what they will do when fully grown. This means that they are almost fully developed. The brain of a newborn human, in contrast, weighs only 25 per cent of what it will do as an adult.
If you think of the ‘childhood’ of the average mouse or horse, versus our own species, this makes sense. Those species are up and running soon after birth, whereas humans are pretty useless for the first year or two after birth. But a newborn elephant brain weighs 35 per cent of the adult brain weight – the same percentage as chimpanzee infant brains, and slightly lower than the 40 per cent figure for bottlenose dolphins. The brains of all these species have a lot of developing to do during their long childhood – almost as much as we do – suggesting they also have a lot to learn.
An elephant is big. Very big. A fully grown adult male can reach a shoulder height of 3.4 metres and weigh up to 7,000 kg. That’s the same as four family cars, with passengers. The largest known elephant was a male, shot in Angola in 1956, which was a colossal four metres tall, as big as some of the prehistoric species we mentioned, and is thought to have weighed 10 tonnes. And while there are other megaherbivores roaming the earth today – including four species of rhinoceroses, the common hippopotamus, and giraffes – none of them come close to the size of a full-grown African elephant.
The elephant’s enormous size has been the key to their evolutionary success. It gives them a triple whammy of survival benefits: making them less vulnerable to predators; enabling them to live in a wide range of habitats; and meaning they can eat a wide range of foods. This allows elephants to move into
