was slow at first, but the causes for that decline500 years ago are essentially the same as those today – namely hunting for ivory, and habitat loss due to agriculture.
From the sixteenth century onwards, Europeans introduced new crops to Africa, such as maize and sweet potato, which were grown on land newly claimed for agriculture. Elephants would have been using those same areas as natural feeding grounds before they were turned into farms. This increased the number of encounters between humans and elephants, which would have quickly turned ugly if the elephant was intent on sampling the new food source that had suddenly appeared in their stomping ground.
But as well as crops, Europeans also brought guns. And with them, a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory that would change things forever. These European colonisers were not the first to covet and value ivory, though. Long before history was recorded, Stone Age Europeans used mammoth ivory to carve figurines, toys and religious idols. Tomb inscriptions show that Ancient Egyptians had been collecting tusks since at least 2000 BC, and Tutankhamun’s tomb of 1325 BC was full of ivory trinkets. The Ancient Greeks also discussed the use and beauty of ‘the white gold’, long before any of them had seen an elephant’s tusk.
The Romans used far more ivory than the Greeks or Egyptians before them, and even in the British Isles, Anglo-Saxon women were buried with ivory accessories. But the procurement of ivory in these ancient times, although a highly valuable trade, was not occurring fast enough to dent the millions-strong elephant population at the time.
Commercial ivory trading really took off in the sixteenth century, at the same time as the spread of agriculture in Africa. This loss of habitat and increase in unnatural deaths had a catastrophic impact on the ranges and behaviour of elephants, and by causing local population declines, made any other losses far harder to recover from.
People didn’t only interact with elephants to steal their teeth, of course, and historic accounts show that our fascination with the live animal is not a new phenomenon. The size and strength of elephants has always been a source of wonder for us, and perhaps it is indicative of human nature that it’s something we have always tried to exploit.
We know that elephants have been caught, broken and tamed for use from as early as 3000 BC in India and 1500 BC in Syria. Having encountered them in battles in India, Alexander the Great began using Asian elephants around 330 BC like an ancient precursor to the battle tank, and Ptolemy II – the king of Egypt and Carthage – was the first to capture African elephants for use in war. Ptolemy III apparently had an army of around 300 African elephants by 240 BC.
Most famously, Hannibal used a herd of forty African elephants during his invasion of Italy by way of Spain in 218 BC. Three had died before they even reached the Alps, and the remaining thirty-seven were used mainly as pack animals, although they did join in the combat against the Roman cavalry. In the end, all but one died of cold or starvation; and the fate of the last is unclear. Hannibal did use elephants again in a few subsequent battles, until it was made part of his peace terms with the Romans that he surrendered all his elephants and agreed that he wouldn’t train any more.
The main advantage of using elephants in war was the sheer intimidation factor – it must have been truly terrifying to see these giant monsters charging towards you across the battlefield at speeds of 25 mph, particularly when they were in large numbers, covered in armour with a turret on top. Even battle-hardened Roman soldiers were known to rout under such an onslaught. However, it’s important not to forget that the sights and sounds of battle must have been equally terrifying for the elephants themselves, and if they were wounded or panicked by the enemy, they could end up running amok, trampling men and horses within their own lines.
In fact, because of this risk, elephant riders often carried a large mallet and chisel-shaped tool, which was used to kill the animal if it went berserk and became uncontrollable. Experienced enemy soldiers also learned over time to target the elephants at the outset of the battle – to fire their arrows and direct their lances towards the poor animal’s sensitive trunk – in order to make them panic and flee back into their own ranks.
Perhaps because of their unpredictability, Julius Caesar didn’t rate the use of elephants in battle, so few African elephants ended up being used in European wars after 47 BC. That said, they are still classed as a pack animal in a US Special Forces field manual issued as recently as 2004! The last supposed use of elephants in war occurred in 1987, when Iraq was alleged to have used some to transport heavy weaponry for use in Kirkuk during the Iran–Iraq war.
Of course, other equally exploitative uses have been found for elephants throughout the ages. Elephants were used as bloody entertainers in gladiatorial tournaments, where they were baited and pitted against other wild beasts. They’ve even been used as a gruesome method of torture, where the convicted prisoner is either gored or squashed to death by a tethered beast.
There have been many attempts to domesticate African elephants, too. Whilst African elephants should in theory not be any different to Asian elephants in terms of trainability, the culture has not been as deeply ingrained in Africa, so most efforts have generally ended in failure. That said, there was a moderately successful elephant riding school set up in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, where tourists could pay to ride, and local mahoots were trained up in the Asian style. However, these trials inevitably met with disaster, after one of the guides was killed in front of horrified guests.
The other major ‘use’ of elephants has, of course, been as curiosities in zoos and circuses – a trend that sadly continues around the world to this day – and it is estimated that there are up to 20,000 elephants still held in captivity.
A vast range of proboscidean species have walked the earth since their earliest ancestors emerged from the swamps of Africa over 60 million years ago. They have been a remarkably successful group, which dominated the grasslands, forests and tundra of almost every corner of the earth. But only three species survived the dramatic extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene. Humans have been central in the downfall of so many species.
Does the same fate await the last three types of elephants, or can we learn from our history? Before we answer that question, let’s have a look at what makes African elephants so special.
A Giant’s World
There are three species of elephant alive today: the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), and the African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana), which is the primary subject of this book. Although some debate rumbles on about whether forest and savannah elephants really are two separate species, evidence points to the fact that they are. They look different, their behaviour is somewhat different, and recent research shows that their DNA is distinct, too. These genetics-based studies more or less confirm their separation as two individual species. They likely diverged from a common ancestor as much as 5.5 million years ago, at a time when the climate got cooler and forest habitats became smaller.
The Asian elephant is a more distant relative to the two African species – it’s estimated that they split between around 7 million years ago, with the first migration of Elephas from Africa into Asia happening some 3 million years ago, although as I mentioned in the last chapter, the two types continued to live alongside each other on the plains of Africa until only a few thousand years ago. Interestingly, genetic analysis has revealed that the closest relative of the Asian elephant is not its African cousin, but in fact the extinct woolly mammoth, from whom they diverged at a similar time to their divergence from the forest and savannah elephant. Visually, these groupings make sense, given the smaller ears, lumpy-looking heads and sloping backs shared
