elephants, which inhabit the tropical jungles of central Africa, are smaller in height and weight than African savannah elephants, with thinner, straighter tusks that tend to point downwards. They consume much less grass – but more woody plant material and fruit – than savannah elephants, as you’d expect of a species that lives in dense forests, and from what we understand they probably live in smaller social groups, and are much better at climbing steep slopes. The two species overlap only rarely in the fringe areas of Africa’s tropical forest belt in places like the Congo.
Yet across these three surviving species, there are clear similarities that mark them out as elephants: the overall large size, including long limbs and broad, cushioned feet with distinct, flat toenails; the very large head and skull; the trunk; the excess growth of the incisor teeth to form tusks (in many but not all); and the phenomenon of horizontal teeth displacement.
This is a unique process whereby the molars gradually move forward from the back of the mouth to replace worn teeth at the front. There are an amazing six progressions – imagine having six sets of teeth come through! – and the final set of molars, which erupt at about thirty or forty years of age, are enormous, weighing over 3 kg, and measuring 20 cm long and 7 cm wide. The shape of African elephant teeth is how they got their Latin name: Loxodonta means sloping teeth.
But the teeth that elephants are most famous for are, of course, their second upper incisors – known universally as tusks. In Asian elephants, the females never have tusks and many males don’t either. Some female Asian elephants have what are known as ‘tushes’. They resemble very short tusks, but do not have the same tooth pulp inside, and so they never grow further. However, in the two African elephant species, both males and females generally have tusks.
The tusks of males tend to be larger – thicker and longer – than those of females. Mature male elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park have an average tusk weight of around 50 kg, whilst the average female tusk of the same age weighs only 7 kg. Tusks grow for the whole of the elephant’s lifetime in both sexes, meaning that older elephants tend to have the longest tusks.
Elephants use their tusks in a variety of ways: to help forage for food by breaking or pushing branches and to strip bark from trees. They use them to dig in the ground as they forage for roots or search for water. They are a convenient lever, and are even used to carry things; elephants can often be seen using their tusks to move logs or carry grass in the same way as a forklift truck. I’ve seen elephants use their tusks as lethal weapons in fights with other elephants and indeed with plenty of other animals that make the mistake of crossing them. With the full strength of a charge, an elephant can easily pick up a fully grown buffalo using its tusks as a spear and whip it into the air.
A fellow officer in my battalion of the Parachute Regiment was once on a military exercise in Kenya. Captain Jay Courtney was leading a patrol through the bush in an area of the country where British troops often went to train before being sent on deployments to Afghanistan or Iraq. It was a warm evening in the autumn of 2018, and Jay led his four-man team on a reconnaissance mission to scout out an imaginary enemy on the far side of a dry riverbed. At around 6 p.m., as the sun was setting over the distant escarpment, the soldiers were in the process of climbing up a sandy ridge onto an open plain dotted with acacia trees and thorny scrub.
Jay was point man, focused on navigating the soldiers towards the position, his mind running through all possible scenarios – would the enemy be laying an ambush, or would they be able to sneak up on them? Did his men have enough water to last in case the patrol was extended? He thought about where he would be sleeping that night, under a thin poncho beneath a star-filled African sky, and wondered whether or not he might get a faint cell phone signal so that he could message home. All sorts of things run through a soldier’s mind, especially when he’s been immersed in the wilderness for so long, and this exercise had already dragged on for six weeks.
Jay felt comfortable in the bush, and had become accustomed to the ferocious heat, the irritating flies and the daily chore of cleaning his rifle of dust and sand. This was a training exercise, and even though the soldiers carried only blank ammunition, which simply made a loud bang, it had to be treated like a real combat mission and he took his job seriously.
Like all the other paratroopers, Jay was a hardened warrior, used to the rigours of living in the wild. He’d been warned of the dangers of the wildlife and briefed on how to avoid getting on the wrong side of a lion, buffalo or elephant, but so far, he’d only seen the animals at a distance, and generally they ran away from soldiers. Most wildlife has no desire to hang around strange-looking (and smelling) men who like to blow things up and make loud noises. As Jay put it, the elephants were simply ‘part of the furniture’.
That is perhaps why, as he strode forward under the weight of his webbing and rucksack, it came as a shock to hear the man behind him start shouting frantically and waving at the confused commander. Jay shook his head and raised an upturned palm to question what on earth the raving soldier was making such a fuss about. You should never raise your voice on a patrol, let alone shout and scream, unless the enemy are already upon you and you’re under fire.
Instinctively, Jay ducked and looked around, thinking that perhaps his junior soldier had spotted the enemy troops, or maybe a shot had been fired, and somehow he’d not heard it. But then as he swung back and looked forward, he realised his mistake. It wasn’t enemy forces. In this case, it was something far more dangerous. There, not fifty metres away, was an enormous female elephant with two fat tusks. The giant was shaking her head in anger and flapping her ears, while stomping her feet on the ground.
Jay froze, glancing about him. Now he understood what had happened. Off to the side of the female were more elephants, and babies too. He had inadvertently walked right into the middle of a breeding herd. The mothers, who usually corral their youngsters into the middle of the herd to protect them from predators, had not spotted Jay. The wind had been blowing towards the patrol, so the elephants hadn’t picked up the soldiers’ scent before it was too late. Jay was almost surrounded, while the other three men scarpered to the safety of the edge of the riverbed.
For Jay, the moment seemed like an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. The matriarch, startled by the presence of an armed human, was not about to take any chances with so many vulnerable calves in the herd. She gave him one ear-splitting trumpeting call as a final warning before charging at full speed right towards him. As the elephant crashed through the bushes at twenty miles an hour, Jay’s mind spun in disbelief at the surreal vision that unfolded in front of him. This doesn’t happen except in the movies, he thought, surely it will stop soon?
It was too late to run anywhere and there was nowhere to hide. In any case, he remembered what the brief had said, you can’t run from an elephant. His attention became fixated not on the bulk of mass hurtling towards him, but instead at the glistening ivory tusks that appeared like spears before him. They were cracked and patchy; one was slightly longer than the other, and, he thought to himself, decidedly blunt. Even so, the primal fear inside him took over as his body exploded with adrenaline, and he knew that whatever happened, he must avoid those tusks.
The rest is a blur, but from the accounts of the other soldiers who watched on in horror, the elephant smashed into Jay with her forehead, sending the young officer flying into the air, before the 3-tonne beast continued with the assault, ramming her tusks into the ground either side of the man. Jay remembers seeing the enormous grey hulk hovering above his head and stamping down on the earth, all the while using her trunk to flick and toss his injured body around like a piece of cloth.
He tried to crawl away from the carnage, but there was no stopping it. Then the elephant delivered her message home in the only way she knew how, by driving one of her three-foot-long tusks right through his arm, ripping the paratrooper’s
