Dawn comes slowly on the veldt. With the touch of morning light, each still-life character wakens into slow motion. But there is nothing measured in the young bull elephant racing toward the feeding rhinoceros—a dull gray mound grazing among gilded yellow grass. Hornbill chatter and the gazelles’ tentative glide burst into loud squawks and frantic movement as the two giant mammals collide. The air explodes with the crash of body against body, gray against gray, and deafening bellows. In a short while, stillness descends. Gradually, birds and antelope filter back, and the landscape resumes its former repose. One by one, vultures drop from the sky to begin methodically picking over the armored rhino corpse before hyenas take over. It is South Africa, 1992, two years before prisoner Mandela would become President Mandela. Within a decade, more than one hundred rhinoceroses would be dead, and the bull elephants gunned down as culprits.
Elsewhere, dawn reveals another grisly scene. Hornbill chatter is replaced by commuter traffic, and instead of antelopes, lawn-mowers skate over spacious green lawns of a Florida retirement community. The day’s heat is starting to be felt, and the weight of humid air has begun to press. Nothing obvious suggests that the van outside the suburban home is anything extraordinary, yet when the doors slide open, instead of the usual golf-clad retiree, three young men jump out and disappear inside the house. In a few minutes, the neighbors hear loud gunshots, and the sound of the van speeding away. Police f i nd sixty-eight-year-old James Miller and his sixty-three-year-old wife on the floor. Mrs. Diana Miller is dead from two gunshot wounds to her chest and head. Mr. Miller is still alive, despite a bullet that has grazed his head and penetrated his ear. The prosecutor asks for the death penalty in two cases and consecutive life sentences with no parole for the youngest, the alleged shooter.1
What possible connection could there be between a murderous elephant and a murderous human separated by thousands of miles? Humans may kill with disturbing frequency, but historically, inter- or intra-species violence is uncommon among elephants. Even during musth, the period of heightened sexuality, when male elephants become openly aggressive as elevated testosterone charges through their systems and their faces become marked by the distinctive stream of temporal gland secretion, male-on-male injury and mortality are relatively rare. The string of more than one hundred rhinoceros fatalities took on greater significance in light of news from other parks and reserves.2 There were similar incidents involving rhinoceroses at other locales, and at Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, male-on-male elephant aggression is responsible for 70 to 90 percent of adult male deaths.3 These statistics stand out as exceptions to the natural history rule of elephants.
Keith Lindsay, a researcher in the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, notes:
The detailed studies over more than 30 continuous years have recorded only four cases of males killing other males during musthrelated contests over females. The great majority of male-male contests result in one or the other male backing down, after recognizing the superior strength or motivation of his opponent; the escalated contests that result in mortality occur when the two males are most evenly matched. This sophisticated ability to assess the likelihood of winning a fight or sustaining serious injury has been developed over many years of experience in male society, and dysfunctional elephants who rapidly escalate to violence are clearly lacking this social learning.4
Today, violent outbursts in elephants are not anomalous.5 Elephant clashes with other species are not limited to rhinoceroses. The extent of discord between elephant and people has warranted the coining of the acronym HEC, for “human-elephant conflict.” In Nepal killings of humans by herbivorous elephants outnumber those by predator tigers.
Elsewhere in Africa, such as in Sierra Leone, where humans and elephants have a history of peaceful coexistence, some three hundred villagers left their homes because of “unprovoked” elephant attacks and damage. Disturbingly, new patterns of aggression are not limited to the male of the species. Female elephants have been observed to uncharacteristically leave their calves vulnerable in order to charge tourists.6 The
ethologists Delia and Mark Owens, authors of Cry of the Kalahari, have noted that some mother elephants ignore their distressed or endangered infants. The cries of young who have strayed from the herd’s protection go unheeded. Other behavioral oddities include social aloofness among herd members, something else completely uncharacteristic of the close-knit family-values-oriented elephant society, in which group members retain their deep connection with frequent affectionate caresses and thoughtful inquiries by serpentine trunks.7
According to the forest conservator in the Wildlife Circle of Doranda in India, increased human populations and reduced elephant habitat have caused the dramatic rise in human-elephant conflict: “As forests become more fragmented and degraded or are converted to monoculture plantations, both elephant feeding and migratory patterns are disrupted. The results are sadly predictable. A herd of 13-18 elephants killed seven people during one five month period. Another herd of about 60 elephants killed 11 people in 1988 and another 12 in 1989.”8 The inspector general of forests and director of Project Elephant in India echoes the same concern. There were sixty-seven human deaths in 2006-7 and ninety-one deaths in 2005-6 in the Jharkhand region as a result of “conflict with wild-elephants.” These numbers come to an annual average of 250 deaths when all eastern states are totaled. Elephant fatalities are even
higher: “nearly 700 elephants died in Orissa between 1990 and 2008....
34 per cent of the elephants died due to poaching, 24 per cent died as a result of accidents including electrocution and road or railway mis-haps.”9
Statistics and testimonies can no longer be argued away as unfortunate, aberrational events or whimsical stories. People who have lived with elephants for generations report “rampant conflict,” “serious trouble with wild elephant herds,” and “angry wild elephants ... attacking the locals.”10 Elephant behavior has changed. A forest worker, Debojeet Saikia, says, “Earlier if they saw us foresters, they would run. But now they don’t care even if we open fire or burst bombs. We could scare them off with search lights but now they come after us.”11
On June 30, 2001, more than sixty people from twelve villages met in the Meshenani area of the Olgului/Ololarrashie ranch, “the largest, most important communal land that almost engulfs the Amboseli National Park.” Participants described “the peaceful coexistence of Maasai and wildlife in the delicate balance of the ecosystems within which they live.” A Maasai elder in Kenya maintains that in the past, “elephants hardly ever attacked people unless provoked, thirsty or instinctively reacting to an experience of past attack,” but as a result of threats coming from “commercial agricultural expansion; sidelining of the Maasai from mainstream nature conservation; insensitive tourism practices; and continued loss of Maasai traditional lands to other modern economic enterprises,” elephant-human relationships have changed. The Maasai insisted that the “ongoing destruction of forests, commercial hunting, and loss of wildlife migratory routes and breeding grounds must be stopped now if the future of wildlife in Kenya and Tanzania is to be guaranteed.” Without such steps, “we lose land and culture [and] elephants and other wildlife lose habitat.”12
In light of reports from Asia and Africa, the South African bulls turn out to be the tip of a very unsettling iceberg, or, to apply another metaphor, they represent a several-ton canary in the environmental coalmine. By accumulation of data over a broad geographical expanse, isolated events begin to look like evidence of a behavioral sea change in normative elephant behavior. Since attachment theory and neuroscience have been helpful in understanding what makes an elephant an elephant in mind and body, it makes sense to revisit these subjects and see what causes the reverse: what makes an elephant act unlike an elephant, uncharacteristically “violent”?
Violence is a powerful word, and it is not usually employed in the case of animals, let alone herbivore elephants. In contrast to the more frequent animal descriptor of aggression, violence includes intent and implies moral violation, attributes typically reserved for the human species. As one well-known pair of forensic sociologists put it, “No one imagines that the plant has intentionality.”13 Conventional thinking would declare rhododendrons and elephants incapable of violence because neither is supposed to have the requisite higher-order functions associated with a sense of morality or the mental sophistication that permits action other than instinct. Animals are expected to kill, and the drive to do so is a compulsion of base instinct. Killing is what lions, tigers, and bears do for a living, almost mechanically, without emotion.
Perceptions of animals and emotions are linked. Like species, emotions have been ranked according to evolutionary progress, scale natura, or the Great Chain of Being. Time separates humans from animals as much as cognition and emotions do. In the past brain structure and functions were thought to be layered upon each other like geologic strata where “The various lines of psychic development start from one common stock whose roots reach back into the most distant past.”14 Accordingly, “it should be possible to peel the collective unconscious, layer by layer, until we come to the psychology of the worm, and of even the amoeba.”15 Humans may share the instincts of worms and snakes, but it is the human veneer of higher faculties that prevents William James’s unthinking blind ferocity from taking over. More than a century later, the psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has studied human violence extensively, voices a similar sentiment: “It is not a coincidence that our human propensity to create morality and civilization, and to commit homicide and suicide, are the two characteristics that most specifically differentiate us from all other species.”16
Violent emotions, the instinctive, involuntary reactions, only “upset the rational order of consciousness by their elemental outbursts,” breaking through this veneer to reveal a common animal ancestry.17 Violent anger is an amoral emotion because it can be clearly seen in rats, dogs, toddlers, and other creatures considered to lack a well-developed moral life.18 Aggression, anger, and rage are shunned in humans, while their antitheses—humanity, love, compassion, and rational thought—are celebrated, not only because they are obviously more desirable but because their opposites are considered to be a regression to animal baseness: a manifestation of some human pathology or failure to repress a destructive impulse. (Ironically, humans alone have been allowed the privilege of mental disorder.)
Yet when cloaked in the collective righteousness of human war and other sanctioned injurious practices, violence becomes more acceptable. In these instances, violence loses its purplish cast and settles into muted grays of rationality. Anglo-American common law considers that killing in response to discovery of a wife’s infidelity is an act of a “reasonable man”: it is not condoned, but it merits a reduced penalty. Violent sexual jealousy is deemed normal or at least unsurprising both in societies in which the cuckold’s violence is seen as a reprehensible loss of control and in those where it is seen as a praiseworthy redemption of honor.19 Blame is mitigated by sympathy.
Animal and human become strangely blurred, then, with the juxtaposition of violence and elephant, and with the phrase “human-elephant conflict,” which situates the species on equal, albeit combative, footing. One of the first times that scientific models of human and nonhuman animal behavior crossed, and animals were ascribed humanlike attributes, occurred when “war” between two groups of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, was reported by Jane Goodall.20 Despite a desire by many other scientists to discredit her on the grounds of anthropomorphic projection, species parallels were marked. Chimpanzees were observed engaging in multiple, systematic gang- or group-led killings, infanticide, and finally the eradication of one clan by the other (what one might call, in the case of humans, ethnic cleansing), finally leading to peaceful coexistence.
Since then, science has documented additional examples of violent behavior, including—contrary to Gilligan’s assertion that the behavior is uniquely human—suicide. Intentional self-harm leading to death—inward-directed violence—has been observed in animals, but has rarely been called suicide.21 Nonetheless, it is not unusual for some species in captivity to die from self-inflicted injuries. Moluccan cockatoos in captivity, after losing a human caregiver to whom they have bonded, sometimes pick at their chests until they expose the bone and then succumb from these wounds, and as we shall see, Jenny, an elephant at the Dallas Zoo, has been seriously damaged from repeated self-injurious behavior.
Not everyone has considered the lines between animal and human affective behavior so distinctly drawn. David Morris muses on modern culture’s ambivalence in this regard. “We are a strange kind of animal. We have bodies like other animal bodies, and move like them. Our stories tell of these human-animal affinities, we speak of animals as totems or familiars, and we elucidate principles of the cosmos or society in terms of animal behaviour. Yet, in telling, speaking and elucidating—indeed in building and thinking—we find ourselves estranged from the animals.”22
Even the ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen have openly criticized scientific models for being prejudiced. Lorenz argued that aggression in the animal kingdom is normative, but human perceptions made it perverse. What may seem to the human observer disturbing behavior in an animal is in actuality “misguided by sensationalism in press and film, [whose authors imagine] the relationship between the various ‘wild beasts of the jungle’ to be a bloodthirsty struggle, all against all, [but] such things never occur under natural conditions. What advantage would one of those animals gain from exterminating the other?” In Lorenz’s eyes, killing is part of life, “appearing either appropriate and self-protective, even constructive, as in healthy self-assertiveness,” whereas in humans aggression assumes its pathological aspects, becoming violence when it is “inappropriate and destructive.”23
Compared with natural disasters, to say nothing of human-against-human violence, deaths caused by elephants are negligible. Amid the chaos gripping the world today, one might expect that elephant aberrance would get lost, a tiny signal against an obliterating white noise of human distress. But elephant incidents receive far more attention than they warrant statistically. There appears almost a kind of eagerness to prove that elephants are “as bad as us,” while simultaneously denying that likeness demands comparable rights.
Labels other than violence or even conflict are available to describe elephant aberrance, and the preference for these charged terms is informative. Violence serves the purpose of media out to grab attention, but there may be a more psychologically significant reason for using the word. Intentionality implies directionality. Directionality implies motion, suggesting that elephants are stepping out of their assigned role as part of the passive landscape against which human dramas play out. In this new scenario, elephants have become actors, and in so doing, have upset humans’ sense of order. Elephants have trespassed against physical and psychological boundaries and have flouted human privilege by damaging houses, consuming crops, and showing a commitment to kill: behaviors legitimate only in human circles.
Suddenly daily reports from Assam, Kerala, Tanzania, and Kenya are laced with a sense of outrage. Elephant violence invites human retaliation perhaps because elephants’ apparent appropriation of human privilege signals a refusal to obey the rules of fair play, and therefore a type of guilt.24 An elephant who kills a human is not only morally dubious but morally stigmatized.25 Before, an elephant’s charge was explained as a fearsome display by a mighty rogue bull. Now it is called “elephant rage,” and bulls are brought down in India much like renegades.26
Neighbor turns to foe, salutations twist into hostile bellows and deadly cudgels. All of a sudden, humans have paired themselves with elephants in hostile bondage: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the War Between the States, Indian-Pakistani tensions, the human-elephant conflict. However, it is an unfair pairing; something has gotten lost in translation. The discovery of similarities should not obscure profound differences. Elephant culture and values are not the same as modern human culture and values. Elephants are not armed with deadly technologies. It is easy to forget that their “violence” exists only because humans have manufactured an environment that leaves them few behavioral choices, including those that seem to resemble human behaviors.
Below the surface, in the realm of neurons, there is yet another indication of how close humans and elephants really are. Biology suggests that either the young rhino-killing elephants don’t come from elephants, or they aren’t being raised like elephants. Barring any Star Trek visitations from other planets, attachment theory predicts that differences in elephant behavior are organic and native to the circumstances in which they were raised, circumstances that do not conform to those of the past.
Robert Hinde, an ethologist and colleague of John Bowlby, wrote that behavior “can be understood only in terms of a continuing dialectic between an active and changing organism and an active and changing environment with cause and consequence closely interwoven.”27 If we understand the concept of dialogue figuratively, Hinde’s picture of behavior directly describes the ways the lives of elephants and people of Africa have changed: the two species are engaged in a very different sort of conversation since colonial occupation.
Everyday life of elephants in Africa and Asia no longer entails foraging and family life peppered by the occasional threat of a marauding predator. Now these preoccupations are dominated by a new factor: a magnified threat from humans that heightens everyday perils. Today’s humans do not offer the terror of a single spear: they descend in helicopters wielding machine guns, bringing horrors of apocalyptic proportions. The skies—source of the gift of much needed rain in arid lands, and the lacework of birds carrying news of faraway plains and mountains—are no longer benign. Modern humans have the power to replace an entire wooded valley with crops or to change the flow and course of water that quenched the thirsts and cooled the bodies of elephants for generations.
As the land and ways of the African savannah and Asian jungles have changed, so have the conditions under which baby elephant brains develop. The rupture of elephant lands, lives, and history is mirrored in the legacy of rupture in their brains, bodies, and behavior. The object of our inquiry is therefore not just the elephants, not just the environment, but both, the dialogical space in between, which turns out to be the site of trauma.
Trauma is a specific kind of stress. There are all types of stress. We get stressed when we get stuck in rush-hour traffic. We get stressed when a lover announces she is leaving. We get stressed when the boss walks in the office and says that the deadline is moved up three hours for a job that takes six, and the list goes on. But while the hustle and bustle and uncertainty of the twenty-first century may be blamed for many ills, stress by itself it is not always bad. Stress is part of everyday life and survival.
In its broadest definition, stress can be thought of as what results from the difference between what we expect in body and mind and what we actually experience. Stress becomes harmful only when our expectations are not met by the environment in which we live and we are unable to adjust to the actual conditions. Every species (and individual) has its own psychological, emotional, and physical “envelope of tolerance” to which each has adapted and functions well. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone is vulnerable to the same stressors—the fear of death and threats, whether in the form of a lion or of an angry supervisor. But just as each person and animal has a unique body type, each has a unique psychological type. An elephant’s body and mind are equipped to handle environmental stress differently than are the body and mind of a lion or a turtle or human. A penguin doesn’t feel stress in subfreezing weather as a lion would, and a lion doesn’t feel stress in the oppressive heat of the savannah as a penguin would. As the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes, this is the reason why zebras don’t get ulcers and we do: ulcers and other ailments related to a “strain in the nervous system”—that is, things related to severe emotional stress—are widespread in humans because of the postmodern life of traffic jams, multitasking, multimedia, and Super-momming. “When left to their own devices, zebras don’t get ulcers.” But when they undergo “severe and unnatural stress (e.g., when they are first transported into a zoo),” ulcers can and do develop.28 If a psychologically or physically intolerable situation cannot be avoided, fled, or resolved in some way, if “we are no longer able to change a situation,” stress emerges and “we are challenged to change ourselves.”29
The inability to compensate for radical changes in the environment affects us at multiple levels and in multiple ways. Severe stress causes an overactivation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. This set of structures located in the brain functions as the body’s neuroendocrinal chassis for dealing with environmental change and regulating stress. When something startles us—a sudden, loud noise or someone coming at us with a knife—we feel a spurt of adrenalin. Blood pumps, heart races, the flight, fight, or freeze program kicks in. It is the HPA axis that functions as the action-reaction boiler room, taking information in for mind and body and processing it to appropriately match what is needed to survive. The system is efficient and effective—unless the threat does not go away or is too big for us to handle.
Chronic stress, when the pressure does not let up, and trauma, when forces of danger are overwhelming, overexcite this regulatory engine such that it stays in high gear much like a Volkswagen Beetle trying to pass a semi on the freeway. First it starts accelerating in anticipation of the Big Truck; gets into the left lane and keeps accelerating to overtake the Big Truck; then, after gliding back into the right lane, safely ahead, slows down to a nice, leisurely VW pace—but in the chronic stress scenario, it can’t. The gears are stuck and it stays in fourth gear even when it gets off the freeway to slow down.
After a while, running in high becomes taxing and wearing, a worrisome state for the nervous mechanic on the side. When this happens in the body, getting into high gear means circulating the various biochemical and hormonal packets, endogenous corticosteroids. Constant stress keeps them getting released and running throughout the body, all of which cause a change in biochemistry that eventually translates to what we see on the outside—a change in behavior and personality. We get grumpy, irritated, edgy, fearful, anxious, and fall prey to a myriad of other unhappy moods, illness, even memory loss.
The envelope of coping tolerance also relates to ontogeny—the physical, emotional, and psychological conditions that an individual experiences as he develops. As we learned from attachment theory, parents and caregivers form a matrix that communicates and interprets meaning and significance of the World Out There to the youngster. This is how an infant begins to learn about the world in which she will eventually live, mature, and have her own children. For better or worse, early relational dances influence perception, knowledge, and behavior.30 The Nobel Prize winner in literature Francois Mauriac put it most succinctly: “We are moulded and remoulded by those who have loved us; and though the love may pass, we are nevertheless their work, for good or ill.”31
Consequently, what happens to the mother and family happens to the child’s world and mind. When a mother is killed or the child is harmed, the world causes pain. The young body and mind adapt and shape to these environmental conditions accordingly. Thus what goes around, stressful interactions with Mum and Dad, comes around: stressful childhood leads to stressed behavior in maturity, and passes to the next gen-eration.32
Traumatic disruption from a single event can create lifelong changes in personality and neural organization; in some cases, stress can even be transmitted from mother to fetus within the womb and permeate as deeply as genes. Hormones can turn genes on and off, so in a sense, the genetics of one twin, who had a loving, happy-go-lucky childhood, may function somewhat differently from that of his sibling, who grew up in a violent and unnurturing family. Abuse, neglect, or sudden parental death can impair the expression of those genes involved in neurogenesis and synaptogenesis of highly receptive developing brain circuits that inform memory, cognition, and emotions. What and how we remember, think, and feel is affected by traumatic experience. The impact of an emotional event such as the violent loss of a parent “affectively burns” into the primordial emotional and social centers of the limbic system, HPA axis, and the right frontal lobe of the brain—in animals and humans alike.33
What we now know from neuroscience was documented well before in study after study on behavioral effects of altered socialization and rearing of animals. Dr. Harry Harlow (with Stephen Suomi, whom he mentored and who is now chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) even devised apparatuses specifically designed to examine how changes in natural infant-rearing patterns affected both mother and child.
Eschewing the euphemisms typical of much contemporary dialogue, Harlow frankly described his work and his aims: “The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don’t have any love for them. I never have. I don’t really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs.”34 He designed a “rape rack” to force monkeys to mate, a “well of despair” in which infant monkeys were kept isolated in the dark from birth to one year. Using an “iron maiden”—a metal mother-monkey-shaped doll that stabbed or blasted cold air with sufficient force to knock a baby down—Harlow tested an infant’s loyalty to his mother.
Today Harlow’s studies and attitudes are decried, but his successors pursue similar research, taking care to describe their experiments in more politic language: “terminate” instead of “kill,” for example.35
Harlow’s work, as distasteful as it may be to most mainstream researchers, serves as a sort of grotesque funhouse mirror of current science. In fact, much of the research about attachment was implicitly framed from the perspective of the sort of trauma that is explicit in the design of his studies of relationships and the behavior they induce. In learning about love through its horrific violation, Harlow established that the importance of relationships goes beyond their role as conduits of food and other commodities.
Bowlby’s lessons about early bonding—learned without excessive and brutal methods—also derived from the perspective of rupture, what he called loss and separation. Indeed, attachment theory might very well have been dubbed trauma theory. Many of the concepts underlying attachment theory came from observations of children suffering from traumatic compromise. One book in Bowlby’s trilogy on child development is devoted to the effect of parent-child separation. Bowlby’s work was motivated by his compassion for the plight of children left bereft of parental love. He writes that that “no one can be unmoved” by their stories and conditions and that the “loss of mother figure, either by itself or in combination of other variables yet to be clearly identified, is capable of generating responses and processes that are of the greatest interest to psychopathology.”36
Mindful of the psychic costs that he experienced when sent off to boarding school at a vulnerable age, Bowlby regarded the fear and anxiety associated with traumatic separation as defining events. Separation events “occur so commonly in the lives of children, adolescents, and adults, and constitute so large a proportion of the major stressors about which we know, that a clear understanding of their effects is of immediate help to clinicians whose task it is to understand psychiatric disability, to treat it, and whenever possible, to prevent it.” If the process of loving bonding is absent or interrupted, Bowlby continues, then the infant’s learning path is altered. Loss, abuse, and abandonment are responsible for the profound corrosion of security and well-being, and for the resultant behaviors. Disruptions to early bonding cause acute stress, whose effects endure into adulthood. “One reason for this belief was that the responses and processes observed seemed to be the same as those found to be active in older individuals who are still disturbed by separations they have suffered in early life.”37 Indeed, Bowlby maintains that loss of the attachment figure is the principal agent in the development of psychopathology.
We now see that attachment theory is directly associated with traumatology. Attachment and trauma are two sides of the same theoretical coin, and the two together provide a new conceptual framework for understanding human experience and psychological life. Attachment studies how relationships, particularly those of infants and children, influence thinking, feeling, and behavior; traumatology studies how stressful disruptions and experiences, particularly those effected through our interactions with others, influence thinking, feeling, and behavior. Ruptures to primary bonds constitute relational trauma (in contrast to shock trauma, which might occur during war when witnessing an atrocity), which in symmetry with attachment processes, can be related and mapped through current models of the brain to their expression in behavior and psychological states. Trauma challenges or undoes what attachment creates.
However, while joined in theory at the levels of neurons and genes, the two frameworks hold very different places in science and society; the reason is tied to politics and perception. Harlow and company aside, attachment attracts with its heartwarming images of mother love and babies. On the other hand, trauma repels with images of death, violence, suffering, and controversy. The trauma psychiatrist Judith Herman writes in her seminal book on trauma, Trauma and Recovery, of the unique role and peculiar history of trauma studies. It is a history of “episodic amnesia”: the field advances in fits and starts not because the subject is vulnerable to academic mood swings or fads but because it “provokes such intense controversy that it periodically becomes anathema.”38
Part of the controversy derives from an intrinsic unease with the topic of suffering. Cognitive acrobatics may entrance, but mental distress attracts uncomfortable attention, sometimes even inspiring an impulse to conceal findings from a squeamish public, things that, like sleeping dogs, are best left lying.
Understanding the history of human traumatology and its place in science and society is important to our exploration of aberrant elephant behavior because of its intrinsically relational and therefore unavoidably political nature. An external, causal agent has created the trauma. Diagnosis and treatment implicitly involve more than the victim; they involve cause: the person or circumstances that have inflicted physical or psychological injury. This relational framing of psychological suffering departs from conventional models because what and how a person thinks, feels, and acts is acknowledged to be vulnerable to other events or people.
In childhood, the agent of trauma may be something or someone who disrupts what Bowlby refers to as the “warm loving” bond between parent and infant. But the relational aspects of trauma and its impacts extend well beyond childhood to the broader web of social relationships and structures in which each person is embedded. Thus neither human nor elephant victim of trauma stands alone in their plight. Similar to human violence, an understanding of the aetiology of aberrant elephant behavior, and its amelioration, can only develop when examined in their social and ecological contexts.
The history of the rights and trauma of survivors of war and domestic abuse illustrate this principle. In both cases, individuals were subjected to violence through collective norms and sometimes through law. Both groups have been denied sovereignty over their bodies and limited to identities subordinate to collective purposes—women as helpmates or sexual objects and soldiers as corporal instruments in service of a “greater good.”39 The First World War coincided with the work of Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet, whom we now might consider psychology’s first traumtologists. The Great War became a watershed for both its historical significance and its unprecedented brutality and loss of life. More than five million soldiers died in four years. The conditions of trench warfare, the appalling physical and emotional states of returning soldiers, and the overwhelming numbers of veterans in need of hospitalization or long-term psychiatric care forever dismissed any notions of war as a glorious heroic endeavor. Shell-shock and “neurasthenia,” the sanitized terms for mental breakdown, accounted for almost half of British causalities, and the “reality of psychological trauma was forced upon public conscious-ness.”40
Soldiers on both sides of the Maginot Line protested against the war. One celebrated case was an antiwar proclamation by the English soldier Siegfried Sassoon. A decorated solder himself, Sassoon was sickened by the pain, injury, and death inflicted upon his comrades merely to suit politicians and a public hungry for victory at whatever cost. “I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops,” Sassoon wrote, “and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”41 Such a manifesto was grounds for court-martial; through intervention by sympathetic friends, including Robert Graves, Sassoon narrowly escaped the death sentence that the conditions of war dictated for his “crime.”
With its numbing horror, the First World War galvanized interest in psychological trauma, and soldiers were seen, however fleetingly, as more than cannon fodder, and the generals and government were seen as something other than glorious martial demigods. The underbelly of war was revealed to be what it was: brutal and anguished. Still, society was not yet prepared to face the realities of war. The thousands upon thousands who returned injured in mind and body failed to break the veil of silence concerning what war really did to people. Experiences of veterans (the disabled were referred to as “moral invalids”) continued to be ignored, even belittled. To recognize the emotional ravages of war would be to admit that the government and society at large were agents of trauma. This accusation brought into question the raison d’etre of the modern project. Only decades later did Abram Kardiner, an analysand of Sigmund Freud and someone who had witnessed the devastating effects of psychological trauma in veterans, establish a formal psychiatric diagnosis for combat fatigue (another euphemism). Kardiner is credited with coining the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress in his 1941 book The Traumatic Neuroses of War, which he wrote specifically to bring recognition and legitimization to combat neuroses.42
Soldiers aged, more wars were fought, and the public forgot the devastating legacies of violence, at least for the time being. Public concern submerged in another period of amnesia, and not until the Vietnam War did war-caused trauma begin to get serious attention. Illuminated by such interest groups as Vietnam Veterans Against the War and by the publication of long-term studies on World War II resistance fighters and concentration camp survivors, psychological trauma finally began to move toward mainstream legitimacy within the field of psychology. Along with women’s and civil rights groups, civilian antiwar groups also aided the transition. As Herman observes, the link between trauma and politics is critical. Trauma is an “affliction of the powerless,” and the “systematic study of psychological trauma ... depends on the support of a political movement.”43
Today, stress and trauma permeate the language and imagery of Western culture, reflecting that “we are onto something widely experienced and intuitively understood”; a wealth of articles and books on the subject can be found in an ever-growing number of fields.44 The question is how do we reconcile what we know about war, genocide, and suffering and relate it all to elephants? National Geographic images of stately elephants walking along the sunset horizon make it hard to believe African elephants can be as stressed out, their habitats as hectic as the traffic-filled freeways of Los Angeles or as terrorizing as Lebanon or New York. Even if nature can sometimes be brutal—“red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson famously put it—the natural world has no analogue to the grinding violence of modern warfare and urban life. Or does it? When we travel to the elephant lands, we find their lives less different from our own than we might think.