Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Psychologist Says Elephants Suffer Post-Traumatic Stress
African elephant in Masai Mara National Park. Kenya. Africa (Kike Calvo via AP Images)
Since mid-January, poachers have killed as many as 200 of the free-roaming elephants in Bouba Ndjida National Park in northern Cameroon. Although sales are banned in most countries, a growing demand for elephants’ ivory tusks is behind the slaughter.
The poachers are believed to be invading from Sudan, and have taken to throwing hand grenades into herds of elephants. On March 1, the Cameroonian government sent over 100 armed soldiers into the park to protect the remaining elephants, but the poaching has continued.
How is this affecting the remaining elephant population?
“Essentially, you’re seeing a culture under siege,” Gay Bradshaw said to Here & Now’s Robin Young. “You have the trauma, the shock, as well as the breakup of the society, which has profound psychological effects.”
Bradshaw, a trans-species psychologist who researches the effects of violence on elephants and other animals, says what happens in elephant culture after a genocide is not unlike what happens in human societies.
“A death of an individual has an impact, on the family, within the community,” Bradshaw said. “But when that keeps happening over and over and over and over, in increasing numbers, you start to get the entire fabric of the community, of the population, of the net, falling apart. You have a sustained psychological trauma, and then you do not have any of the traditional healing structures of the elephant family and culture.”
Bradshaw says elephants are very close-knit, emotional, and have strong family ties. And when elder elephants are killed, the babies don’t get the kind of care and mentoring they need and traditionally receive.
She says the fundamental unit within elephant culture is the natal family, which is led by a matriarch — typically the older female. There is a set of mothers and aunts that take care of the young. The females usually stay in the family for their lifetime, whereas the males go off to an all-male group or an all-male area when they are between the ages of 9 and 11. There, the young males enter a second stage of socialization where they get mentored by the older males until their 30s.
“It’s a very connected society,” she said. “And all of those ties have been broken, with what has been happening over the past centuries and then acutely, over this past decade.”
Although Bradshaw recognizes that there are critics who accuse her of anthropomorphism — the ascribing of human characteristics to another species — she says many characteristics are no longer exclusively human.
“When you look at brains, if you want to look at models of science, elephants and humans really share the same components of structures and the processes that govern emotion, cognition, consciousness,” she said. “All these attributes that we once used to say are uniquely human are really found in other animals – not just elephants.”
Bradshaw believes we can get valuable insight from applying what we know about ourselves to animals.
“Trauma does not just go away,” she says. “It passes through the generations. It passes through socially, culturally as well as neurobiologically. So we have lessons, unfortunately, from our own human history, of different genocides and war. And we actually see, very sadly, the scars that violence leaves on the bodies and brains of people, and now we understand with other animals.”
Security has been unable to prevent the massacre carried out by poachers on horseback from Sudan and Chad
Reblogged this on Fahrenheit 451 Used Books and commented:
Stop the slaughter, trap the hunters and poachers!
humanity (as a liberatory concept) is a trans- (or per frankfurt school understanding) supra- species condition of planetary relations.
people in animal advocacy are routinely tripped up by speciesist language games in which they denote a particular community of bipedal hominids to be denoted as “human” (and then only particular communities historically speaking within that larger community).
we have never yet been human, or if we have been, then it has only been through the unfolding of an educational process of learning and teaching the world in such a way so as to promote and deliver the conservation of a commonwealth of joy, peace, freedom, equality and reciprocity (radical love).
of course elephant communities can suffer psychologically from systematic violence done to them and around them — call it ptsd or what you will. the sensibility of such might be nuanced and different, but that the disorder names a psychic state of how beings react and respond to systemic trauma means that the ecology of that trauma structures the relationships for all beings that exist across the social field of its violent disturbance.
it is a sad and embarrassing fact that such insights not only count as professional epiphanies today, but still are often seen as apostasies and the fallacious claims of heretics zealous for their cause.
The repugnance we should feel at the need to achieve such intellectual and scientific breakthroughs, then, is symptomatically related to the utter revulsion the genocidal extermination (and corresponding zoo-ification) of elephants and other species demands.
I am sharing this article. I have nothing to say at this moment! I am too saddened and totally heartbroken!
These photo’s are bloody terrible to view, these poachers should be shoot on sight ! soon we human will wipe the planet clean of these beautiful Gods creatures.
When my youngest of 5 turns 18, my motherhood job will be done. I will be available to join the elephant defenders…