Tim Flannery notes in a recent review, of books that to me look mostly bad, that "elephants have been known to raid a shed filled with the body parts of slaughtered elephants, removing the feet and ears (which were destined to be turned into umbrella stands) and burying them." This follows the various reports over the past decade of complicated premeditated raids by elephants on villages inhabited by humans who, often years before, had killed members of their elephant families.
In the Politics Aristotle says that hunting is a form of war, and the common wisdom has it that this is a war that has been decisively won by humans in the past few millennia. We have killed off the great majority of other megafauna species, and now the only creatures that pose any real threat to us are mosquito-sized and smaller. But elephants remind us that the war is still on in some spots. The particular expression of their violence can only lead one to conclude that 'war' is not an analogy here. In fact, what their behavior most resembles is that of besieged guerillas, who are ultimately doomed and have no real hope of winning against their enemy, and are fighting, whether they know it or not, precisely because they are doomed.
What more, I wonder, do elephants have to do in order to have their moral personhood acknowledged? Write an elephant version of The Praise of Folly? What does a creature have to do in order for humans to stop dismissing as 'anthropocentrism' what looks in every way like the behavior of a reflective, moral agent?
Some might of course feel emboldened in their dismissal of the moral status of elephants by the fact that they act with such violence. But the interesting thing about this violence is that it is a feature of their behavioral repertoire that can either be manifested, or not. The refusal to attribute a moral character to animal behavior in the history of philosophy has often been grounded in the belief that animal behavior simply flows from animal nature, that there is nothing an animal does that it could just as well not have done. But elephants, like people, appear much more likely to flip out when they or their loved ones have been messed with. Elephant attacks have nothing of the character of, say, shark attacks, which really do flow directly from the shark's nature. It is simply a scientific mistake to suppose that the elephant attack ought to be studied in more or less the same way as the shark attack, rather than, say, a Naxalite attack in rural India.
Maoist insurrection has as its root cause the inability of human beings to share land and resources; it is a problem of demography and geography. One way of solving this problem would be to cull human populations to the point where everyone could share resources to the satisfaction of all. But of course no one seriously considers this an option, since each individual human is supposed to have an irreducible moral status that precludes the possibility of treating them as anything other than an end in themselves. Yet it remains a fringe view to suggest that elephant populations should not be culled for their own good. Flannery, for example, who appears to recognize all of the different respects in which elephants behave as individual moral agents, still advocates culling. Why is this? Again, it is not enough to say that if we don't cull them, then they are doomed, since evidently the same reasoning could not possibly be invoked with respect to any human population. Human beings as a species probably are doomed, in fact, for reasons having much to do with overpopulation and competition for resources, but what righteous and decent people do nonetheless is to look for ways to save every last one of them, rather than just some of them. I want to know what it is that permits us to reason differently in the different cases, other than the fact that they are elephants, and we are human. This is true, but it's not an argument.
The great Pleistocene megafauna kill-off must have been quite a scene. Part of me --and perhaps this comes from reading too much Walter Burkert recently-- wants to think that Aristotle's characterization of hunting as a form of war derives from some ancestral memory of a time when European pachyderms were still putting up a good fight against their human competitors. In other parts of the world, in the hunting of other species, this activity has been conceptualized not on the model of war, but on the model of gift-giving. It's hard to imagine that anyone ever thought a mammoth was 'giving itself', especially if what we now know about existing elephant species --that they do in fact fight wars-- can be projected back to the extinct ones.
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