Elephants! by Cathleen Keyser
Just a moment ago, as I started to think about what I was going to write, I thought I heard a gunshot, so know that as I write this brief introduction paragraph, I’m filled with fear.
Remember when I was changing the color of my blog and wrote that I was looking for guest bloggers? If you don’t, you can click on that link and revisit history. Anyway, this post is something written by one such person and I love it.
- Adult elephants typically weigh around 10,000 pounds and can crush and kill any other land animal including rhinoceroses.
- Crushing by elephants was a popular method of execution in Asia for thousands of years, and eventually made its way westward, to be used by the Romans and the Greeks.
- Instead of throwing victims under the elephants to be trampled (a common practice with military leaders such as Hannibal or Perdiccas (a successor to Alexander the Great) who used elephants in their armies), executions would involve impalement, torture and dismemberment.
- Since this practice involved the use of a tamed elephant, Asian elephants were mainly used since they are easier to control than their African counterparts.
- The decline began with, like many other things, colonialization and the expanding British empire of the 19th and 20th century. Gradually the practice became outlawed in parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia. Crushing by elephants however is a major job hazard for elephant keepers.
- Elephant keepers are predominantly male. There are three different Sanskrit words to describe elephant keepers:
- Reghawan: those who control elephants through love
- Yukihiman: those who control elephants by using ingenuity
- Balwan: those who control elephants by cruelty.
- Bull elephants occasionally suffer from periodic rages called musth. You can tell a musth elephant by its raging desire to kill you and the tar-like secretions that are coming out of the sides of its head which happens to taste “unbelievably foul” according to Wikipedia. Musth is thought to be linked to sexual arousal.
- Crushing by elephant is not to be confused with elephant crushing, which is a method of domestication for wild elephants. In elephant crushing, the elephant is put in a cage, restrained with ropes, and is subjected to all kinds of acts (stabbing ears with nails, beating, sleep-deprivation, starvation, etc) to “break” the elephant into submission. Elephants born in captivity do not go through this.
