Focusing on animals: an escape from human ills & errors

                                 Botswana baby                         Getty pic               

Summer is almost over and the world is a sick, crazy, cruel mess.  What else can go wrong?

Instead of downer-forecasts, let’s work on what might go right: take a bike ride or a walk along fields of drying grasses rimmed by yellow flowers, with crickety sounds rising from the brittle foliage.  Take deep breaths and look around at the blue-sky world.   

Or, re-pot a plant or two before it winters over inside, and clean up the garden a bit – leaving enough debris for small animals’ cover till spring. 

Or, brush your cat or take a walk with your dog, and feel extra grateful for pets, who can center and comfort us.

Or, and this isn’t as far afield as it may seem: think about the wildlife you love and advocate for.  Just move far away, mentally, and think about animals – those who fascinate you, those you especially care about. 

                                                   Elephant Crisis Fund pic

Recent news about elephants intrigued me (no surprise, right?), so I’ll go there.  And why not? They’re such remarkable-but-sorely endangered animals, and they need our help as well as our admiration for all the good they do in the world.

I used to report that elephants’ worst threat came from poachers who slaughtered them for their tusks, then sold their ivory to satisfy the world’s demand.  Habitat all over Africa is steadily being lost to development that affects elephants’ traditional travel routes; highways do the same.

But now, a growing hazard for elephants comes from the people who live and farm near them.  As human population increases and elephant habitat shrinks, elephants’ hunger drives them to invade people’s farms and threaten or destroy their crops.

Retaliation follows. With coexistence becoming ever harder to maintain, frustrated farmers strike back at the elephants, often killing them.  Fences can be ineffectual and the bees that elephants fear aren’t universal; nor are the animal advocates who set up bee-deterrents to keep elephants away from land intended for other purposes.   

                                                          Dodo-Shutterstock

Big-picture elephant news that should ultimately help conserve elephants: a decades-long study and its resultant product – “The Elephant Ethogram: A Library of African Elephant Behavior” – is an illustrated list of some 500 elephant behaviors and 110 behavioral suites in a wide variety of contexts, with still more to come.  Publicly available and invaluable to scientists and those working for elephants’ survival, this Ethogram includes more than 3,000 video and audio clips that illustrate the text.   

Dr. Joyce Poole’s “tens of thousands of hours spent observing, tracking and analyzing” African savanna elephants -- described as “the largest land animal on the planet and one of the most cognitively and behaviorally complex”-- led to this encyclopedic result. 

Poole and her husband, Petter Granli, compiled the Ethogram, released last May by ElephantVoices, a non-profit group whose mission is “To inspire wonder in the intelligence, complexity and voices of elephants, and to secure a kinder future for them.”   https://tinyurl.com/2kmy262m

Not only does the Ethogram look like a great thing to browse or spend days with, but also, the article below, where I first learned about it, is terrific all by itself, offering wonderful images and captions.  https://tinyurl.com/49dc4k45

                                                            MoizHasein-Stock

Now I wonder whether the elephant ethogram includes the many ways that elephants use their trunks, which turn out to be multi-multi-multi-purpose tools!  

With no bones or joints in it, the trunk is pure muscle, yet capable of delicate actions too: although it can uproot trees, it can also pluck a single leaf from a branch.  And it boasts a powerful sense of smell.

Elephants use their trunks to drink, store and spray water, and they can blow air through them to communicate, with bellows that are audible for miles.  With their trunks, elephants can apply suction to grab food too – a function formerly thought to be exclusive to fishes.  

But of what practical, or satisfying, use is it for an elephant to be able to suction up a single potato chip, as shown in this story?  Answer: that feat may suggest technological innovations in the human and robotic worlds.  Science at work!   https://tinyurl.com/4jzx69kw

 

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