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anger and pain
Monday, 30 October 2006 09:58 amThis BoingBoing post leads to this New York Times article, which has just made me cry bitterly and helplessly for twenty minutes. (NYT requires that you register as a user in order to access articles. It's worth it).
It's not enough that human activity is slaughtering elephants mindlessly: we also have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly that the entire species is going into post-traumatic stress. Human incursions are destroying elephant social constructs, disrupting a slow, complex, careful, supportive and rational system which allows elephants to self-regulate their enormous strength, to socialise themselves and thus contain the exaggerated behaviours of adolescents through the influence of older members of the group. Fragmentation of family groups is wrecking this process. Even worse, experience of the deaths of family members is traumatising young elephants and teaching them about cruelty, and they're starting to attack humans more frequently. We haven't just decimated them, we've broken the survivors, destroyed the functionality and dignity of their society.
The extent to which this study's findings in elephant societies mirrors current trends in human society, breaks my heart. It's one thing for our own young to be deprived of mature parenting and exposed to ongoing violence: our social functioning at the moment is absurd and dangerous, but you could argue that it's our own problem and something we're doing to ourselves. It's another order of iniquity altogether to impose our own disfunctions on another species, as we are undoubtedly doing to other species besides the elephants: not even that we assume, with absolute arrogance, that we have some kind of right to destroy other species for our own profit, but that often we don't even notice. I can't work out if it's worse to be unthinkingly destructive or actively psychopathic. As an individual, the human race is both. It could learn a huge amount about self-regulation from the elephants, who have, if left undisturbed, a far better ability to control their own enormous destructive power.
Things like this make me not want to be human. I am ashamed to be part of a species which could commit this kind of crime. I hope we destroy ourselves quickly, soon, in time that some other remnants of life on this poor planet have an actual chance at survival.
It's not enough that human activity is slaughtering elephants mindlessly: we also have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly that the entire species is going into post-traumatic stress. Human incursions are destroying elephant social constructs, disrupting a slow, complex, careful, supportive and rational system which allows elephants to self-regulate their enormous strength, to socialise themselves and thus contain the exaggerated behaviours of adolescents through the influence of older members of the group. Fragmentation of family groups is wrecking this process. Even worse, experience of the deaths of family members is traumatising young elephants and teaching them about cruelty, and they're starting to attack humans more frequently. We haven't just decimated them, we've broken the survivors, destroyed the functionality and dignity of their society.
The extent to which this study's findings in elephant societies mirrors current trends in human society, breaks my heart. It's one thing for our own young to be deprived of mature parenting and exposed to ongoing violence: our social functioning at the moment is absurd and dangerous, but you could argue that it's our own problem and something we're doing to ourselves. It's another order of iniquity altogether to impose our own disfunctions on another species, as we are undoubtedly doing to other species besides the elephants: not even that we assume, with absolute arrogance, that we have some kind of right to destroy other species for our own profit, but that often we don't even notice. I can't work out if it's worse to be unthinkingly destructive or actively psychopathic. As an individual, the human race is both. It could learn a huge amount about self-regulation from the elephants, who have, if left undisturbed, a far better ability to control their own enormous destructive power.
Things like this make me not want to be human. I am ashamed to be part of a species which could commit this kind of crime. I hope we destroy ourselves quickly, soon, in time that some other remnants of life on this poor planet have an actual chance at survival.
