More brain than brawn

Bharathan is a ‘makhna’, a tuskless male elephant, and a bit of a local celebrity around Thorapally, a small village along the Mysore-Ooty highway, right at the edge of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu. He is enormous and intimidating, but he’s also known for his smarts, and is quickly learning to coexist with the people he comes in contact with. He comes out of the reserve every night to try and get food from near the village. He hides quietly in the bushes waiting for the jackfruit-seller to take a pee-break before raiding his stock, and tolerates a large number of tourists in close proximity — one even pulled his tail to try to get some ‘action’ out of him. When the forest department dug an ‘elephant-proof trench’ to keep him inside the reserve, he took to using the highway — scaring away the guard and carefully stepping around the check post. When the locals gathered to try and prevent him from getting across the check post, he went as far as to enlist the help of another elephant! While the friend acted as a decoy to divert attention, he quietly made his way up to the elephant chasers, trumpeted loudly to scare them off, and then quickly got across. The most incredible thread running through all the anecdotes is that Bharathan seems to have learnt that violence and direct confrontation with people does not work in the long term. He is continuously trying to outsmart them — using his brain rather than brawn — despite having infinitely more brawn than his human adversaries.

How can this rather strange behaviour be explained? This is where the science gets murky. Animal behaviour has traditionally been the forte of biology, but increasingly there are more diverse explanations than pure science can offer. ‘Human geography’ is engaging more and more with human-animal relationships and ‘animal geographies’. Anthropologists have been discussing the ways in which indigenous people across the world interact with and think about animals.

Traditional biologists view the animals they study as objects, where all their actions and behaviour can be explained by Darwinian ideas, triggered by processes like evolution, fitness, stimulus from their environment and a survival instinct. They shun the idea of ‘culture’ playing a role in behaviour, partly because ‘culture’ in itself is hard to define. EO Wilson, in his book Sociobiology (very controversially) argues that even human behaviour, including emotions like altruism, can be fully explained from the point of evolution. The majority of elephant behavioural scientists would agree that it is hard to fully explain all elephant activities through Darwinism, but are still bound by the limits of their discipline. Primatologists in particular, have been strongly pushing the idea of chimpanzees having ‘culture’ — broadly thought of as the process of social learning from peers that is passed on through generations. These ideas are thought to have initially come from Japanese scientists, but Frans de Waal’s books on chimps are now the leading works in this area of study.

Animals with agency

Geography’s interest in animals started with understanding how species were distributed across the earth’s surface, with a more recent rise in the ‘human geography’ literature examining how animals shape human culture. Over the last decade, a growing group of researchers calling themselves ‘more than human geographers’, have started viewing animals not just as objects, but as subjects, with their own experiences, feelings, beliefs etc. They believe animals have ‘agency’, where they make decisions based on thought and other cognitive processes.

Anthropologists also have some scintillating insights on what it means to ‘live with’ animals from an indigenous cultural perspective, given that these communities have been living relatively peacefully alongside animals for centuries. Hunter-gatherer communities’ ideas of animism are important in this, where animals, non-living beings (a stone, the sun, our ancestors) and natural phenomena (thunder or wind) are all thought to be ‘other than human persons’. Nurit Bird-David has written extensively about the Kattunayakans (a hunter-gatherer tribe) in the Nilgiris and their relationship with nature, with some fascinating descriptions of encounters with elephants. They clearly think of elephants as ‘non-human persons’ and see each animal as an individual, some ‘good,’ some ‘bad’. They believe that mutual respect between them and the elephants allows them to coexist. She describes some members of the community even talking to wild elephants, persuading them not to damage their houses or attack people.

Biologists are at best unaware of all this literature in the social sciences, and at worst sceptical of all of it. This despite the fact that they are at the forefront of decision-making in the field of wildlife conservation — which clearly involves both humans and wildlife. Biologists and ethologists (those who study the behaviours of animals in the wild) continue to document instances of animal intelligence, resolutely independent of the social sciences’ interpretation of it.

Elephants are one of the most intelligent species after humans, and have been the subject of numerous cognitive tests. Their brains are comparable to ours in terms of structure and complexity, with the cortex having as many neurons. They are able to use tools, learn quickly and cooperate with each other in complex tasks. They are one of the few animals that are self-aware and respond to the mirror test, where they recognise themselves in the mirror rather than think it is another animal.

They are even able to do basic arithmetic beyond what any other non-human species are capable of. They have also been observed to be altruistic, where they act in ways that benefit other animals, but not themselves.

A ‘rogue’ tusker in central India recently knocked down a house, but when it heard a baby crying it stopped its rampage, and carefully cleared the debris around the baby. A domestic elephant that was working to plant timber posts into holes that had been dug into the ground refused to put the post into one of the holes, despite its mahout’s goading. When the mahout looked, he found a dog sleeping in the hole, and the elephant clearly did not want to kill it. When elephants accidentally kill people, they invariably stand over them and try to cover them with leaves or mud, and are visibly distressed at what they have done. They are also the only other species known to have rituals around death, where the herd gathers around a deceased animal, covers it with leaves and guards it against predators.

People living alongside wild elephants brim with stories about their intelligence. A herd of nine elephants between Gudalur and Ooty comes to mind. They walked along an electric fence surrounding a house for about 50 meters till they found the one fence post where the electrified wires had mistakenly been secured to the inside of the post. They neatly knocked over the post, and carefully stepped between the wires and crossed over. They walked around the house, between flower pots, bending under a low-hanging roof, passing by large glass windows and even walked up and reversed back down a narrow stepped passage leading up to the kitchen. They then quietly went back the way they had come, over the fence and back into the hills. They did not eat anything — not the flowers, nor the young mango and dadap saplings, not even a clump of yellow bamboo — all elephant delicacies. The only evidence they left behind were the pile of dung and a knocked over broom near the kitchen. Everyone was intrigued by the strange behaviour, and the only feasible explanation was that they were exploring the new surroundings — making a mental map of the house that was now a part of their new home range.

Conserving these amazingly intelligent animals in a crowded country like India is going to be challenging. Only 22 per cent of the elephant’s range is officially under ‘protected areas’, and they come into contact with humans almost everywhere. And it’s not just about elephants. The ability of large wild animals and people to share space is arguably going to be one of the biggest conservation challenges of the future. Across much of the developed world, numerous ‘rewilding’ projects are under way to bring back a suite of locally extinct animals or other similar animals to the same ecological niche. While most of these projects are experimental and restricted within fenced off regions, some large and dangerous mammals, including wolves and bears, are making significant ‘comebacks’ with populations increasing and ranges expanding across Europe and North America, putting them in direct contact with humans. People and wildlife already live in close proximity and at very high densities across much of South and Southeast Asia. And Africa, which David Attenborough presents as ‘the world’s greatest wilderness’, is perhaps, only now beginning to see a significant human population expansion.

The only response from the conservation fraternity seems to be burgeoning literature on the ‘human-wildlife conflict’, based on the assumption that people and wild animals are inherently incompatible. The protected area approach separating humans and nature has perhaps been useful for conservation in the past. But with barely 5 per cent of India ‘protected’, we need to take a more holistic view. A more nuanced and interdisciplinary understanding of animals, and elephants in particular in an Indian context, is essential for successful conservation. While we in India have imbibed lessons from the global conservation movement, we can also give back a lot, and show how it is possible to live with nature, even with large and wild animals.

( Tarsh Thekaekarais a biodiversity conservationist and researcher working with The Shola Trust )

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