Some of my email listmates posted links to this article, originally printed in the New York Times and more recently in the Toronto Star. This link is on the Elephant Sanctuary website (mentioned in the article).

There is much I find interesting in this article, knowing what I know about parenting a traumatized child (and knowing about the vast information Allan Shore has brought to the field of attachment and trauma.) First of all, the “symptoms” that these elephants exhibit (who have either been traumatized by poaching and encroaching on their land, or by being held captive in zoos and circuses) have striking similarities to humans who have been traumatized. In fact the article reports that elephants have not only become abnormally aggressive and violent toward humans, but packs of young males have been known to rape and kill rhinoceroses. Hmmm…

The article draws interesting parallels between children orphaned by war and elephants orphaned by poaching and encroachment. It talks about the quick startle response, unpredictable and asocial response, and hyper-aggression.

Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist who has studied elephants for some time wrote (along with collegues) an article that was published in Nature entitled: “Elephant Breakdown,” a 2005 essay that argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

The bottom line is that through changes in their societal system elephants has changed the ability of these highly relational animals to attach to their “families” and the results have been trauma. We here in the US have experience with what happens to traumatized elephants through elephants in captivity. That’s where what’s happening at the Elephant Sanctuary is of significant importance. And where neuroscience comes into play. This has great potential implications for humans as well.

In fact, neurologists have actually conducted functional MRIs on elephants brains and discovered that they have large hippocampuses ( the seat of memory) and prominent limbic systems (which is where emotion is processed). In fact, Shore comments:

“We know that these mechanisms cut across species. In the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas.”

So what is being done for these elephants? And what can be done for traumatized children?


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