![]() ![]() Traumatic disruption from a single event can alter neural organization and lead to lifelong disorders in learning and coping abilities. The effects of stress cannot be overestimated, in animals or humans. Such culls (planned killing to control populations), along with extensive habitat destruction and poaching, have reduced elephant populations to near extinction in some cases, and left formerly tight-knit, highly complex social groups in fragmented shambles. The common characteristic of the killers is that they were orphaned at a young age and witnessed the systematic slaughter of family members. ![]() It wasn't long before biologists began fitting the pieces of the puzzle together and realized that elephants are showing the effects of traumatic violence and social breakdown. Even females, typically peaceful unless protecting their young, have begun unprovoked attacks on tourists. In some parks, the biggest risk for a bull elephant is to be killed by another male. Other strange behaviors, including evidence of "false mounting" of rhinos (what would be termed rape in the case of humans) and mortal elephant-on-elephant violence, have been observed in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Zambia. Furthermore, the South African rhino killings weren't isolated events. Though elephants are the planet's largest land mammals, they are herbivores that rarely engage in aggressive behavior, let alone cause fatal injuries. As unsettling and odd as these deaths were, even more bizarre was that the prime suspects were young bull elephants. In the period of a few years, more than one hundred were found. In 1996, game park rangers in South Africa began to find something very disturbing: alarming numbers of rhinoceroses that had been gored to death. ![]()
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