FEROCIOUS ELEPHANTS
Did my mind deceive me, or was much of the talk radio show I just heard taken up with the dangers of elephants? Perhaps I was just hallucinating. I hope I was. It's that or the country is gone succinctly round the final bend. What sort of person goes on national radio to give his or her opinion about the dangerosity of the elephant? Is the nation replete with elephant experts? I think not. Quite the opposite, possibly. All perspective has been lost. Next week we can move on to the burning question of whether the Incas were actually Martian, and after that have an in-depth discussion of string length variation.
The ferocity of the elephant is not a matter that will be easily settled on the public airwaves. Are we talking here about a rogue bull elephant with toothache in the tusks or the heffalump that was bottle-fed by humans when it was a pup - or fry or gosling or whatever baby elephants are called. Calves, that's it. Are we talking of the Indian, the African, or the dread Siberian elephant? Is this an elephant we've given a bun to, or an elephant we have poked with a stick? There are so many levels of elephant, each possessing its unique risks. Lesson one was given to us by a man who called in to say his uncle had been killed by not one, but two elephants. How exactly? They'd been fighting and he'd tried to break them up.
And he was killed, you say? Well fancy.
The Darwin people will be thrilled. For lesson two, someone called in to say that the elephant was known categorically to be the most dangerous animal in Africa. This is a very interesting point, mainly because it isn't true in the slightest little bit. They may not, let us be direct, be animals one should mess with. It isn't recommended for example that you hide behind trees and jump out at them. However the elephant is fundamentally a non-aggressive type. It lunches on leaves, not the tiger. It is seldom ill-disposed towards man. Indeed it often fails to notice man altogether, we being in rough proportion about the height and weight of a little barky dog.
No, the honour of being by far the most dangerous wild beast in Africa - if honour that be - goes to the hippo. This may seem strange, the beast hardly appears deadly. It is generally thought to wallow in the mud and sing its little heart out. Exaggeration though that may be, it bears little malice. It does, however, panic like all hell when startled. The hippopotamus, you see, is only mentally secure when in the water. Yet in the evenings it feels the need to exit same and stroll about the bank, possibly for the exercise or the roughage of the thorny bushes it finds there. The mistake that people make, and unfortunately make often - for it must be remembered that people are essentially riverbank creatures too - is to come between the animal and the comfort of its river. Seeing that to happen, the hippo will return to water by the most direct route possible. If you are in that path that is too bad, it will not detour. It really doesn't have to. Far more people meet this ignominious fate every year than are eaten by lions or punctured by rhinos - and certainly far more than are squished by the elephant, which does not panic easily, or live in rivers.
The much-maligned elephant ought to be respected for what it is - the greatest threat to rainforest that ever walked the earth. More than the human? Very much so. For if it were not for the ministrations of this natural bulldozer, Africa would be mostly jungle. Without its voracious taste for tree, there would be no place for the lion to prowl, or zebra or giraffe to run away. No great skies. No savannah at all.
And remember, it is the shrinking away of the forests that taught the first people to leave the woody edge and walk upright across Africa's grassland. If it were not for our pachyderm pals, not only would there be no rolling African plain, there would be no people on it. Or anywhere, now or ever.
So I say, lay off the elephant.