The Social Behavior of Older Animals

3 The Wisdom of Elders

chapter 3 The Wisdom of Elders A young “rogue” elephant assaults tourists in the Pilanesberg Game Reserve, South Africa, in 1996. The next day he kills the professional hunter sent out to shoot him. Out-of-control young males attack, try to rape, and gore to death nineteen white rhinos (L. Watson 2002). What is going on here? Lack of Supervision In the 1980s, officials in Kruger National Park, South Africa, shot a number of elephants because they were becoming too numerous for their habitat. Men aimed darts at adults from the air, then gunned them down as they lay anesthetized on the ground. The youngsters who watched this nightmare were then rounded up and sent to parks and reserves that lacked elephants (L. Watson 2002). Problems such as those described at the head of this chapter erupted 15 years later, when the young males from this group were about 20 and beginning to produce serious amounts of the hormone testosterone. Their pathological behavior was related in part to the earlier killing of their family members and the stress of translocation they had suffered; scientists equated it to human PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), which involves “abnormal startle response, depression, unpredictable asocial behavior and hyperaggression” (Bradshaw et al. 2005; Meredith 2007). However, the bizarre aggression of the young males mainly re- flected a lack of adult supervision when they were growing up as orphans . Under normal conditions, when the males were juveniles, they would have been socialized by matriarchs. At puberty, when young teenage bulls left the herd into which they were born, most would have gathered together casually and hung out with a variety of other males 29 for the rest of their lives. During this time, the young are guided in their behavior to some extent by older males. Aging bulls are important in quieting young males during their first period of musth, when they develop an unfocussed aggression triggered by increased testosterone. These seniors spar with them, dissipating some of their hostility and forcing them to calm down. Whereas in most species older males do not compete against younger prime males, this is not the case for elephants, where adults and their tusks continue to grow with age. Even an elderly male can be a formidable opponent, and it is these dominant males who usually sire the calves. This chapter about elephant behavior is entitled Wisdom, because it depicts how wise older elephants are, due to experiences garnered over a long life. Like male elephants, females also continue to grow after they reach adulthood. The largest females, the ones with the most experience, are the most dominant (Archie et al. 2006). Their reign as a group leader is not usurped by younger animals—those with less experience, but physically bigger and stronger—as it is in most social species. Elephant matriarchs share their vast knowledge with younger individuals, and they are responsible for maintaining order and harmony within their herd. If a young calf gets out of line, a matriarch will give him a disciplinary whack with her trunk; if there is a dispute, she quickly quells it. When older animals are targeted preferentially to be slaughtered in a government cull or by poaching, the results for the family are devastating , rendering the herds dysfunctional. They have lost the cultural, learned information of the matriarchs: how to engage socially with other elephants, how to resolve conflict, how to communicate effectively, and, most importantly , how to physically survive in the wild. The depleted elephant group of youngsters and subadults will now flee in terror from human beings . They have reason to panic, because without guidance from older matriarchs, mayhem results. With its elephant mother gone, statistics show that every infant under the age of 2 will die, those orphaned between the ages of 3 and 5 have a 30 percent chance of survival, and only half of those orphaned between the ages of 6 and 10 will survive (Chadwick 1992). Thus a lack of maternal supervision can devastate the young in a herd. In no other species is the wisdom of elders, gained in earlier experiences , so vital. 30 the social behavior of older animals Importance of Matriarchs The behavior of older female African elephants (Loxodonta africana) is admirable. The matriarch makes all the daily decisions for her herd, a group of females and their young so intensely social that the females spend their...