The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

Philosophy of the Elephant in Accepting Captivity and Making the Best of It. The most astounding feature in the education of an elephant is the suddenness of his transition from a wild and lawless denizen of the forest to the quiet, plodding, good- tempered, and cheerful beast of draught or burden. I call it astounding, because in comparison with what could not be done with other wild animals caught when adult, no other word is adequate to express the difference. The average wild animal caught fully grown is "a terror," and so far as training is concerned, perfectly impossible. There takes place in the keddah, or pen of capture, a mighty struggle between the giant strength of the captive and the ingenuity of man, ably seconded by a few powerful tame elephants. When he finds his strength utterly overcome by man's intelligence, he yields to the inevitable, and accepts the situation philosophically. Sanderson once had a narrow escape from death while on the back of a tame elephant inside a keddah, attempting to secure a wild female. She fought his elephant long and viciously, with the strength and courage of despair, but finally she was overcome by superior numbers. Although her attack on Sanderson in the keddah was of the most murderous description, he states that her conduct after her defeat was most exemplary, and she never afterward showed any signs of ill-temper. Mr. Sanderson and an elephant-driver once mounted a full-grown female elephant on the sixth day after her capture, without even the presence of a tame animal. Sir Emerson Tennent records an instance wherein an elephant fed from the hand on the first night of its capture, and in a very few days evinced pleasure at being patted on the head. Such instances as the above can be multiplied indefinitely. To what else shall they be attributed than philosophic reasoning on the part of the elephant? The orang-utan and the chimpanzee, so often put forward as his intellectual superior, when captured alive at any other period than that of helpless infancy, are vicious, aggressive, and intractable not only for weeks and months, but for the remainder of their lives. Orangs captured when fully adult exhibit the most tiger-like ferocity, and are wholly intractable.