Elephants Have Brains

Southland Times, Issue 23740, 11 February 1939, Page 13

Elephants Have Brains

By

M. H. H.

LONDON, f went down to a London hotel 1 today and talked to a man named Sindra Jas, the most noted elephant hunter in all the state of Mysore. Sindra Jas, whose master, the Maharajah of Mysore, holds the biggest elephant keddahs in the world, told me sadly that ’ elephants are slowly dying out, though there are still about a quarter of a million left. He told me also that elephants can pray, and sing, and dance, that they are afraid of mice, that they are the most intelligent animals on earth, that they have fingers in their trunks, that some of them weight eight tons, that in the Congo there are dwarf elephants as well as dwarf men, and of course that they never forget. But this story is chiefly about Indian elephants. African elephants, for all I know, forget to their hearts’ content.

For an hour the Indian talked to me about the big, lovable, intelligent animals—found only in India, Burma, Malaya, Cochin China, Sumatra and Ceylon, and south of the Sahara in Africa—which are slowly decreasing in numbers. Elephants are such big animals, though, that it takes a long time for them to die out. In the Pliestocene age millions of years ago there were elephants all over Europe as well as Asia and Africa. In the English country of Kent diggers found the skeleton of a true elephant 14 feet high. There were giants in those days, all right. These days elephants grow no bigger than 11 feet at the most. Sindra Jas told me that elephants are absurdly <iasy to train. “I have seen lots of elephants, just captured from the jungle, learn to obey their mahouts in two days,” he said. “They are certainly the most intelligent animals there are. But the thing I like most about them is their goodwill. They wouldn’t hurt anything, except in selfdefence or for revenge.” “Revenge?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t say that elephants never forget., “Revenge,” said Sindra Jas; “elephants never forget.” “Never forget a friend or forgive an enemy?” 1 asked innocently. “That’s right,” he nodded, unsmiling. “Many weird stories are told in India about elephants and some of those stories are true. There is an elephant in Mysore today that has killed a man. A huge female elephant that weighs six tons. When she was two years old a cruel mahout chained her out in the open sunlight for five days without shade. That is the worst thing you can do to elephants, it drives them mad. The mahout was imprisoned for this offence, and when

he was released six months later he left the state. Four years later he came back and the maharajah forgave him and gave him a job. A few days after he was seen in the yards by the elephant he had tortured. She rushed at him, bellowing, and trampled him to death.” It was at about this point that Sindra Jas told me that elephants can pray and sing and dance; that he told me of the dance of the pachyderms, the strangest thing he ever saw. One rosy dawn some years ago, he said, he was hunting wild boar in the wonderful jungles of Mysore with some Englishmen. He suddenly got tired of boars and hunting and Englishmen and felt a powerful need to go on into the jungle alone and commune with the spirits of the trees. After a while, lying in the long grass and listening to the cosmic hum, he heard a strange noise far off, a noise which he described to me as something like “a low trumpet-like chanting.” “It sounded,” said Sindra Jas, who is a highly educated and sensitive Hindu, “as if some great tremendous event were taking place under its breath.” He crept forward on his hands add knees till he came through bamboo trees to the edge of a clearing and there he saw a very strange thing. “I saw between 30 and 40 elephants sitting on their haunches in a circle. I suddenly remembered legends I had heard, and never believed, of the elephants’ ritual dance. I believed it now.

“The 30 or 40 elephants were chanting in unison: a low, pleasant trumpeting sound made rhythmically, each head bowing with each note. Then they got up and walked on all fours round the ring, making a slightly different noise. Then they sat again on their haunches. After a long time, five or ten minutes, they danced. Some oh their hind legs, some on all fours, they danced around the circle. “And finally they prayed. I tell you, they prayed. That is, they sat on their haunches again and bowed their heads as low as they could, and I heard nothing but the whisper of leaves.” Enormous Appetites IT seems incredible. Yet I myself have seen jack-rabbits do the same thing on a cold, moonlit winter night, though without the humming or chanting . . . “When I got back,” said Sindra Jas, “nobody believed me except an old man and a young mahout.” Speaking of elephants being clever, Major Francis Yeats-Brown, author of “Bengal Lancer,” has been telling some good stories. In India, he says, he used to go pig-sticking with an elephant named Lakshman Piari. After the day’s hunt he would give the mahout a tip, and the mahout always shared this tip with Lakshman Piari. He would give the elephant a few coins called annas. The beast would then amble down to the bazaar all alone and do her own shopping. She carried the annas in her trunk. “Piari knew quite well

that the coins would make her quite welcome at the grocer’s, and that the grocer had what she wranted. Dropping the money in front of his crossed feet, she would help herself to a tray full of toffee and several bundles of sugar cane.”

Elephants, he says, never forget their stomachs. They have enormous appetites. A normal day’s diet consists of a quarter of a ton of grass or greenstuff, 20 pounds of grain, 40 pounds of

chopped straw and two pounds of molasses sugar. Some elephants take tea, or strong drink or opium, and they all like things such as chocolate cake and fruit. Elephants are snobbish, and will pay greater deference to big shots than to little shots, says Yeats-Brown. “I used to know a colonel to whom 50 elephants would salaam simultaneously when he appeared at their lines. They knew he directed the shoot, so they raised their

trunks and trumpeted their welcome. “Lakshman Piari, though of the fair sex, was as brave as a tusker when facing danger. When her mahout told her to ‘stand perfectly still, a leopard is going to break out of the grass,’ she used to obey, although trembling with fear; and I have known her to search a covert for a wild boar that had already wounded her severely.” He says that elephants understand everything their mahouts tell them. “Dutt” means “stop,” and “chai” means “giddap.” “Hathi-le-kuba” means “Pull up that tree.” “Aire-le-kinch” means “Pick up that stone and give it to me.” There are even more complicated orders, such as “There are sugar-cane stubs here which many cut your feet, so be careful.” It seems that a good mahout talks continually to his elephant just as a good negro talks to his dice. Sindra Jas told me a young elephant can learn to pull trees in 20 minutes. Elephants certainly have horse sense, all right. Mrs Robert Flaherty, who was in Mysore with her husband when he was making the film “Elephant Boy,” tells about a mahout who died in the jungle, leaving a motherless child. His elephant took charge of the child; found fruit for it and fed it; rocked its cradle with its trunk; wouldn’t let anyone come near. She tells about another mahout who

was bad to his elephant, underfed him,

stole his rations. “One day he gave the elephant a rotten coco-nut. The elephant kept the coco-nut in his cheek. He kept it there a month. Then the inspector came. As soon as he saw the inspector he spewed the bad coco-nut in front of him. Then he seized his mahout and threw him after the coco-nut.” “There’s another thing,” I concluded. “Is it true that wild elephants go off to a secret burial ground to die?” He smiled. “It has never been proved,” he said.