captive.
Some human beings regard nature chiefly as a resource, and that its value may be measured by its utility. This brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan (1892) in which Lord Darlington defines a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Spoiler alert. Some entries in the Table make veiled reference to entries elsewhere. Because some of you tell us you’ve enjoyed discovering these associations on your own, may we suggest holding off reading the rubric items until you’ve spent some time with the Table as a whole? Which, if you can’t spring for the print, you’re welcome to find here.
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24 | War
First use for a new technology has often been for the purposes of war.
Amongst war elephants, oliphants were the favored species being easier to train, better swimmers, and able to chalk up more kills than the smaller North African Loxodont, used for instance by the armies of Carthage. It is reported the army of the Mauryan Empire included up to nine thousand oliphants.
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25 | Execution
Execution by elephant was a common means of capital punishment in South Asia until the late 1700s, especially in India where oliphants were trained to publicly torture, dismember, or crush prisoners in public executions. This practice, employed by the rulers to emphasize their might, was eventually curbed by European colonizers.
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26 | Hunting
Maharajas, and later the great white hunters of the Raj, rode trained elephants to hunt tigers from howdahs. A featured event at many Maharaji birthday parties was a fight staged between bulls feeling their musth, a periodic state when testosterone levels in males may increase sixty-fold.
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27 | Logging
Elephant owners have to find ways to feed creatures that can eat up to a quarter-ton of food a day. Some turn to illegal logging, which requires elephants to work quickly and hard. Many are fed bananas laced with amphetamines, and these elephants become drug-dependent, exhausted, and sickened — and ultimately discarded when the timber business takes a hit.
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28 | Polo
Elephant polo, played in Nepal and Thailand under the auspices of the World Elephant Polo Association, claims to enforce strict rules regarding elephant welfare. Nevertheless PETA has alleged cruel mistreatment of polo elephants. Granted, PETA’s record is spotty, but in this instance the organization presented credible evidence leading to match cancellations, sponsorship withdrawal, and the removal of references to elephant polo records in the Guinness Book of World Records.
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29 | Circus
The Periodic Table may well imply people are indifferent to the suffering of elephants. But people, William Blake tells us, are made up of two parts — one part capable only of good, the other of good or evil. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has ended its elephant acts, and cities across the U.S. have passed regulations outlawing such acts, as well as the use of bullhooks to train elephants.
Drip by drip, we say.
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30 | Zoo
“Being kept in relative confinement and isolation (is) a kind of living death for an animal as socially developed and interdependent as we now know elephants to be,” wrote Charles Siebert in The New York Times (2006). Some people are doing something about this (Cher, for instance) and have put up the money to buy solitary elephants that they may be released from soul-dispiriting prisons and settled in preserves and sanctuaries.
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31 | Temple
Temple elephants, especially festival elephants, are dressed and ornamented with great pomp and treated with veneration. As a result these creatures become glowing beacons of enlightenment. (See No. 109.)