Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
by G.A. Bradshaw

The distance separating man from animal has become increasingly smaller as cognitive studies have uncovered more of the complexities of the animal mind. With the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in elephants, the mental and emotional similarities between humans and elephants become distinct and force us to reassess the way in which we as humans interact with animals who rival our emotions and our ability to empathize. G.A. Bradshaw, using her expertise in psychology and ecology, and her experience as the president and co-founder of the International Association for Animal Trauma and Recovery, comments in her book Elephants on the Edge, that “Cognitive acrobatics, memory feats, and intricate social interactions all point to a degree of individuality that contradicts past claims that elephants . . . are little more than wind-up bundles of instincts.”

Throughout Bradshaw’s narrative, the symptoms of PTSD are continually compared between human sufferers and their elephant counterparts. Orphaned elephants who witnessed their entire families being slaughtered suffer from flashbacks in an incredibly similar manner to the flashbacks suffered by war veterans. Captive elephants who reside in circuses and the some of the most prestigious zoos in North America show similar signs of mental breakdown that humans kept in forced confinement have shown.

A peek back into history and into current science tells us that elephant violence has less to do with elephants than with our own culture. Elephant attacks on rhinoceroses and mahouts reflect the violence that this otherwise peaceful species has experienced. Hyperaggression, depression, infant neglect, and other symptoms are not uncommon for elephants in captivity, but are unheard of in the wild. When we know elephant’s history and their sensitivity to surroundings, behavioral oddities cease to be a mystery. Elephants are merely mirroring the circumstances in which they have come to live.”

Bradshaw delves into the psychological process behind why people are able participate in horrible acts against animals and other humans without fully realizing the ethical implications of their acts. The doctors at the Nazi death camps were healers, but at the same time were responsible for deciding who was sent to the gas chambers. Elephant keepers at the San Diego Zoo claimed to have loved the elephants they looked after and that they were devoted to the conservation of the species, but at the same time beat a young female elephant with boards for two days straight until she lay prostrate on the ground with the skin on the side of her head falling off simply because, out of nervousness, she did not respond to a command. Bradshaw explains this behavior as psychological dissonance, or doubling; having knowledge of a reality, but at the same time denying it.

The greater the hierarchical organization in society, the greater the degree to which group qualities are pressed on an individual, the greater the anonymity of responsibility, and the greater the ethical confusion: “I was just following orders.” An enforced ordinariness is installed, and the “unthinkable” act or belief is normalized through the shared identity. Doubling, then, is a two-step process involving, first, ceding ethical responsibility to a group reality and, second, psychological separation from experience.”

By presenting and discussing the psychological issues elephants are facing, Bradshaw forces a light on the way our behavior as humans affects the lives and mental stability of the creatures around us. She openly confronts that notion that to have empathy for one’s animal subject is to skew one’s scientific research and uses current trans-species research to show that it is possible to interpret the emotions of elephants. The reader is challenged to reassess they way in which they view zoos and circuses and to question the reasons given for keeping elephants in confined enclosures. Only by changing our own thinking, and forcing ourselves to truly see the damage we are capable of doing in the name of conservation, will we be able to make positive changes for the animals with which we share our world.

Reviewed by Jennifer Campbell

Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity by G.A. Bradshaw
Yale University Press, 2009
Cloth, 310 pp, $28.00
ISBN-10: 0300127316