Instinctively, Jay ducked and looked around, thinking that perhaps his junior soldier had spotted the enemy troops, or maybe a shot had been fired, and somehow he’d not heard it. But then as he swung back and looked forward, he realised his mistake. It wasn’t enemy forces. In this case, it was something far more dangerous. There, not fifty metres away, was an enormous female elephant with two fat tusks. The giant was shaking her head in anger and flapping her ears, while stomping her feet on the ground.
Jay froze, glancing about him. Now he understood what had happened. Off to the side of the female were more elephants, and babies too. He had inadvertently walked right into the middle of a breeding herd. The mothers, who usually corral their youngsters into the middle of the herd to protect them from predators, had not spotted Jay. The wind had been blowing towards the patrol, so the elephants hadn’t picked up the soldiers’ scent before it was too late. Jay was almost surrounded, while the other three men scarpered to the safety of the edge of the riverbed.
For Jay, the moment seemed like an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. The matriarch, startled by the presence of an armed human, was not about to take any chances with so many vulnerable calves in the herd. She gave him one ear-splitting trumpeting call as a final warning before charging at full speed right towards him. As the elephant crashed through the bushes at twenty miles an hour, Jay’s mind spun in disbelief at the surreal vision that unfolded in front of him. This doesn’t happen except in the movies, he thought, surely it will stop soon?
It was too late to run anywhere and there was nowhere to hide. In any case, he remembered what the brief had said, you can’t run from an elephant. His attention became fixated not on the bulk of mass hurtling towards him, but instead at the glistening ivory tusks that appeared like spears before him. They were cracked and patchy; one was slightly longer than the other, and, he thought to himself, decidedly blunt. Even so, the primal fear inside him took over as his body exploded with adrenaline, and he knew that whatever happened, he must avoid those tusks.
The rest is a blur, but from the accounts of the other soldiers who watched on in horror, the elephant smashed into Jay with her forehead, sending the young officer flying into the air, before the 3-tonne beast continued with the assault, ramming her tusks into the ground either side of the man. Jay remembers seeing the enormous grey hulk hovering above his head and stamping down on the earth, all the while using her trunk to flick and toss his injured body around like a piece of cloth.
He tried to crawl away from the carnage, but there was no stopping it. Then the elephant delivered her message home in the only way she knew how, by driving one of her three-foot-long tusks right through his arm, ripping the paratrooper’s limb almost in two. Despite its rounded end, the tusk speared his tricep, tearing through the flesh and muscle like a hot knife through butter. Jay’s body crumpled, and the only thought he could muster was that it might be better to play dead. He curled into a ball and hoped above all else that he might survive.
The elephant calmed down, her bloodlust perhaps satisfied by the thought that he no longer posed a threat, but she still loomed over him, her weight crushing his chest. Then, as the creature was about to stamp on his lifeless form, the other soldiers began to fire their weapons in its direction. Despite the fact there were no actual bullets flying, the noise seemed to do the trick. The elephant, startled by the bangs, raised her trunk and trumpeted again, reversing backwards and flicking her head in disgust. The men jolted forwards, shouting and firing more shots into the air, until the creature backed off and slinked away in the direction of the rest of the herd. A few seconds later they had disappeared, and all was silent.
Luckily for Jay, he survived. The other soldiers ran to his side and held his smashed arm together, applying a tourniquet and stemming the flow of blood until the medics arrived at the scene ten minutes later. He was rushed to hospital in Nairobi, where doctors managed to put his mangled arm back together, and now he’s left with only an impressive scar and a good story to tell. One thing’s for certain, though, he won’t ever think of elephants as merely part of the furniture again. And it’s a lesson that anyone who walks on foot through Africa is advised to keep well in mind: those tusks are not just for show.
Apart from their tusks, the other defining feature of elephants is obviously their trunks. Formed by the fusion of the nose and upper lip, trunks are truly amazing appendages. Imagine having a six-foot-long nose that doubles up as a hand.
Trunks are used for gathering and picking up food and other things with remarkable precision. African elephants have two pincer-like ‘fingers’ at its tip, one at the top and bottom, whereas Asian elephants have only the one at the top. Trunks can be used to push over and break up large food items, sometimes as big as whole trees. They’re also handy for trumpeting, dusting, scratching, bathing and snorkelling, as elephants are born swimmers. It’s an enchanting sight to watch young elephants tumbling around in a watering hole, as they learn how to spray water and play with each other.
As Jay found out, the trunk is also a formidable weapon with which to smash others, and even to launch projectiles: elephants can throw things like sticks and stones, and with pretty good aim. And, of course, elephants use their trunks to drink with, sucking up litres of water before pouring it back into their mouths.
Trunks are used almost continuously to check on the rest of the social group, either in a tactile way – reaching out and touching others by way of greeting or reassurance – or by sniffing others to get information. Because above all else, trunks are fundamentally a nose – a highly mobile and phenomenally sensitive nose, at that.
The mobility and precision of the boneless trunk comes from the 40,000 or so muscles it contains. By way of a comparison, the whole human body contains just 639. The muscles of the trunk are divided into more than 100,000 fibre bundles, each served by a mass of nerves and connective tissue. And to illustrate how sensitive a nose it is, consider that elephants have five times more olfactory receptor genes than humans and more than twice as many as dogs. These are the genes associated with our sense of smell and while this does not necessarily mean that an elephant is twice as good at smelling stuff as dogs are, it certainly means they have more sensitivity to a broader range of scents.
In fact, recent experiments with Asian elephants have shown they can smell the difference between buckets containing either one or three scoops of sunflower seeds, correctly choosing the bucket with more food. Clearly, we could do the same by looking, or feeling the weight of the buckets. But by smelling only, through a sealed lid? I don’t think we’d stand a chance.
The importance of scent and smelling to elephants becomes very apparent when we begin to look at their brains. Elephants dedicate a huge area of their large brains to perceiving and processing smells. The size of various brain parts shows us that hearing sounds and producing vocalisations is also of considerable importance to elephants, whereas vision seems to be much less significant, with the areas of the brain that process visual signals being much smaller than those that deal with smell and sound.
This confirms an important point about elephants: they must perceive the world in a rather different way to us. As a species, we rely heavily on sight to get information about the world around us, but for elephants, smell and hearing are the dominant senses.
When you scale the brain against body size, humans win out. We have the largest brains relative to body size with bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees coming after. An average person is seventy-five times smaller than an adult male savannah elephant, yet our brain is only three or four times smaller than that of an elephant. That said, when it comes to absolute terms, there is no brain bigger on land than that of the elephant. They weigh in at up to 5.5 kg in males and slightly less in females. Sperm whales and orcas do have larger brains than this – at around 7 kg – because water can support a heavier head and body. Humans by contrast have a brain that weighs just 1.3 kg.
Compared