Category Archives: Elephant

A Hunter Weighs in

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Here’s a nuisance, pro-kill comment I received this morning on the post, “What’s the Difference Between a Poacher and the Owner of Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches?” It is quoted here, verbatim, to share some insight into how these kind of people think:

“Apart from the elephants and rhinos, a lot (not saying all) of the big cats hunted in Africa are typically neucense animals to local tribes, farms, and villages. The hunters are the ones who pay the money for the guided hunt (by locals) and almost all of the animal is utilized for it’s furs, meats, and bones. It doesn’t just go to waste. On top of that it also removes the neusence animal from the area; which in turn makes life for the locals a little bit easier. Or I’m wrong and he likes to murder awesome animals. Either way, I am for it.”

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Elephants recognize the voices of their enemies

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[This is true of many other animal species as well…]

African elephants can distinguish human languages, genders and ages associated with danger.

  1. An African elephant listening intently. Elephants can recognize which humans are more likely to pose a danger depending on what they sound like.

    Karen McComb

  2. A matriarch reacts with alarm after the play-back of a Maasai voice.

    Karen McComb

  3. An elephant family group on the move.

    Graeme Shannon

    Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to distinguish between African ethnic groups that have a history of attacking them and groups that do not. Now a study reveals that they can even discern these differences from words spoken in the local tongues.

Biologists Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, guessed that African elephants (Loxodonta africana) might be able to listen to human speech and make use of what they heard. To tease out whether this was true, they recorded the voices of men from two Kenyan ethnic groups calmly saying, “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming,” in their native languages. One of these groups was the semi-nomadic Maasai, some of whom periodically kill elephants during fierce competition for water or cattle-grazing space. The other was the Kamba, a crop-farming group that rarely has violent encounters with elephants.

The researchers played the recordings to 47 elephant family groups at Amboseli National Park in Kenya and monitored the animals’ behaviour. The differences were remarkable. When the elephants heard the Maasai, they were much more likely to cautiously smell the air or huddle together than when they heard the Kamba. Indeed, the animals bunched together nearly twice as tightly when they heard the Maasai.

More: http://www.nature.com/news/elephants-recognize-the-voices-of-their-enemies-1.14846?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20140311