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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M.Krishnan : An Elephantine Inhibition : The Sunday Statesman : 17 June 2018
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AN ELEPHANTINE INHIBITION

"SOME YEARS AGO I saw, in a cinema house, a documentary on a kedah, showing the elephants soon after they have been impounded in the stockade. I like wild Elephants too much to care for the sight of them milling around in a panic, bewildered and trapped but an incident in the documentary roused my anger, though it seemed comic to everyone else in the auditorium. A little calf, separated from its mother in that melee was shown approaching a grown cow, which promptly sent it flying with a kick and the commentator said something about the myth that elephants are considerate to all young of their kind.

Well that is no myth and that man said what he did out of ignorance. Anyone who has watched elephants closely will know that never, even when moving in a tight-packed crowd and in a hurry, do the huge adults trample on an infant or kick it accidentally. Such care in social animals in usually instinctive and not the result of an intelligent realization of their responsibilities by the weaker members of the herd. Sometimes such behavior is induced or guided by instinctive reactions to colours.

The phrase "a red rag to a bull", conveys the immediacy of an animal's response to colour, though it has no basis, for bulls are colour-blind and see red only as a shade of grey. Crows as is well known react strongly to something black. On a recent tree-photography trip I used a view camera and the usual square of black cloth a photographer throws over his head to focus on the ground-glass. The crows wee so violent in their response to my black cloth that I had to get it covered with a square of thin khaki after which they left me in peace.

Elephants on the other hand, seem to instinctively avoid contact with anything black. I think they are not able to see things right under them very well and believe that quite a few men who have fallen while running away from a charging wild elephant, or dived into cover and crouched owe their lives to this inability of elephants. In a herd, it is likely that the adults are not able to see an infant that is right beneath or besides them clearly except perhaps as a dark blurred mass and I think the dark colour of the little one serves to save it from being trampled accidentally.

Wild elephants uproot and damage milestones posts and similar things when they are left or painted, white or some light colour but usually leave them alone if painted black - this is further evidence of the theory. An experienced electrical engineer once told me that the bases of the pylons carrying the power-lines through elephant jungles are invariably painted black to save them from being damaged by the great beasts.

An even more interesting example of this instinctive reaction to black is provided by the pilgrims who undertake the climb up Sabarimala in Kerala to the shrine of Aiyappan they wear black shirts and black dhoties not out of regard for any religious convention but out of prudence - they have to traverse through several miles of elephant forests, and believe they are less prone to attack if dressed in black.

At first sight this simple dodge might seem the complete solution to the problems of people living near or right inside elephant jungles. Wild elephants are undoubtedly the animals they dread the most and hostile brushes between the great beasts and men are much more frequent than is generally thought - not all cases of men killed by elephants are reported. It may be thought that in such places all that people have to do to secure immunity from attack by wild elephants is to wear black and tar their shed and dwellings.

I think such a practice will definitely lessen the risk to humanity from wild elephants but not eliminate it. I am thinking of the calf that got kicked in that documentary and also of the fact that animals are often moved by instincts that are mutually opposed, and go by what dominates them at the moment. An elephant may well attack something black when driven by fear or anger as everyone knows, elephants do fight among themselves at times.

In deep hill-jungles where men have not yet occupied their terrain, elephants tend to run away from humanity. But where they have been constantly disturbed and harassed by men who have invaded and occupied their homes and occasionally shot at, they develop a lasting hatred towards humanity. It would be quite necessary to stop the disturbance of the elephants and bar cultivation inside the jungles, before the inhibiting potential of black can be exploited effectively,and that would be an exceedingly difficult thing to do in India today."

- M. Krishnan


# This was published on 19 February 1968.
@ The photograph of a herd of elephants has not been reproduced here.