The world is an awfully crowded place. It’s easy to forget this sometimes, living in Idaho, although even here, the baleful, Californicating eyes of the human surge make my spine prickle at times.

This makes it all the more odd that we’ve somehow managed to coexist with a 8.25 ton creature so alien-looking that H.P. Lovecraft used it as his model for Cthulhu.

I was set to thinking about elephants by a nasty update from Cameroon, where conflict in nearby Chad has spilled over into a guerilla war against elephant populations in the north of that country.

This won’t be a diatribe against guerillas in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s hard to expect child warriors- possible sick from brown brown (a gunpowder laced form of cocaine popular in Northern African war zones) and adrift with cross-currents of colonialism and neglect- to feel much empathy for endangered species. Read Ishmael Beah’s searing memoir ‘A Long Way Gone’ if you need a primer on that landscape.

It’s more of a celebration of that corner of the human psyche that wants to love ‘otherness’.

It’s generally recognized that humans are drawn to wild animals that evoke the infantile. In fact, Stephen Jay Gould (the roaring crusader for all things Darwinian) published an essay on this topic titled ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, noting the prime rodent’s steady evolution from a basal, rat-like form to a Gerber baby with big ears.

Elephants don’t really fit the mold, though. The proportions are off… and then there’s the trunk, a sinister polyglot mating between a bristle worm and a python.

Most people have encountered the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach'd the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

For the full poem, see  ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’

The kernel of the story is the mismatched, unthinkable weirdness of elephant anatomy. School kids in western nations have been conditioned by Babar- we forget how odd the creature must have seemed to Western Europeans, acclimated to the Jersey Cow and the chicken.

It’s also hard for humanity to really anthropomorphize anything that simultaneously evokes a landslide and a tornado. Nothing that large should be able to move the way that elephants do.  There’s a reason that elephants have ploughed through endless eruptions of daub and wattle huts in Africa, ultimately imperiling their own existence. They know that they can.

Mastodons and Wooly Mammoths shared that knowledge, I’m sure, but were no match for the spears and pit traps of Paleolithic humanity in North America.  Bringing back those giants to North America would take a phenomenal breakthrough by Svante Paabo and his ancient DNA crew, as well as Pleistocene re-wilding on a grand scale.

Personally, I’m all for it… but there may be a few ranchers and gardeners in Middle America who object.

There are reasons why elephants have persisted where their ice-age brethren have been lost. Certainly, the harnessing of Asian elephants- although one step removed from domestication- has placed them in the ‘servant’ bracket in some parts of the world. This doesn’t explain Africa, however.

I’d like to think that there’s a deep response to any creature so manifestly intelligent, and so expressive of familiar emotional nuance. Tales of familial bonds, deep grief and loyalty in elephants: these archetypes are familiar to the Animal Planet crowd, and are undoubtedly a shot in the arm to international conservation efforts.

This type of response explains the stuffed barbaloot look-alikes that infest nurseries (although the one in the image to the right could have been pulled from a detox tank at a county lockup).  But I think it’s insufficient as an explanation for elephants as persistent fellow-travelers.

Maybe the bottom line is that the world- while feeling so crowded- remains larger than we realize. Maybe it’s Providence. At the very least, it’s definitely the tireless efforts of international NGOs, scientists, and underpaid game wardens in the Kalahari dust. People who love otherness. 

I have to believe that the numb inertia of the international ivory trade- and the hollow-eyed madness of post-colonial warfare are small things in comparison.

And I’d like to think maybe someday our world- or at least our shared understanding of it- will re-expand, and the geneticists and Pleistocene dreamers will bring back the mastodons back too.