“There are still plenty of questions to answer, but this research provides further evidence of the importance of these older bulls in elephant society.”
And here we go again.
Trophy hunters are playing the conservation card again, saying that old bull elephants that are no longer useful for breeding are a waste of space. They chew up valuable and finite natural resources — literally — and guzzle dwindling supplies of fresh water that would be better served slaking the thirst of fat dentists from Minnesota, and other trophy hunters.
Old bull elephants are hoarders of ivory — they’re so greedy! — and they would make great keepsakes for the trophy wall, except that libtards, bunny huggers, socialist lefties — the worst kind — and big-city elites keep getting in the way.
By gunning down every old bull elephant in Africa, trophy hunters are doing the environment, and conservation, a favour. Why can’t people see that? Can’t a fat dentist from Minnesota catch a break in the media every once in a while?
How inconvenient, then, that new research, highlighted just days ago in the New York Times — that socialist rag! — challenges the assumption that bulls become redundant in elephant society once their breeding years are behind them. Elephant matriarchs are vital to a herd’s survival, due to their vast repository of past knowledge — where to find water in a drought, how to keep the babies away from marauding lions, where the best eating is to be found at any given time of year. While matriarchs are a valuable natural resource in their own right, old bulls were traditionally viewed as solitary loners, sullen, rude and uncommunicative. They have big tusks, though!
New evidence, the results of a study by the University of Exeter in the UK, published last Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, suggests however that old bulls pass along vital information to younger bulls, not just life skills but about how to behave in polite society. It turns out that, as with human beings, there is no bigger idiot than a young male, and it takes the wisdom and maturity of age to show young ‘uns the way to a more responsible, fulfilled life.
Again, as with humans, young bulls are disinclined to listen to their female elders, but an old bull can lay down the law big-time, if it should have to come to that. Needs must.
That wailing sound you hear now is every trophy hunter in Africa moaning the fact that perhaps shooting every old bull elephant in Africa isn’t that good an idea after all.
“Little research has focused on male elephants,” writer Rachel Nuwer noted in the New York Times. “Males tend to roam across vast distances. This makes them difficult to track and observe.”
Studies have hinted, though, that there is more to males than is often assumed.
“For example, from 1992 to 1997, young orphaned male elephants that had been introduced to Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa began coming into premature musth, a temporary state of heightened aggression and sexual activity,” Nuwer continued. “When females rejected the adolescentsʼ advances, the young males took their aggression out on white rhinos, killing more than 40. Seeking a solution, researchers introduced six older male elephants to the park. The younger malesʼ musth subsided, and the rhino killing stopped.”
Older bulls tend to be targeted by both trophy hunters and poachers, because of their larger tusks. Trophy hunters have traditionally justified this by pointing out that older male elephants no longer serve any purpose to the family group. The new findings underscore the consequences of removing the oldest, largest males from elephant populations.
If an old bull elephant were to write a book, in other words, it might well be titled, How to Behave and Succeed in Life. If a fat dentist from Minnesota were to write a book, on the other hand, it might be titled, How I Shot an Old Elephant on My Hunting Safari to Africa. Which one would you read?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/science/male-elephants-bulls.html
©Nel Botha-Pixabay