Elephant.
The largest and heaviest land animal on Earth, a gentle giant that has influenced history
and to this day plays a sizeable role in many cultures and religions.
If its many unusual parts, both physical and historical, could be displayed in an elephant
ceremonial garment or caparison, then this elephant might carry the story of all elephants.
They have been gods, symbols of political parties, ancient toys, and beasts of burden
in war and peace.
According to Rudyard Kipling's story, The Elephant Child, the elephant's trunk was
made long by a crocodile, a stretch of the imagination if there ever was one.
The fact is, the elephant wins the largest nose in the world contest by more than a nose.
The closest contenders for the largest schnaz title, the elephant seal, and the elephant
shrew come in a poor second to our mighty pachyderm.
But not all pachyderms are elephants.
The term refers to rhinos too, and simply means thick skin.
Although elephant skin can be up to one inch thick, it's not their most distinctive feature.
As a famous poem observes, when people call this beast to mind, they marvel more and more
at such a little tail behind, so large a trunk before.
The trunk is actually part nose and part upper lip, a mass of 100,000 separate muscles with
the power to shake down a meal, and the precision to reap the rewards.
In its search for succulent leaves, the trunk can reach higher than the tallest of all animals,
the giraffe.
Wielding a leafy fan, it can swat away irritating flies.
With a six gallon water capacity, it's a squirt gun that works best when it backfires.
And with help from the tusks, the trunk can maneuver massive logs.
When it comes to the dexterity and power needed to move a portable temple in India, the elephant
has a head start.
The trunk may be a wonderful device for breathing, but we often imagine other uses for it.
Elephants belong to a family known as proboscidea, or animals with a trunk.
One of the earliest elephant ancestors was the short-snouted moratherium.
Later came dinotherium, with its backward curved tusks for digging roots.
Moratherium stood 10 feet tall and had a shovel-shaped lower jaw and tusk.
Mammoths were the closest relatives of modern day elephants, but were driven into extinction
by climate changes and hunting.
The first complete mammoth was discovered in 1799 by a Russian fisherman peering into
a wall of ice.
Mammoths frozen for over 40,000 years have been found in the icebox of Siberia.
Some of the most impressive mammoth bones and tusks have come from the homes of ancient
peoples.
One of the last elephants to go extinct was the pygmy elephant from Sicily.
Only reaching three to five feet, the baby pygmy would have been smaller than a sheep.
It may explain the legend of the rock a giant bird said to swoop down and carry elephants
away.
Only two species of elephant remain today, the African and the Asian.
The average Asian elephant tips the scales at about 9,000 pounds, give or take a comparison.
An eight-year-old African female weighs in at 3,000 pounds, but a full-grown African
bull breaks the scales at 15,000 pounds.
Another difference between the African and Asian is in the curve of their backs.
The African elephant is saddle-backed, the Asian more hump-backed.
But when it comes to the biggest difference, the ears have it.
An African elephant's ears are much larger than an Asian's.
In both size and shape, the ear of the African and that of the Asian bear some resemblance
to their respective homelands.
A lesser-known difference, but very significant, is in the grip tips, or fingers, of the elephant's
trunk.
The Asian elephant has one triangular finger at the end of its trunk and grips by pressing
this against the broad underside of the trunk.
The African elephant has two opposing fingers, and because of this additional finger, can
pick up anything from a banana to a tiny seed.
It can even turn the pages of its own storybook.
With such precise fingers, it's no wonder that the Sanskrit word for trunk, hasta, is
the same as for hand, and the Sanskrit term for elephant means animal with hand.
Elephants even greet each other with their trunks, their own version of a handshake.
All elephants, except for female Asian elephants, can grow very large tusks.
The longest tusks on record belong to a mammoth, curving up to 16 feet in length.
Tusks are actually an elephant's front teeth, which continue to grow throughout life, though
they are constantly worn down by activities such as digging.
In this case, the elephant is digging for mineral salts, an important supplement to
an elephant's diet.
Just as people are right or left-handed, elephants are right or left-tusked, and the shorter
of the two indicates which one does the most work.
For young elephants, tusk sparring is not only fun, but good training for future vows.
When they're adults, they'll have to fight other males for territory and females.
Elephants can be lethal weapons, and some fights between huge tuskers end in death.
For the Parahara Festival in Sri Lanka, tusks are sheathed with gold.
The most unusual tooth on display is a relic in a gold box.
The box is said to contain the actual tooth of the Buddha, and is the focus of a huge
parade with over 100 elephants festooned in elaborate comparisons.
The festivities continue long into the night, illuminated by torches, and the hundreds of
lights and mirrors adorning the elephant comparisons.
One of the Buddha's most famous incarnations was as an elephant with six tusks, four of
which he agreed to sacrifice to satisfy man's greed and demand for ivory.
Elephants with four tusks, and even seven, have actually been recorded, the result of
a deformity in the tusk root.
Tusks grow about seven inches a year throughout an elephant's life, and who knows, maybe
one of this African's tusks will surpass the largest elephant tusk on record, 12 feet
long and 235 pounds, as well as inspiring awe, such tusks have also inspired greed.
But why has elephant ivory, or white gold, always been so desirable?
Ivory is easily carved, durable, pleasing to the touch, and until recently, readily
available for the taking.
Although ivory was used to make some of the earliest works of art 27,000 years ago, today's
demand threatens the elephant's survival.
Despite bans and the burning of illegally poached ivory, many elephants continue to
be slaughtered to satisfy the human desire for white gold.
Humans have always been the elephant's greatest threat.
Even the king of the jungle poses little danger to the combined might of the herd.
Every elephant likes to throw its weight around and protect its territory against trespassers.
This youngster makes a game of it with some noisy mina birds.
Although an elephant's front teeth get most of the attention, it's their massive molars
that put in the longest hours.
They have two in the top jaw and two in the lower.
With the wear and tear of almost nonstop eating, they go through six sets of molars in a lifetime.
These voracious vegetarians spend up to three-quarters of their day chowing down, making them the
biggest eaters on land.
Clearing 220 to 450 pounds of vegetation a day also makes them the biggest weed-whackers.
Elephants are still the largest single influence in clearing woodland and creating the open
grasslands of Africa.
Unfortunately, such monstrous appetites don't differentiate between what grows wild and
what people cultivate.
If anything, they prefer the tastier human produce, making them multi-ton pests to local
farmers.
If a farmer's crop is as high as an elephant's eye, a real one, it can mean disaster.
Every year, grazing elephants eat or trample over $100 million worth of crops.
Who can blame the farmers for trying to drive them off?
Elephants are easily frightened away by fire and loud noises, but mice?
Just an old wives' tale.
Given the elephant's immense size and strength, it's no wonder it was man's supreme war machine
for thousands of years.
Kings rode into battle and directed maneuvers from their state elephants.
Some of the greatest military campaigns hinged on the use of these predecessors to the tank.
Hannibal took elephants across Spain and over the French Alps in his attempt to conquer
Rome.
In 326 BC, Alexander's campaign to reach the eastern sea failed because his troops
were terrified of the enemy's elephants.
As well as the terror they inspired, they were the perfect platform for archers.
As warfare evolved, anti-elephant soldiers used torches and spears to panic the enemy's
elephants, turn them and send them stampeding back into their own troops.
The driver of a maddened elephant would then resort to the ancient version of the cyanide
pill, a mallet and a spike to be driven into the elephant's backbone.
Fortunately, this is only a nightmare of the distant past.
With the advent of firearms 500 years ago, elephants were relegated to the supply lines
and as recently as the Vietnam War, elephants were still being used to move equipment down
the Ho Chi Minh trail.
It's the elephant's foot that makes it such a superior off-road vehicle.
As well as being equipped with the original non-slipped waffle tread, when an elephant's
foot lands, it expands to distribute weight and like a good tire, grips more of the road.
The elephant actually walks on its toes, cushioned by a great squashy heel pad for added comfort.
The largest animal to walk on tiptoe also has a skeleton up to the job.
Like a suspension bridge, the elephant's spine supplies the load-bearing arch required to
support its weight.
The legs provide such a sturdy base, an elephant can sleep standing up.
Surprisingly, similar bone and tooth structures make the tiny hyrax the elephant's closest
cousin.
But the hyrax has never been known to enjoy a game of soccer.
At elephant festivals in Thailand, elephants love to show off their skills.
Although they may never win the World Cup.
When Thailand was still Siam, the sacred white elephant dominated the country's flag and
religious life as well.
Worshipped as living gods, they lived in palaces and enjoyed lives of pampered luxury.
Baby white elephants were even suckled by human wet nurses.
When a new temple was to be built, a white elephant was set loose to find the sacred
site.
In fact, as this statue shows, they're more of a chocolate color than white.
They inspired carvings in gold as well as life-size stone effigies that sometimes became
the temple's foundation.
In ancient Siam, elephants were also used as executioners.
When the king declared, in with his head, the doomed man was placed under an elephant's
foot and crushed.
In the wild, elephants rarely kill people.
A mother protecting her young can be dangerous, but usually she'll just keep her body between
her child and any threat.
Being overprotective comes with good cause.
A baby elephant spends 22 months in the womb, over a year longer than a human baby.
At 200 pounds, they're the biggest babies ever to play in the mud.
A baby's arrival is also important to the herd, which helps with babysitting and can
offer a push when needed.
With an average lifespan of 70 years, an elephant's childhood lasts as long as ours.
It is a youth filled with much to learn, adults to imitate, and lots of time for play.
Elephant twins are extremely rare.
They make up double the weight, double the milk requirement, and double the trouble.
A mother elephant would probably be unable to cope without the help from the herd.
Led by a dominant female, usually an old grandmother known as the matriarch, female elephants herd
together in small groups of about 10, including the youngest.
The matriarch initiates the daily move from the feeding grounds to the watering hole.
As the family travels, the herd can swell as other family groups join the parade.
This can grow from tens to hundreds in the course of a day.
Being the oldest and wisest and one with the longest memory, it is the matriarch who knows
best.
Obedience to the matriarch is rewarded by her expertise in locating food, salt, and
much needed water.
Although she has the hefty responsibility of handing down her knowledge to her daughters,
like any other elephant, she can't resist the opportunity for a swim.
Just as elephants in the wild place their trust in the matriarch, captive elephants
follow a new leader from the human herd.
There is give and take in this relationship, for if the mahout were to forget to give his
elephant a bath, it would almost certainly refuse to work for him.
But a good bath is only the beginning of an elephant's need for water, a drop in the bucket
compared to the 50 gallons a grown elephant can drink every day.
Most elephants live in hot climates where their great bulks are easily overheated.
Water, shade, and mud are all used to keep them cool.
Even dust provides a kind of sunblock.
Ears can help too.
They have a thin skin and thick veins.
When flapped, air rushes over the veins, which release excess heat like a car radiator.
For thousands of years elephants have been tamed and trained by people, but African elephants
have never been trained as successfully as their Asian counterparts, few getting past
the most difficult part of accepting riders on their backs.
Asian elephants, by contrast, are easier to train and take better to being ridden.
They can follow commands within weeks, quickly mastering nearly 100 separate instructions,
making elephants the most intelligent of all domesticated animals.
One of the first things an elephant learns is to hold a rope, which this African elephant
can manage easily.
Though people have long thought the African elephant too wild to train, it may have more
to do with the fact that Africa has never had the same elephant culture as Asia, where
it continues to thrive today.
In many remote areas of Southeast Asia, it's still more economical to use elephants than
modern machinery, which makes them prized labor-saving devices.
A well-trained elephant can cost from $20,000 to $40,000, well worth it considering the
man-hours that can be saved by these powerful and hard-working animals.
In the West, elephants have paraded into popular culture, from babar of children's book fame
to circus elephants.
Some have even played oversized nannies.
In the East, with its long history of elephant culture, elephants belong to more ancient
traditions.
Hindus worship Ganesh, god of students, teachers, and exams, and they fear Gajasura, the demon
of destruction that can possess any elephant.
A destructive rogue elephant is very much a reality, but there's good reason for its
dangerous behavior.
Must is a glandular condition that affects male elephants, or bulls, about once a year.
During must, they seek out females and may become extremely aggressive.
Unpredictable behavior is one reason adult males are not tolerated in female societies.
Bulls may form loose herds, but they never approach the social complexity of the female
herds.
Some males set out on their own, and recently scientists discovered that they keep in touch
with the female herd by using sounds well below the human hearing range.
Infrasound is generated within the swelling forehead, and is so low that two-thirds of
elephant communication can't be heard by humans.
Infrasound creates ripples in the water by its vibrations, and can travel over five miles.
So, if two-thirds of what an elephant hears is below human hearing, then to an elephant,
Tarzan must have sounded like a falsetto.
Though elephant sound is easily measured, their emotions are not.
Observation of their behavior toward elephant remains, such as these skulls, suggests that
they mourn their dead and experience a kind of grief.
Such observations have contributed to the romantic notion of elephant graveyards.
But graveyard sites are most likely the results of weary and dying elephants seeking the one
thing that can support their tremendous weight, water.
Over the years, the corpses may collect in one area, giving the false impression of a
communal death site.
Bones aren't the only things that elephants leave behind.
They are nature's greatest producers of fertilizer, with the output of a fully grown elephant
reaching 300 pounds a day.
This waste to an elephant is just the beginning for many plants, animals, and insects.
Baboons pick at it for undigested seeds.
Franklin's find a nest in it, with central heating no less.
Dung beetles derive their name from it, and they're so devoted to it, a pile of dung can
be more dung beetle than dung.
Not a bad thing, since they take so much of it away.
When water and food are scarce, elephants can teach us a lot about recycling our own
waste.
Providing the stuff of life for many dung-dependent species is only one of the many landscaping
services elephants perform for their community.
Many seeds depend on elephants for dispersal and propagation for the next generation.
Everywhere elephants go, they transform and reshape the landscape.
They pull down trees, break up bushes, carve out rocks with their tusks, create salt licks
for all to use, and with their broad feet cut trails that may be used for thousands
of years.
The multitude of effects on the habitat has led scientists to describe elephants as a
keystone species.
And like the keystone of an arch, if the elephant were removed, then the entire ecosystem of
the vast African grasslands could collapse.
Elephants are even becoming the keystone of some human economies, such as the tourist
industry in Kenya.
In providing a solution to human needs, the elephant performs a role it has long played
in Buddhism.
For in Buddhism, the elephant symbolizes the Bodhisattva, the one who brings salvation
from worldly entanglements by sharing its wisdom.
If the elephant does carry the wisdom of the ages, how appropriate, then, that in China
the phrase, to ride an elephant, sounds the same as the word for happiness.
The
Eyewitness Museum, created by combining traditional filmmaking techniques with state-of-the-art
graphics, stripping away the mysteries of nature and science to reveal the essence of
each subject, bringing the world into sharp focus.
The making of eyewitness.
The distinct style of the eyewitness books is the basis for each of the programs.
Each half-hour episode is based on a book title.
The eyewitness book's visual style gives the program makers a starting point and a challenge.
The challenge of transferring the clarity and super-realism into moving images and sound.
Now let's take a look behind the scenes at the making of elephant.
The comparison which draped our large Asian elephant was commissioned for the eyewitness
program and made to measure for our elephant.
Everyone had to wipe their feet before stepping into the white set.
To achieve movement in the shots of our elephant in the shortest time possible, we used a camera
system called a hothead.
The camera moves were well rehearsed before the animal was brought onto the set.
The hothead and crane required six people working in close harmony to the director's
instructions.
The camera is remote-controlled and is at the end of a seven-meter crane.
The cameraman sees the shot through a monitor and controls the camera with wheels.
It takes great precision to compose a shot for the later edition of electronic graphics.
Everyone on the set fell in love with our small African elephant.
Except perhaps the mouse.
Our filming proved that elephants are not in fact frightened of mice.
A different approach was needed to illustrate the myth.
An animation was commissioned which used our real mouse and a make-believe elephant.
Our real elephant was keen to get to know the mouse, but the mouse had other ideas and
sought the sanctuary of the camera.
The eyewitness graphics design team created a montage of exotic fruits to demonstrate
an elephant's eating action.
The art department created a mountain of food to show how much the animal eats in a day.
This artistic presentation was lost on our elephant who demolished it within minutes.
Despite their attempts to keep things neat and tidy.
Take a look.
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