On Trails (15 page)

The feet, I realized, might provide a clue to how elephants can find the easiest route across hundreds of miles of jungle or desert. In fact, when I thought about it, the whole of an elephant's body is perfectly engineered for creating trails. With their powerful sense of smell and hearing, elephants can detect food, water, and other elephants from many miles away. With their broad shoulders, they can bash through dense brush. Because of their immense weight—it requires twenty-five times the amount of energy for an elephant to climb one vertical meter as it does to travel the same distance on flat terrain—elephants will travel to great lengths searching for shallow inclines. (This explains why, as I had noticed in Tanzania, elephants always find the easiest place to cross a river drainage.) Elephant brains, too, are ideally tooled for trail-making; their fabled memory is no myth, particularly in regards to spatial information. They have evolved, it seems, to learn the land.

On top of everything else, the family structure of elephants is extremely conducive to trail creation. Typically, herds of female elephants travel single file, with their matriarch in the lead. It is the role of each matriarch to memorize the location of grazing spots and watering holes; over repeated journeys, those routes are taught to the younger elephants, one of which will grow up to become the next matriarch.
I
This hierarchical, clan-based form of travel likely dates back to the dawn of their species. Paleontologists have discovered a six-million-
year-old “Proboscidean trackway”—the fossilized footprints of thirteen female elephant-like creatures moving together along the same path. Over time, given their sheer size and social structure, elephants will—whether they want to or not—print out trails in their passing.

The unique physiology and social structure of elephants explains
how
they create such elegant trails. But
why
they follow
them remained unclear to me. With all these powerful instruments of perception at their disposal, do elephants need trails, or are trails merely a by-product of walking? Do they give them any more thought than we give the footprints we leave in an inch of newly fallen snow?

I asked these questions to an ecologist named Stephen Blake, whose work focuses on how animal movement affects the land's ecology. In the late 1990s, Blake began studying the ways that forest elephants disperse fruit seeds throughout Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo. To better understand where the elephants were traveling, he started creating a rough map of their trails. Hiking through the swamps and rainforests, he systematically surveyed the trees surrounding the elephant paths, paying special attention to trail intersections. He discovered that the trails overwhelmingly found their way to clumps of fruit trees or to mineral deposits. Other studies have revealed that in desert landscapes, where elephants are forced to cover vast distances to survive, trails likewise tend to connect watering holes and grazing areas. “Lo and behold,” Blake said, “just like all the footpaths in England lead to either the pub or the church, all elephant trails tend to lead to something that elephants want to get to.”

Blake suggested that, even if these trails are not created with any conscious foresight, they quickly come to serve a number of functions. “Let's say you've got naive elephants in a forest they've never been to, and there are various trees dotting the area,” he said. “I suspect at first elephants would go bumbling around and wait until they bumped into a fruit tree, and in doing so, they would have knocked down a load of vegetation to get there, and they would perhaps re
member the geographic location of that tree. And even if they didn't, as they kept bumbling, they're probably going to create a path of least resistance through otherwise thick vegetation. So, just like when you go for a walk through the woods, you get to know which trails lead to a good place and which don't, presumably elephants learn, and certain trails start being reinforced.”

In the jungle, where resources like fruit trees are plentiful but randomly distributed, or in the desert, where resources like watering holes are rare and far-flung, trails serve to reduce the amount of bumbling (a costly activity, energy-wise) and lower the chances of an elephant missing the mark. “Elephants, just like people, get disoriented,” Blake explained. Trails can reorient lost elephants and reconnect disparate populations. In doing so, trails serve as “a form of societal spatial memory”—a collective, externalized mnemonic system, not unlike that of ants or caterpillars.

And it turns out that the big brains and powerful sense organs of elephants, rather than obviating the need for trails, in fact allow them to create vaster and more complex trail networks. Instead of just signifying
this way leads to something good,
as a caterpillar's trails do, memory allows for the nuance of new categories: Animals can learn that
this way leads to fruit, this way leads to water
,
and even (in an elephant's case)
this way leads to my sister's grave
. Animals can begin to feel oriented within a network, aware of where they are in relation to the things they need. In a sense, memory can serve as a trail guide—not necessarily a full record of where things are, but an index of how to quickly access them.

Given their powerful memories and the similarity of their trail networks to our own, I wondered if elephants had grown to regard trails roughly the way we do—which is to say, symbolically. I asked Blake: Does an elephant know what a trail
means
? In other words, do elephants recognize a trail not just as an easy place to walk or an instinctive attraction, but as a symbolic indication that something worth reaching lies at the other end?

I had posed the same question to dozens of animal researchers—with areas of expertise ranging from caterpillars to cattle—without ever getting a satisfying answer. Blake's response was unequivocal: “For sure.”

Creating symbolic trails may seem an onerous mental feat for a nonhuman animal, but in fact, with a vast enough plot of land to memorize, thinking symbolically becomes the path of least resistance. It collapses a complex environment down into neat, easily recognizable lines, and then individuates each of those lines according to its destination, like the color-coded lines of a subway system. Certainly, animals
could
navigate without them, but it would be more difficult, and natural selection, as Richard Dawkins has observed, “abhors waste.”

Relying on trail networks for survival is not without its dangers, though. In places like the Congo, the elephant trail network has recently been disrupted by logging operations, which has left the elephants dangerously disoriented. Blake described the effects of the destruction this way: “Let's say you take a vibrant city that was bombed to buggery in World War II—you take Coventry or Dresden—that had transport networks all over the place. It was interconnected, everybody knew how to get from one side of the city to another. All of that infrastructure that people understood, it was the basis of their lives—and then it got the crap bombed out of it, and buildings fell, piles of rubble everywhere. Then, you just have chaos. Similarly, when you selectively cut a rainforest—you send in bulldozers, you chop out one or two trees per hectare, you pull them out, and in doing so you knock down a lot of other trees, you create other roadways—you just
erase
what was there. Even if you don't go in and kill the elephants, you've done astonishing damage to that sort of beautiful latticework, that functioning system.”

Once a trail system or a learned migration route is severed—as, increasingly and alarmingly, they are, due to human habitation and industry—it rarely reestablishes itself, and the population suffers crippling losses. This is why the zebra migration route Bartlam-
Brooks had uncovered in the Okavango served as such a startling, hopeful discovery. If her theory is correct, it means that, once the fence fell, a herd of elephants managed to revive one of their ancestral routes, which led to a blooming valley of fresh grass hundreds of miles away. Once the elephants' path was reestablished, hordes of other animals could then benefit from the wisdom revealed by the passage of those broad, sensile feet.

PART II

Herding

After I left the elephant sanctuary, I kept thinking back to the image of Misty obediently raising her hind foot so that Cody could inspect it. Before I arrived there, I had expected the elephants would be distant and aloof, carefully avoiding humans, the spindly creatures who had once terrorized them so viciously. But watching Misty and Cody, what struck me about their exchange was that it seemed so calm, so natural; it had none of the air of begrudging acquiescence one often sees when elephants are forced to perform silly tricks. It was gentle, almost affectionate. What it reminded me of most, I later realized, was a handshake.

Knowing how much violence can go into training circus elephants, I was curious about how much coercion had gone into teaching Misty this gesture. According to Kelly, the process was totally pain-free. It was a textbook case of Pavlovian conditioning: First, the caregiver teaches the elephant to associate the sound of a clicking device with a treat, like an apple. The purpose of the clicking device—called a “bridge”—is to let the elephant know the exact moment it has completed the desired behavior. The caregiver begins by clicking and giving the elephant a treat.

Click: treat.

Click: treat.

Click: treat.

The caregiver does this until the elephant reaches out her trunk for a treat whenever she hears a click.

Then, the caregiver touches the elephant's leg with a stick (or “target pole”).

Stick: click: treat.

Stick: click: treat.

Stick: click: treat.

Finally, the caregiver holds the stick a few inches away from the elephant's leg and says “foot.” Then, the caregiver waits.

“Foot.”

“Foot.”

If and when the elephant finally lifts her leg to touch the stick,
click: treat
.

Using a roughly similar method, Kelly was training some of the elephants to receive treatment for their tuberculosis. The elephants needed a course of medication, but they had refused to swallow the foul-tasting pills. So once a day, seven days a week, each infected elephant had been trained to wait patiently while Kelly or another caregiver inserted her rubber-clad arm into the elephant's rectum. According to Kelly, the elephants did not enjoy receiving this treatment any more than she enjoyed administering it.
II
In the long coevolution of humans and elephants on this planet, this is where we have ended up. First, we ran from them, then we hunted them, then we enslaved them; and now we—some of us, at least—do disgusting things to keep them alive.

The elephants fortunate enough to have found their way to the sanctuary probably enjoy better lives than any other elephant in North America—roaming freely across many acres of open forest, well fed, free from predation, their every scab and sneeze worried
over. Nevertheless, I imagine they must sometimes feel like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, comfortably trapped on an alien planet—probed, pampered, and constantly, if politely, surveilled. Despite the caregivers' best efforts to simulate their natural environment, simply by virtue of being cut off from their families and their homeland, the elephants have been made strange to themselves.

Elephants have been tamed countless times throughout history, but have never been domesticated. Nearly every trained elephant—from Hannibal's war beasts to Barnum's ballerinas—was wild born, and subsequently “broken,” as animal trainers used to say. This is what separates a tame animal from a domesticated one. A domesticated animal, like a sheep or a cow, never needs to be broken, because it has already been bred to live comfortably in a human environment. We have sculpted it, right down to its genes, to fit into our version of the world.

In
Guns, Germs, and Steel
, Jared Diamond noted that the “Major Five” domesticated animals—sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses—share a rare set of just-so features: they are neither too large nor too small; neither too aggressive nor too fearful; they grow quickly; they can rest and reproduce in close quarters; and they abide by what Diamond has called a “follow-the-leader” social hierarchy. Channeling Tolstoy, he quipped: “Domesticable animals are all alike: every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.”

Elephants share some of these traits (a strict dominance hierarchy), but not others (they are too big, too restless, and grow too slowly). As almost-domesticates, they have been entered into a rather grisly lottery: each year, for the past four and a half millennia, an unlucky few are abducted, broken, and forced to work for humans, while the rest roam free.

In his controversial 1992 book
The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication
, the science journalist Stephen Budiansky argues that “virtually all of the important characteristics that set apart domesticated animals from their wild progenitors” can be accounted
for by a single biological phenomenon called “neoteny”: the retention of juvenile traits in an adult animal or, as Budiansky playfully puts it, “perpetual adolescence.” These traits include notably cuter physical features and more flexible brains. In stark contrast to the behavior of adults, which tends to be rigid, neotenates explore, play, and solicit care just like the young. Notably—and crucially—they also tend to lack a defensive or fearful posture toward other species and new situations. These traits are most notable in dogs (which were, not coincidentally, the first animal to be domesticated), but are also evident, to varying degrees, in all of the Major Five domesticates.

Yet more striking is Budiansky's panoramic description of how humans and domesticated animals, having locked themselves into a symbiotic blood pact, proceeded to colonize the earth. What unites humans and our motley alliance of herd animals, he suggested, is that we are all “edge-dwellers,” opportunists who continually exploit new and shifting landscapes. Our flexibility is our chief weapon; we are “the scavenger or grazer that can eat a hundred different foods, not the panda exquisitely adapted to living off nothing but huge quantities of bamboo.” Far from having been enslaved, domesticates “chose” (read: evolved) to rely on humans and the changes we wrought on the landscape. The Major Five animals—along with chickens, guinea pigs, ducks, rabbits, camels, llamas, alpaca, donkeys, reindeer, exotic bovids like the yak, and a handful of other species—became domesticated for the same reason some people chose to give up the free-ranging life of a hunter-gatherer to toil as agriculturalists: because it allowed them to outbreed and outcompete their rivals. It was easier to follow the shepherd into the pen than to strike off alone into the wilderness.