Animal attacks

File this under the wildest of wildcards, but rae the number of attacks by animals formerly thought to be relatively harmless or difficult to provoke on the rise?

My ever-sharp colleague pointed me to an article about a stingray attack in Florida, in which the stingray leapt into a boat and stung an 81 year-old man. Today, Reuters reports that five people in a village in Bangladesh were killed by rampaging elephants. The New York Times had a remarkable article speculating about "an elephant crackup" earlier this month, which some scientists argue is a consequence of the breakdown of elephants' biological and social environments:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem....

it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities....

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, [Oregon State University professor Gay] Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.

Elsewhere, Bradshaw elaborates her argument about elephant aggression, and also suggests that this new interpretation of its causes is part of a bigger shift in animal psychology.

Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part, revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths. Could it be that elephants, like humans, also suffer psychological trauma as a result of violence?

Until a few years ago, making such inference and diagnosing elephants with PTSD would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism. But no longer. Elephant psychopathology, chimpanzee infanticide and other un-animal-like behaviors are part of a growing body of research that suggests science is building toward a radical paradigm shift. Streams of new data and theories, critically from neuroscience, are converging into a new, trans-species model of the psyche. Humans are being reinstated back into the species continuum that Darwin articulated, a continuum that includes laughing rats, octopuses with personalities, sheep who read emotions from the faces of their family members and tool-wielding crows.

We now understand that all vertebrates, and it is argued even some invertebrates, share many biological structures and processes that underlie attributes once considered uniquely human: empathy, personality, culture, emotion, language, intention, tool-use and violence. Furthermore, we are able to see beyond species differences in ways we have never been able to before. Neuroimaging advances such as PET and fMRI can help map more elusive subjective qualities—such as emotion, states of consciousness and sense of self—to specific regions of the brain. In conjunction with a rich legacy of observational data and theories on animal behavior and human psychology, neuroscience is bridging long-standing conceptual and perceptual gaps.

Whether or not this paradigm shift conforms precisely to science philosopher Thomas Kuhn's definition, its potential effects on science and society are revolutionary. The idea that humans share a psyche with other animals is enormously challenging. First, it alters the basic model around which biomedical and other disciplines have organized theory and terminology. Concepts like sense of self, empathy and intention have largely been considered exclusive to humans, and have therefore defined what animals are not. Such perceived dissimilarities have shaped theory, practice, law and custom for centuries. The human-animal gap influences how we live, how we formulate scientific questions, how we practice science and even what we eat. Today, in contrast, models of species' similarity are replacing models of difference, and the lines between species have become increasingly blurred—blurred to the extent that many insist on limits to stem cell-chimera research to avoid mixing the neuronal and psychological capacities of humans and other species.

Are there other interesting statistics suggesting an increase in the number of attacks by animals that previously were not especially aggressive (as in the case of the stingray), or a change in the kind of aggression exhibited by animals (as in the case of the elephant)?

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Comments

[Wendy]

Just as animals can often sense a volcano or earthquake before human technology, animals may have hyper-sensitivity to cell phone towers, climate change, or increased pollution.
I have heard one explantion of this phenomena which goes back to the Old Testament and the book of Genesis in which man was given dominion or power over animals, infering that before that point animals were not so easily controlled. Man as prey is a concept long forgotten and what causes a bear or other large mammal to fear man is not readily understood. If folk-lore describes a time when animal/ human relations were different would be an interesting topic to explore.
Prof. Wendy Neill