I don’t want this post to end up sounding like one of Aesop’s fables, but two animal stories caught my attention recently.
The first involved an ostrich - unfortunately one that didn’t survive to tell the tale. The bird in question was called Gaylord (honest, it was, I didn’t make it up), and Gaylord just did what any sensible ostrich would. He lived on an ostrich farm in San Francisco, and when two drunken youths, Timothy McKevitt and Jonathon Porter, jumped over the fence and taunted him, Gaylord kicked them. When the attendent female camp followers laughed, the two men were so incensed, they returned with loaded weapons and shot the bird (the ostrich, not one of the women) seven times. Porter received a seven month sentence - kind of poetic justice, but clearly not severe enough.
The second involved an elephant and a bee (well, a herd and a theoretical hive actually). Researchers from the University of Oxford (Lucy King and her colleagues) have been able to do what African farmers have failed for years to achieve. Elephants regularly break through fences and do tremendous damage to crops. Farmers have found that burning tyres, shining torches, and erecting physical barriers have no or little effect in preventing the destruction.
Lucy King and her team have found that the mere sound of bees sends elephants scampering (buzzing off, even). When bee sounds were played from speakers in mobile trees (honest, it was, I didn’t make that up either), the animals immediately moved up to 100 meters away. Unfortunately the farmers cannot afford the speakers or mobile trees, so the researchers are now trying to discover if bee hives can produce the same effect.
I suppose the moral is that elephants never forget (a sting in the trunk from an African bee can be very painful and last for weeks), and pride and the desire to impress women often comes before an ostrich kicking and a prison sentence.
Taunting an animal and killing it when it retaliates is the same sort of mentality that causes people to kill other people for such stupid motives such as perceived lack of “respect”.
I am probably considered an extremist in that I regard hurting animals to be an absolute prohibition, though there are signs that the rest of society is slowly (”painfully” slowly) moving in the same direction. I consider care for animals to be an end in itself but a further justification is that there is a continuous spectrum running from harming animals to harming humans. People who torture and kill animals are on the road to torturing and killing humans. We should therefore regard acts like the one described with alarm and disgust.
Even when people are convicted of causing gross suffering to animals, the penalties are often risible. I don’t believe that severe penalties by themselves deter crime but light sentences certainly give the impression that the crime is not very serious.
It is immense hubris to believe that animals are ours to do with as we please and incredible species chauvinism to believe that we are the only race that counts on the face of the earth. We had better hope we never meet a species that thinks we are no better than dogs and treats us accordingly.
Apparently another reason they can’t use speakers to frighten away the elephants is that they’re smart creatures and would eventually twig that the noise wasn’t real bees, so it has to be real hives or nothing.
In the article I read it also suggested that baby elephants could actually be killed by bee stings, which might explain their aversion.