Teenage Youth: Elephant and Human Parallels

Teenagers rebel against parental controls, right?

Well, most in human societies they do, to some extent at least. It is all a matter of degree.  At the mildest end of the scale they may stay out a tad later than an imposed curfew time or chitchat, text or tweet about parents.  I grew a beard. It did not last long because it was truly an eyesore, tricoloured (red, white and brown) and straggly.

At the other end of the scale things can get pretty ugly. Gang warfare, extreme violence, even murder.

A report in the Los Angeles Times of Dec 16 last year, passed on to me by my daughter, who has a teenager of her own, made me dive into my memory banks as she reminded me of its parallel to things I had witnessed in elephant society.

It was titled Michigan study: Fewer men around? Expect more youth violence. Of course I had a look at the links and was struck by the fact that the author’s name was Daniel Kruger. He was quoted by the Times as follows:

A new study that zeroed in on a single city in Michigan found that where men are scarce, youth were more likely to commit assaults.

“Male scarcity is actually a driver of conditions,"... "It’s the most powerful predictor.”

Dr. Kruger is a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the study, originally published in the Journal of Community Psychology. Other media outlets picked up the story and there are similar studies reported elsewhere.

None of these studies picked up on the great similarity they have to events in elephant society that I first learned about in South Africa in 1997. I was with my wife on a study leave from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine  and by sheer chance, or maybe an alignment of the planets we were visiting a former student and friend, Bob Keffen. Bob had been determined to work as a wildlife vet in Africa even before he graduated. He had had to settle for a job as a park ranger and was employed in Pilansberg NP. He managed to wangle an invitation for me to sit in on a meeting about a major elephant problem.

The problem was all to do with teenage elephants and the lack of big bulls in the population (sounds like Dr. Kruger's study in Michigan).

In the 1970s and 80s elephant numbers had grown out of proportion to the capacity of the Kruger NP, South Africa’s largest, to feed them and the park’s vegetation was taking a hammering. 

A cull, this one in Rwanda in 1975. The young went to the Akagera NP

It was thought that a humane way of dealing with problem in park was to cull adults, capture juveniles and transfer them to other locations. 

 Pilansberg had been one such destination and several young elephants, all under the age of ten, had been shipped there. At first all seemed well and of course the new animals drew plenty of tourists. It was not only the elephants that were new. Plenty of rhino, mostly white rhino, had been taken there as well.

The elephants grew up, but of course had no parental guidance and a complete loss of social and family history.

Such history is vital to elephant society and it comes as no surprise, after the work of Joyce Poole and others like Cynthia Moss, that events in Pilansberg did not follow the normal path.

Male elephants reach sexual maturity at about age 17 but get little chance to breed until they are much older. Their most aggressive activities take place during musth, when testosterone levels go sky high and various externally visible changes rake place. Secretions from the pre-orbital gland drip down the side of their faces and a green secretion drips from the penile sheath. Before she had worked out what was happening Dr. Poole had even called it “Green Penis Syndrome.”  

In a moving speech at the 22^nd AnnualElephant Managers Workshop Dr. Poole said Young males coming into musth for the first time… are unsure of their new selves, apparent slaves to their raging hormones.

In “normal” elephant society mature bulls, that can detect the smell of a female in heat from up to 10 km away, will quickly suppress any musth tendencies in these teenagers. Dr. Poole saw this happen as quickly as twenty minutes after an encounter.  

In Pilansberg there were no big bulls to control the youngsters, and the females had no chance of doing so, not even if they formed coalition groups and talked to one another in their subsonic language.  By their late teens the bulls were larger and heavier than any female, even the few rescued from circuses that had arrived as adults.

In the early 90s some strange things began to happen. White rhinos were found dead, and without doubt elephants had attacked many of them.   

A rhino that survived attack, but has a serious hole in his shoulder

Trampling around the kill site, footprints and most compelling of all, large holes in the sides of the rhinos that can only have been created by tusks.

Then the evidence chain became absolutely certain when rangers in helicopters saw single male elephants chasing rhinos. There is even photographic evidence of one such encounter. An unnamed tour bus operator watched as an elephant encountered a rhino and attacked it. 

Into the river

First encounter

In this series of photos to you can see the attack and its outcome, which had a happier ending than many as the rhino escaped. 

 

Unwilling partner. Escape maybe?

Made it! Not all were so lucky

The photos were shared with me by one of Bob Keffen’s ranger colleagues, Gus Van Dyk. The quality is not great, but they were taken with a small camera and then I got copies of what were probably already copies.

In all, during the period 1992-96 some 49 rhino deaths could be attributed to elephant aggression. When known culprits were identified they were shot, and periods of lull in rhino deaths followed.

Of course this does not answer the question of why? Why rhinos? One can only speculate, but one possible explanation is that the young males, like young males of many species, were going through puberty, or had just gone through it, and were looking for some sex. The only thing they recognized as being about the right size and that were standing around were the rhino. On top of that the Joyce Poole phrase about them being apparent slaves to their raging hormones during musth may have played a role.

In human terms there was one terrible ending when a musth elephant attacked a parked vehicle and the family’s father was killed. Two male elephants were culled after that incident. You can read many more details here in an article published in 2001 in the South African wildlife journal Koedoe.

My participation in the meeting with Dr. Poole, Bob and other park staff was minimal, although one ranger did ask about the possibility of elephant castration. On this subject I was able to tell them that the process took a long time and was quite complicated because an elephant’s testes lie inside the abdomen, close to the kidneys and are difficult to reach because of the animal’s sheer size. As far as I know the first such surgery was performed by my friend and colleague Dr. Murray Fowler  and took about three hours. Everyone at the table realized at once that this was not an option in Pilansberg.

It was very soon obvious that Joyce Poole had the solution. She urged the park authorities to bring in a few mature bulls, that she called “super bulls” to suppress the juveniles quickly and create a more normal breeding environment for the entire elephant and rhino societies. The obvious place to source them was the Kruger NP.

Elephant boma with lots of power

It was also obvious that she had made this suggestion quite some time ahead of the meeting because after lunch we were taken out to see the newly built pen into which these super bulls would be placed. It was tiny, perhaps only 40 metres on a side, but fully rigged with several high voltage lines, each on a different circuit. As Gus explained, “we have to teach them to respect fences, which they have never had to do in the Kruger.”

"Super bulls" solved the problem, but created some new ones.

Bob later told me that the results were a resounding success, with one interesting wrinkle. The big bulls soon changed the vegetation in the park as they knocked down and ripped up trees.

I wonder how many readers of this post have spotted the odd coincidence of the name of the park in Africa where the elephants were sourced and the name of the lead author of the report about the human youth problems in Michigan. Both are Kruger.

Urban Deer - Risks to Humans

Have just returned from a great trip out to very western most part of Canada. We got as far as Tofino on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island after visiting friends along the way. I also did a talk on various things related to wildlife for the Victoria Academy of Veterinary Medicine. Most present were small animal practitioners, but there were a few wildlife rehab folks there as well. I may have surprised some of the attendees by suggesting that the feeding of urban deer is simply a bad thing.

Of course it is bad for the humans in several ways.

Perhaps the mildest ”bad” is that the deer eat people’s gardens. Not just veggies, but also ornamental flowers. Most of our friends on the island have erected deer-proof fences and on the offshore Saltspring Island I think everyone has done the same.

Another concern is the potential for Lyme disease to crop up in humans. Here is an authoritative site about it. The deer do not carry the disease itself, but they do carry the ticks that spread it. The more deer, potentially the more ticks. There were ten reported cases of this nasty condition in humans in British Columbia in 2011.

Traffic accidents are of course a major hazard. There are YouTube videos to show it. 

Habituated or tame deer can be very dangerous. The females are especially so when they have very young fawns.  In this clip shown on TV news, a doe attacks a pet dog in the Victoria suburb of Sannich. Imagine if that had been a toddler.

Dr. Jay Rolfe, whom I had not seen since his graduation from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine about 25 years ago, related how a doe had emerged from hiding and flattened a young 18-year old male. In the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, a cow moose attacked and killed a pedestrian.  Newly calved wapiti are very aggressive and are a real hazard in Jasper National park. They seem to view dogs with great dislike and will attack them. I am convinced that small children (say under ten) are seen as potential predators.

If does are potential bad news rutting stags or bulls of any member of the deer family become incredibly dangerous during the rut. Each fall there are reports of so-called tame deer, usually white-tailed deer, changing almost overnight from “stroke-my-nose-please, I-love-it” to crazy killers hell-bent of destruction. One client of mine was treed for several hours by such a buck after it hit him from behind. He was lucky to escape up a nearby poplar with torn jeans and some dramatic bruises. 

As the person who posted this YouTube video wrote:

This is video of the elk rut in Estes Park, CO in the fall of 2009. The elk are in a frenzy, and don't care about people around! 

If that shows how things can get wild with non-imprinted cervids, this story shows how things may turn out.

I wrote this in Of Moose and Men.

My own scary experience with an enraged “tame” bull occurred with three hundred kilos of mind-bent, testosterone-crazed, but luckily de-antlered wapiti. He was part of a research group that I had been working with for several months. I used to visit them almost daily but had missed seeing them over the first weekend in September. On the Monday morning I entered the pen without taking due note of the changes that had happened. The bull came straight for me and pinned me against one of the uprights in a corner of the yard. As long as I stood fairly still he simply leaned on me, albeit with some force, pressing my back against the post so that I could feel each of my vertebrae creating a dent in the wood. If I tried to move he leaned a bit more—quite a bit more. I wondered if I was ever going to get out of this mess, but luckily I was with one of my students, who was outside the pen, and so I called out to him to help me. He had the presence of mind to grab a handy length of two-by-four, lean around the nearby gatepost, and give the bull a good thump on the rump. Happily the bull turned to face this new threat, giving me a chance to break the world’s standing high-jump record over the three-metre fence.

The student was Jay Rolfe, but I had failed to catch up with him before publication of the book and felt I could not use his name without his permission.  He certainly saved me from some serious injury and may have saved my life.

This sharp testosterone peak is central to the whole business of the rut and in this graph that I developed almost 30 years ago from work I did on wapiti (North American elk) I show how quickly it happens.
 
In wapiti the jump takes place about the beginning of September. In other species the date changes, but not the event. If you look closely at the scale you will see that this is a log scale. There would not be room on this page to show the actual rise in real numbers. It is about 1000 fold!

It is not just tame animals that will become aggressive. On the eleventh tee of the beautiful Lobstick golf course in Prince Albert National park a bull wapiti once took over the ground. Wise golfers used ”local rules” and teed up a hundred or so yards down the fairway. I don’t know if the scores for the shortened hole improved, but I doubt it. Golfers would have had heightened excitement levels after a meeting like that. The steadiness needed to play god golf might have been suspended.

I shall explore how the development of an urban deer culture, and especially the feeding of urban deer is an animal welfare issue in my next post.

Murder by elk (moose)?

Linkhttp://stju.blogspot.com/2009/12/swedish-man-cleared-of-murder-after.html

An unusual report has come out of Sweden and appeared on the BBC website (here) on 28th November and on a blog called JUSTICE", FROM THE CRAZY TO THE DEEPLY DISTURBING" (here). The BBC headline reads,

“Sweden woman's 'murder' committed by elk not husband”

.
I have been trying to find out more about it since the as the report has some intriguing holes in it. Of course the first thing to clear up is that the word elk means something different in Europe than it does in North America. It is a bit difficult to figure our why the elk of North America, known as Wapiti, ever became to be called en elk, which is what the moose is known as across the pond and right round the globe as far as the Bering Strait. Elch, Alg, and others are the names in languages other than English. Idle speculation on my part makes me wonder if one of the early settlers, maybe even someone on the Mayflower, was either short-sighted or had cataracts. If he or she saw a large brown deer-like beast it might have been dubbed an elk.

Anyhoo, that aside, the story is a sad one. A man named Ingemar Westlund says he was "dragged through a nightmare" after being arrested on suspicion of the murder of his wife. He found the body of his wife Agneta, aged 63 in September 2008 and was immediately arrested by police and held in custody for 10 days.

In the initial investigation, police did not take into account the possibility of a killer elk, assuming that the animal hairs on Mrs. Westlund’s coat were from her dog. It was only when the police realized that 68 year-old Mr. Westlund was not strong enough to have inflicted the damage to his wife that they went to forensics. Scientists at Umeå University sorted out the hair types and identifed the saliva. At that point it must have been assumed that she had been attacked when taking their dog for a walk in the forest. The charges were later dropped.

One of the weirder elements of this story appears as a quote on the BBC site

“Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.”

There are more detail on the “Justice” blog where it states that:

“Drunken elks attacked an old people’s home four years ago, and had to be driven back by police and hunters… Typically weighing up to half a tonne, elk are best avoided when they are tipsy. They have entered department stores, got stuck in lifts, attacked skiers and barged into kitchens.”

If the “murderer” was a bull then there is a much stronger likelihood that apples had little to do with the event.

The deer scientist in me at once raises a red flag. The sad event occurred in September. September is the month when the rut starts in moose in the Northern Hemisphere and as the month goes along the rut gets more intense.

That intensity is driven by a huge spike in testosterone (T4) in the blood. I am not aware of any exact studies of T4 levels in moose, but in elk (the wapiti version) they are well known. As you can see from this graph, which I made almost 30 years ago during a research project of the rut in wapiti, T4 concentrations increase about 100 fold in the space of two weeks. The scale on the graph does not give a true picture as it had to be altered to fit on a page or screen.

Aggression is then the watch-word and humans are targets if they get too close to the sex-crazed creature. One of my colleagues, who will remain nameless, descried a particularly randy male student (who also flies incognito) as a life-support system for an erection. A rutting male deer really does fit that description.

I have talked to moose hunters who have been attacked. They were all terrified and were mighty thankful to have guns. Poor Mrs. Westlund would have had no chance.

Even if the moose was a female and Mrs. Westlund had got too close, she would have been completely outmatched. Moose cows, especially if defending a calf, are powerful and would attack a dog much as they do a wolf, using the front feet to strike and pound. Imagine 400 kg or more of enraged moose, bull or cow, up against a woman and a dog. No contest.

Another sad element. Mr. Westlund was shunned by his neighbours. “When I and my children bade farewell to Agneta at her funeral in front of 300 mourners, I was suspected of murdering her — can you imagine what that means?” he said. He is now seeking compensation.