Elephant

VHS cover

*Elephant* is the tenth episode of the first season of Eyewitness. The topic of this episode concerns the lives of both African and Asian elephants, looking at their evolution and role in human culture. The episode aired on 10th October 1994.

*Elephant* is based on a book that was first published in 1993, and has been republished in 2000.

## Episode

### Introductory sequence

An elephant’s foot comes down with a heavy impact. This cuts to a composite scene showing three young African elephants before an Asian elephant walks across the screen and leaves the white background behind it. The title sequence then begins.

### Episode outline

Click here for the full transcript for Elephant.

Elephants are the largest and heaviest land animals on Earth. These gentle giants have influenced history, played a sizeable role in many cultures and religions and been used as beasts of burden in both war and peace. In Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Elephant Child’, the elephant got its trunk from a struggle with a crocodile. The elephant has the longest nose of any animal. Elephants are a pachyderm, a group that also includes rhinos – the word simply means thick-skinned.

Although elephant skin is thick, it is not their defining feature. The trunk is part nose and part upper lip, with 100,000 separate muscles. It can be used to reach food, drink, swat away insects and lift heavy logs. We sometimes like to imagine that the trunk also has more musical uses.

Elephant belong to a family of trunked animals called Proboscidea. Some early elephant ancestors include Moeritherium, Deinotherium and Gomphotherium. The woolly mammoth was a close relative of modern elephants but went extinct due to climate change and hunting. One of the most recent elephants to go extinct were the sheep-sized pygmy elephants of Sicily. It perhaps lends credence to the story of the Roc, a bird said to carry elephants away.

Only two elephant species survive today, the African and Asian. African elephants grow larger than Asian elephants, have a saddle-back instead of the Asian elephant’s humped back and each elephant species has ears shaped like the place where it originates from. A less obvious difference is the number of fingers on the trunk, with the Asian elephant having just one and the African elephants having two opposable fingers. With these fingers, it is no wonder that the Sanskrit word for trunk and hand are the same, and the local name for the elephant means ‘animal with hand’.

All elephants, except female Asian elephants, grow long tusks. Mammoths had the longest tusks on record. The tusks grow throughout life but are kept short by activities such as digging. Adult elephants use their tusks in the wild for fighting while at the Perahera festival in Sri Lanka, the tusks of tame elephants are sheathed in gold and over a hundred elephants in elaborate caparisons are involved in moving a gold box said to contain a tooth of the Buddha. One of Buddha’s most famous incarnations was a six-tusked elephant, who gave away four of them to satisfy man’s desire for ivory. Elephant ivory has long been desired because it is easy to carve and pleasing to touch, but although it has been used in art for over 20,000 years today it threatens the elephant’s survival. Humans are the only serious threat that elephants face, and they have very few predators.

Although the tusks are the most obvious elephant teeth, the molars put in most of the work. They spend three-quarters of the day chewing, and make up for the low quality of most of their food by consuming great quantities – between one and two hundred kilos a day on average. By clearing dense woodland, elephants are one of the key factors in keeping Africa’s grasslands open. Elephants can be crop pests – every year they trample or eat a hundred million dollars’ worth of crops, and farmers have to try and scare them off. Mice do not frighten elephants.

Considering their size and strength, it is not surprising elephants were used in warfare. Kings rode into battle on elephants. Hannibal took elephants over the Alps in his attempt to conquer Rome and the campaign of Alexander the Great failed because his army were terrified of the enemy’s elephants. Elephants could also serve as platforms for archers. As warfare evolved, anti-elephant techniques were created to turn the animals around and send them stampeding back into their own army. The driver of a maddened elephant would kill it with a mallet and a spike driven into the animal’s backbone. With the invention of firearms, elephants were relegated to the supply lines. As recently as the Vietnam War, elephants were moving equipment on terrain too rough for modern vehicles.

Elephant feet have a non-slip tread on the soles and they expand when they touch the ground to spread the weight. Elephants actually walk on tiptoe, with the rest of the foot being a fatty cushioning pad. The skeleton is also adapted for weight-bearing, with a huge spine and legs so study the animal can sleep standing up. Similar bone and tooth structures show that the hyrax is the nearest elephant relative. In Thailand, trained elephants play games of football.

When Thailand was still Siam, the white elephant was on its flag. Worshipped like living gods, they lived in palaces and, as babies, were suckled by human wet nurses. A white elephant was let loose to find the sacred site of a new temple. White elephants are actually chocolate-coloured and inspired gold carvings and life-sized stone effigies. Elephants in ancient Siam were also used as executioners, crushing a condemned prisoner’s head under their foot. Wild elephants rarely kill people, although a mother can be dangerous when defending her young.

A baby elephant spends 22 months in the womb and are ninety kilos at birth. The herd helps to babysit a new calf. Elephants have an average lifespan of seventy years, so their childhoods are as long as our own. Elephant twins are rare and take a lot of work to look after; a mother probably wouldn’t manage without the herd. Herds are led by an old female called the matriarch, who is the oldest and wisest individual in the herd and guides the others to food, water and salt. She hands down knowledge to her daughters. Just as wild elephants learn from their elders, tame ones learn from their human handlers. The mahout needs to look after his elephant, otherwise it would refuse to work for him. An elephant can drink 220 litres of water every day. With such big bodies at risk of overheating, elephants use water, shade, mud and dust to keep them cool. Their ears also help them to radiate excess heat.

Elephants have been tamed and trained for thousands of years, although African elephants have never trained as well as Asian elephants, with few accepting men on their backs. Asian elephants can learn quickly and learn over 100 separate instructions, making them one of the most intelligent domestic animals. One of the first things an elephant is taught to do is hold a rope. Although African elephants were long thought too wild to train, it may be that Africa has never had the elephant culture that Asia has. In many remote parts of Asia, it is still more economical to use elephants than modern machinery, and they can cost 20-40,000 dollars. In the west, elephants have marched into popular culture. In the east, elephants belong to more ancient traditions. Hindus worship the elephant-headed god Ganesh and fear Gajasura, the elephant demon.

The destructive rogue elephant is very much a reality due to musth, a glandular condition that affects bull elephants once a year and makes them extremely aggressive. This may be one reason why bulls are not tolerated in female society. Bulls may form loose herds but mostly live alone. They keep in touch with low rumbles, two-thirds of which humans cannot hear. While elephant sounds can be measured, their emotions can’t. The reaction of elephants towards the bones of other elephants suggests that they mourn their dead and feel grief. Such observations contributed to the notion of elephant graveyards. Actually, it was probably dying elephants seeking water and the bodies accumulating over the years to give the impression of a communal death site.

As well as bones, elephants leave behind huge quantities of dung that are useful to creatures such as baboons, francolins and dung beetles. Elephants will even consume their own dung in difficult times. As well as providing for dung-dependent species, elephants spread seeds from many plants. Everywhere they go, elephants change the landscape, pulling down trees and bushes, carving rocks with their tusks, creating salt licks and trails; this has led to elephants being classed as a keystone species, whose disappearance would cause the entire ecosystem to collapse. Elephants are also keystones to some human economies, like tourism in Kenya. In serving human needs, the elephant performs the role it has long served in Buddhism, symbolising one who brings salvation from worldly entanglements by sharing its wisdom. If elephants do carry the wisdom of the ages, how appropriate that in China the phrase ‘to ride an elephant’ is the same as ‘happiness’.

## Animal species filmed for the programme

### Studio footage

* African bush elephant, *Loxodonta africana*
* Asian elephant, *Elephas maximus*
* Harris’s hawk, *Parabuteo unicinctus*
* House mouse, *Mus musculus*

### Stock footage

* African bush elephant, *Loxodonta africana*
* Asian elephant, *Elephas maximus*
* Northern elephant seal, *Mirounga angustirostris*
* Rufous elephant-shrew, *Galegeeska rufescens*
* Greater one-horned rhinoceros, *Rhinoceros unicornis*
* Lion, *Panthera leo*
* Jungle myna, *Acridotheres fuscus*
* Western cattle egret, *Bubulcus ibis*
* Rock hyrax, *Procavia capensis*
* Blue wildebeest, *Connochaetes taurinus*
* Chacma baboon, *Papio ursinus*
* Red-billed francolin, *Pternistis adspersus*
* Dung beetle, *Scarabaeoidae*
* Cape bushbuck, *Tragelaphus scriptus*
* Impala, *Aepyceros melampus*

## Stock footage sources

* Hamilton the Musical Elephant (1961) – Trumpeting elephant cartoon
* Wildlife on One
	+ Trivial Pursuit - The Natural Mystery of Play (1988) - Elephant calf in zoo playing with box
	+ Blubber Lovers (1989) – Northern elephant seal

* Supersense: Sense of Timing (1989) - Rufous elephant-shrew
* Natural World: The Wonderful World of Dung (1991) - Elephants eating dung, dung beetles

## Credits

* Producer - Rob Harvey
* Director - Jan Pester
* Graphics Designer - Alisa Robbins
* Writer - Brian Meehl
* Set Design - Ben Scott
* Design Assistant - Anne Neale
* Production Manager - Peter Thornton
* Production Assistant - Lisa Garvin
* Production Secretaries - Caroline Elston and Cathy Wilkin
* Unit Manager - Grant Dean
* Researcher - Anthony Lee
* Picture Researcher - Martin Willis
* Research Assistant - Lisa Kendrick
* Graphic Design - Richard Higgs and Christopher Vass
* Editors
	+ Offline - Chris Godden
	+ Online - Sharon Stiles
* Dubbing Editor - Julie Mitchell
* Dubbing Mixer - Andrew Wilson
* Music - Guy Michelmore
* Executive Producer - Michael Bright,
* Special thanks to:
	+ Jim Clubb
	+ Bobby Roberts
	+ Othmar Vohringer
	+ Bristol Zoo Education Dept.

## Making this programme

The making-of documentary first shows the caparison, produced especially for the programme and made to be a perfect fit for the elephant. To keep the set white in colour everyone, even the elephants, had to wipe their feet. To film such a big animal, a camera rig operated by six people and positioned on a seven-metre crane called a hothead was used. The young African elephant was everyone’s favourite on set. The elephant was found not to be frightened of mice, so a cartoon had to be used to demonstrate the myth. To show how much an elephant eats, the art department made a mountain of food that the elephant began to demolish, despite attempts by the crew to keep it swept up in a neat pile.

## Home media releases

As well as being released on VHS, Elephant was also released as part of the DVD release in the USA.

Elephant America-release DVD cover

**Writing staff**: Anne MacLeod • Ben Southwell • Ben Steiner • Brian Meehl • David Hanson • David Stafford • David Helton • George Bloom • Lynette Singer • Mike Tomlinson • Paul Thomas • Stan Cullimore
**Directors**: Gavin Maxwell • Justine Kershaw • David Hutt • Andrew Jackson • Justin Hardy • Ludo Graham • Jerry Foulkes • Derek Hall • Sanjida O'Connell • Caius Julyan • Bonni Cohen • Leanne Pooley • Edwina Vardey • Alexandra Beazley • Sam Hodgkin • Karen Walsh • Jack Weber • Richard Simkin • Alex Hearle • Brian Cummins • Ben Southwell
**Composers**: Guy Michelmore (season one) • Guy Dagul (seasons two and three)

**Season One**: Cat • Fish • Horse • Dog • Jungle • Bird • Amphibian • Insect • Shark • **Elephant** • Reptile • Dinosaur • Skeleton
**Season Two**: Desert • Tree • Ape • Mammal • Butterfly and Moth • Volcano • Rock and Mineral • Seashore • Pond and River • Weather • Arctic and Antarctic • Prehistoric Life • Shell
**Season Three**: Flight • Bear • Sight • Island • Survival • Mountain • Monster • Human Machine - Plant • Ocean • Planets • Life • Natural Disasters