Why Elephants are Incredibly Social (But Never Domesticated)

What the film says

1. In 1879 four Indian elephants were landed on the coast of present-day Tanzania for a Belgian expedition, and they died one by one, probably from overwork and disease.

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2. King Leopold II's elephant-taming project in the Congo began in 1899 under Commandant Jules Laplume, and the first elephants were trained in the early 1900s.

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3. By 1925 the Api station had about 50 elephants: 19 adults doing full work, 25 doing light work and six still in training.

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4. In 1920 Indian or Ceylonese mahouts were sent to improve the training methods.

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5. The elephant station later reached a maximum of 84 elephants.

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6. In the early 1980s the WWF, the Frankfurt Zoological Society and UNESCO backed a rehabilitation project, and by 1989 only four of the original herd remained.

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7. A study of 2,685 female timber elephants in Myanmar found that wild-caught females reproduced later and less successfully than captive-born ones, effects lasting over a decade, and their calves had lower survival to age 5.

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8. A 2023 PNAS paper proposed elephants as self-domesticated, citing reduced aggression, prosociality, an extended juvenile period, playfulness, socially regulated cortisol and complex vocal behavior, plus genetic evidence.

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9. Elephant gestation lasts about 22 months.

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