In evolution and in human-elephant relations, it is the strongest who survive. But now, perhaps people and elephants need one another to survive. . . .
From the earliest days of recorded history there are examples which clearly demonstrate that the love of ivory is self-destructive.
All ivory's fault?
Not long ago, Taiwan came under Pelly Amendment sanctions for its consumption of ivory, rhino horn and other wildlife products, tarring Taiwan's name in the annals of international wildlife conservation. Three thousand years ago, King Zhou of the Shang dynasty spoiled his concubine Daji with pools of wine and forests of meat. In writing of these events during the Spring and Autumn Period (722-481 BCE), the great historian Sima Qian was also unable to forgive another, lesser-known crime of King Zhou's-his use of ivory to manufacture goods.
King Zhou ordered a craftsman to make him a set of chopsticks from ivory. When this craftsman had finished and brought these exquisite chopsticks into the palace, the responsible and patriotic minister Jizi saw them and was frightened. The chopsticks had set off an unpleasant train of thought: Today, it's only a small pair of ivory chopsticks. But to match them, the king will need a precious jade cup. Next to the jade cup, he'll have to have dishes of elephant's nose, dragon's liver, and phoenix's marrow to make the table complete. And if he doesn't have silk clothing and jade robes to wear, and a magnificent hall to feast in, how can he provide an appropriate setting for such rarities as ivory chopsticks and dragon's liver? Ivory chopsticks are the beginning of luxury and indulgence and the beginning of the end for the country. How can I continue to serve King Zhou? When his thoughts arrived at this point, Jizi felt a chill travel down his spine and fled the palace.
Han Feizi and the Historical Records both record the story of the ivory chopsticks. The idea that good fortune and disaster are inextricably linked is etched deep in the heart of the Chinese people. For this reason, the Chinese feel that if those who are wealthy enough to have precious ivory chopsticks don't appreciate their good fortune, they may soon experience the endless troubles that ivory can bring. In the Spring and Autumn Period, the Golden Age of Chinese philosophy, Spring and Autumn with Commentary by Tso Chiu-ming uses the story of the elephant's teeth bringing trouble on itself to hint at the troubles that the accumulation of wealth brings to people. The elephant, who has done nothing wrong, gets into trouble simply because he possesses something valuable. He has grown a pair of ivory tusks which are admired by everyone, and so must constantly be on his guard against being killed.
It's just a shame that the wariness with which the philosophers and men of learning treated ivory was not shared by society as a whole. They spoke of its dangers earnestly, but the public listened with disdain. Jizi's prediction came true and King Zhou (佻) was the last of the Shang kings. They were replaced by the Zhou (周) dynasty, which, in order to express the grandness and solemnity of certain spring rituals in the countryside, incorporated the use of ivory wine-cups into those ceremonies. As one dynasty gave way to another, the beauty of decorative ivory carvings became overwhelming. Ivory carving techniques developed until they reached a pinnacle in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Particularly in the carving of multi-layered ivory spheres in which layers are carved inside one another, the Chinese ivory craftsmen were without peer. In modern times, China Airlines has even used these ivory spheres in advertisements to imply that their in-flight service personnel are as attentive to the "little things" as an ivory craftsman is to his carving.
China's ancient ivory culture is currently facing a painful attack from international conservation groups. In response, last year the Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology put out a paper entitled, "Ivory and Rhino Horn-the Conflict between Environmental Protection and Chinese Culture." The paper was a stern reminder to people of other parts of the world who don't understand the sentiments of the Chinese people. According to the paper, the use of the body parts of wild animals as nutritional supplements and as raw materials for craftsmen has a long history in Chinese culture. For this reason, the Chinese people shouldn't be pushed to undergo a social revolution, but instead "the Chinese people of Taiwan should be gently persuaded to change this bad behavior."
Is the manufacture of ivory handicrafts a "bad behavior" that needs to be changed?
All of me?
Coincidentally, Historical Records, with its tale of the king who lost his kingdom because he couldn't resist a pair of ivory chopsticks, is not the only ancient record to mention ivory. The Western classic The Odyssey also records how much Odysseus missed his clean and comfortable ivory bed at home. The great Greek poet Homer was the first to use the word "elephas" for ivory which is the origin of the English word "elephant."
From this derivation, it is all too obvious what people's real interest in the elephant was. In the case of the ancient Greeks, they had never seen elephants, instead having only used goods made of ivory. The European side of the Mediterranean is not home to elephants. The cultures that originated there did, however, conquer North Africa where elephants were common. And as Mediterranean trade developed, elephant tusks went where elephants did not-across the sea into Europe. Imported ivory products also had a period of fashionability in Western art.
Following the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians and the Byzantines each established ivory trading and manufacturing centers. Western ivory carving came in all shapes and kinds through the Renaissance and the Baroque. It even carried down to the beginning of this century, of which it is written in the Encyclopedia Americana that a new fashion arose in Paris and Brussels, that of using ivory together with precious metal and jewels. It goes on to say that the style has an especially affected air. . . . But in contrast to its praise of Western ivory arts, the encyclopedia says that while Chinese ivory carving was very finely done, it possessed no artistic content.
Robert Delort, a French scholar and the author of The Life and Lore of the Elephant, writes that Africa, the continent with the most abundant "elephant resources" in the world is nonetheless the region which least exploits the elephant. But, in fact, ivory carvings unearthed in modern times in North Africa (including Egypt) prove that ivory has been used to make everything from everyday utensils to fine works of art. What can one say to that?
Perhaps one can say that, regardless of their race or tribe, when humans become "masters of their environment" they all deal with elephants in about the same way.
Crazy about ivory
Some people have said that to the modern elephant, humans are like the asteroid that made the dinosaurs extinct. To be fair, if one looks at the history of the elephant on earth, by the time human civilization began to develop, the elephant had already become something of an anachronism.
Nobody can say how much ivory humans have used, but from a very anthro-centrist perspective the Encyclopedia Americana says that ivory has only two major characteristics-its durability and its uselessness for anything other than being made into decorative carvings. No other use? An elephant's crescent-shaped tusks are like a pair of hands to the animal. The extinct woolly mammoth used them to dig through the frozen ground for moss to fill its belly. Modern elephants use their tusks to dig in the earth for salt. Their tusks are also weapons with which they may defend themselves against lions and tigers. With their tusks and their enormous bulk, elephants were once the kings of the world.
At that time, humans were still hiding in caves, coveting the "mountains of meat" walking about in herds before their eyes. These hungry proto-humans, half-man and half-ape, empty-handed or armed with only the most primitive tools, might surround and kill a solitary elephant. Given that stone-age man lacked the most rudimentary materials, it was only natural that he would not only consume the elephant's meat, but also make use of its tusks.
In English, an "ivory wedding anniversary" commemorates 30 years of marriage. Pure and milky white, ivory, like gold and diamonds, possesses a material character which doesn't change over time and is a symbol of a long marriage. Data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources confirms that ivory is the animal world's white gold, one which had value to humankind as early as the stone age.
Seven thousand years ago in what is now China, the Hemudu culture was already producing ivory handicrafts. In France, where there are no elephants, 25,000-year-old ivory utensils belonging to Cro-magnons have been discovered. The ivory that has been used by humans through history is not all derived from the currently extant African and Asian elephants. While modern people blame one another for recent over-exploitation of elephants, in its history the Earth has already seen 400 species of elephant become extinct.
The earliest ancestors of the elephant appeared in North Africa about 60 million years ago. Ancestors of the modern elephant spread to nearly all parts of the world, even crossing oceans. Elephant fossils have even been excavated in Taiwan. But the Earth's environment and climate changed and the fossil record demonstrates that the disappearance of earlier species of elephant was the result of natural processes.
On the battlefield
In the 17th century John Donne called the elephant "Nature's great masterpiece." How could humanity's ancestors, always seeking to move ahead, resist exploiting such a "resource"? Humans, who have strode the long evolutionary path to civilization, have different ways of treating elephants which, of course, are not limited to a mere love of ivory by people who have never seen an elephant.
"Humanity's first thoughts on the elephant were of how to train it to fight in wars," feels one expert on the relations between man and the elephant. He may not be exactly right, but then neither is he far wrong.
Some people think that Chinese chess, literally "elephant chess," owes its name not to its ivory chess pieces, but to the ancient use of elephants on the battlefield. Fierce Shang-dynasty warriors rode elephants into battle in their attacks on eastern barbarians. In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, generals in the army of the king of Yunnan, Meng Huo, rode elephants at the head of the vanguard while attacking. Elephants were trained to pull chariots across the battlefield. In China, such chariots became known as "elephant chariots." Coincidentally, the great Roman general Julius Caesar also bound military carriages to the backs of elephants and used them to invade Britain. But this was only after the famed Carthaginian general Hannibal had crossed the Alps with 37 elephants in a sneak attack on Rome. In spite of their superior military strength, the Romans suffered serious losses in the attack. After such an unforgettable lesson, the Romans "imported" elephants for military use.
But the elephant is an herbivore which relies on its tremendous size to put enemies to flight. Under normal circumstances, it is not an aggressive animal, and on the battlefield, it is not very reliable. If its master were killed, a troupe of elephants would be left without a leader. Losing heart for battle, injured and frightened, they might scatter in all directions, trampling friend and foe alike as they fled the field.
An elephant show
Limited by their relatively clumsy bodies, elephants were gradually "phased out" of military service. But humans did not give up training the world's largest land animal.
According to Chinese legend, the filiality of Da Shun, a legendary Chinese king, not only moved heaven, but also the hearts of the elephants which then began to work in the fields for men. Although some are critical of such stories, saying that people should not get carried away with their legend making, it is a fact that the Asian elephant has been trained to work in the fields. The ancient Egyptians, too, it was noted that the Indian elephant was more suited to domestication than the African elephant. But even in the case of the difficult-to-train African elephant, failure hasn't deterred people from trying. At the end of the 19th Century, the King of Belgium ordered the establishment of elephant training centers in the Belgian Congo. The objective of this program was to use elephants to build roads and open the African interior to trade.
With the opening of the Suez Canal, European businessmen began to penetrate the darkest parts of the African interior. The Europeans treated Africa as their principal supplier of wild animals. Rare and valuable animals were sold to circuses, museums and zoos all over the world where visitors went to see "Nature's great masterpiece" stand on one leg, a ball perched upon its trunk. At zoos, amidst the excited chattering of children, elephants extended their nimble trunks out from their pens to be fed peanuts and bananas. Hollywood's movie studios weren't far behind, transporting outdoor sets to where herds of elephants roamed and sprayed one another with water on the plains of Africa. Through these films, Hollywood brought the look and feel of Africa and the elephant in the wild to families everywhere.
Wealthy Europeans and Americans with little to occupy their time finally brought "elephant entertainment" to its zenith. Following in the footsteps of the great explorers, the leisured class threw their time and their money into African safaris, competing for the opportunity to "conquer" the giant elephant with their guns and attain the highest "honor." After satiating their desire to stalk wild beasts, hunters would return home with the "spoils of war"-elephant tusks and elephant feet. The tusks would be used to decorate living rooms while the feet would be made into umbrella holders or wastepaper baskets.
Low-class goods
The killing of elephants for sport is an example of the "out of control" behavior of humans as masters of the planet. The assassination of elephants and the use of their ivory are just the kind of "bad habits" that animal conservationists speak about ending.
Originally, the acquisition of ivory didn't necessarily entail the wholesale slaughter of elephants. Besides which, the tusks of elephants that have died naturally of old age are especially large. Moreover, where there is life, there is also death in a never-ending cycle. Why hurry the deaths of the elephants? There is a Chinese folk tale which tells of an elephant taking a man who had removed a thorn from its foot into the mountains. There the elephant unearthed some tens of tusks for the man in repayment of his kindness.
The desire of "civilized" humanity for material goods is insatiable. Man is also the only animal to have developed commerce. Ivory has been a common raw material since the earliest days of markets, and its consumption has grown continuously. Robert Delort writes that the blood shed in the pursuit of ivory far exceeds that shed in acquiring any other material. The ivory trade was conducted by the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, but by the Roman era, the North African elephant had disappeared. During the reign of Charlemagne, ivory-working centers produced sacred vessels, crosses and covers for Bibles. Demand for ivory exceeded supply. But it simply was not acceptable that the trappings with which people showed their reverence for their benevolent deity be in short supply, and so the walrus of France's northern coast generously donated its tusks.
According to the Encyclopedia Americana, by the 20th century, where they had not disappeared altogether the West's magnificent ivory-carving arts had degenerated and ivory itself had become a vulgar product. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, plastic had not yet been invented, and in both Europe and America the tusks of female elephants were seen as the perfect material for the manufacture of billiard balls. Immeasurable amounts of ivory were also turned into the "ivories" under pianists' fingers. The world's strongest proponent of elephant conservation, the United States, was at one time also its largest consumer of ivory, taking 30% of the world's ivory production, of which 80% came from poachers. But times change. In today's Asia, proud of its international economic might, ivory, once exclusively a luxury of the aristocracy, is now used to manufacture the sort of name chops used everyday.
Friends become enemies
People finally realize that the increase of human population, the destruction of forests to open up land for farming, and the unlimited desire for material goods are connected to one another. They recognize that the disappearance of the elephant threatens their own survival. The elephants requiem has turned into a call for a stop to the killing of animals. Biologists admire the giant beast for its unusual intelligence, its excellent memory, and its sense of justice. . . . It seems that elephants are better than people. And isn't the elephant the symbol of America's Republican Party? Some say that this kind of change is dramatic. But taking large animals to be gods is not something that started with the conservationists. Countries which are home to elephants have relied on them for a long time and this reliance has given rise to deep feelings for the elephants.
Among the Zulus of Africa, the word "elephant" connotes respect and admiration. Indians commonly believe that seeing an elephant on first opening one's eyes in the morning is lucky. A Buddhist sutra which records the Buddha's previous lives mentions the Buddha taking the form of an elephant. Buddhists also believe that touching an elephant can help one along the road to enlightenment. In modern Asia, some temples raise elephants on temple grounds. Given these kinds of sentiments about elephants, it's no wonder that conservationists are saddened by the plight of the elephant. Its stomping grounds are being reduced and its encroachments on land used by people are turning one-time friends into enemies. For some, this is a tragedy for Southeast and South Asia.
China is another example. Three thousand years ago, Asian elephants roamed in the Yellow River basin. And at the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, the child-genius Cao Chong is said to have used displacement to weigh an elephant. But at that time, Xu Shen also stated explicitly in his Shou wen jie zi that "elephants come from Nanyue [Vietnam]." In China, herds of wild elephants could only be seen in the south. Stories such as "Cao Chong Weighs an Elephant" and "Blind Men Touch an Elephant" actually came to China along with Buddhism from South Asia where elephants still lived.
The mainland Chinese writer Gu Hua, in an essay entitled "Two Elephants Village" about his hometown of Jiahe in Hunan Province, mentions, "People say that some time ago in the forests around my hometown there were elephants, and peacocks spreading their tails and that the old trees almost scraped the sky, their branches draped in golden birds like colored-cloud blossoms." Later, as people spread through the area, the elephants, the peacocks and the golden birds could only move away into the mountains and forests to the south and west. In the end, all that remained of the animals were memories and the names of some villages, mountains and waters.
In the Warring States Period, Han Fei, a famous scholar, explained how the word xiang (象), which means "elephant; image; external appearance" came to acquire the meaning of "external appearance." According to Han Fei, at that time, seeing an elephant with one's own eyes was already a rarity; it was only from pictures that one could know what an elephant looked like. For this reason, any thing that one thought about or imagined was called xiang. When people realized that elephants were the largest beast living on the land, the metaphor was extended to include the evident instances of things, such as the appearance of mountains, rivers, the sun and the moon. After more twists and turns, the word came to mean "the external appearance of things."
In today's China, wild elephants remain only in the Xishuangbanna area of Yunnan Province. The herd that remains consists of only 200 or so animals. These elephants have dual nationality. "When they hear the sound of poachers' guns, or when the smoke of people clearing the forest begins to rise, the wild elephants flee towards Laos. Or they flee towards China," says a scholar of animal behavior.
A symbol of peace
From dinosaurs to elephants to people, animals have disappeared and animals have arisen. Perhaps the creator is letting life renew itself, or making the Earth more colorful and varied. For this reason, perhaps humans shouldn't be too saddened by the failure of the elephant to survive. But it's worth thinking about. If the giants of the Earth, the dinosaurs and the elephants can become extinct, how can we guarantee that the intelligent, the humans, will be eternal like the creator?
The Chinese expression "peace has its symbol [xiang]" perhaps may inadvertently be turned into reality. Next to the throne of the emperors throughout Chinese history there were two metal elephants. On the back of each was a flower vase. The figures made a play on the sound of tai ping you xiang, "peace has its symbol." World peace was something prayed for by both emperors and commoners alike.
In the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government it is recorded that in the sixth year of the Dahe period of the Tang dynasty, while the emperor was at his Yan Ying Palace he asked his prime minister, Niu Sengru, when there would be peace in the world and where he could look for a sign. Niu answered, "Peace has no sign. World peace has no absolute standard. Now, the empire in not being invaded by the tribes on our borders. The people are not wandering. While the empire is not at its zenith, it is doing well. If Your Majesty wishes to take the empire to yet a higher level, I fear this minister's abilities are insufficient to the task." Niu's response that "peace has no sign" was later used ironically to speak of rulers who tried to pretend things were better than they really were. Later emperors feared becoming known to their people as no ability "no sign" idiots. The vase and the elephant come together in a concrete expression of the idea that "peace has its sign." Always by the side of the emperor, they reminded him of this-or perhaps just brought him some luck.
Peace has its sign. But without the elephant, can people have peace?
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A town on the outskirts of the Kruger National Park uses a pair of elephant tusks as a landmark. Worried that it might be stolen? Relax, it's not really ivory. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)
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Once the object of hunters on safari, since being named an endangered species, the elephant has become a major tourist attraction. Inside Kruger National Park, tourists can't pass up a chance to see "Nature's great masterpiece." (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)
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The picture shows an ivory sphere carved in modern Taiwan. (photo courtesy of the National Museum of History)
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"Peace has its sign." In China, in addition to its practical value, the elephant eases the hearts of the common people. (photo courtesy of the National Palace Museum)
"Peace has its sign." In China, in addition to its practical value, the elephant eases the hearts of the common people. （photo courtesy of the National Palace Museum）
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