It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.

It is a devastating read, Charles Siebert’s “An Elephant Crackup?“, but it is an important and needed read. And not only because of what it says about the plight of the world’s elephant population today. The stunning, inherent revelation is impossible to miss: there is a distinct parallel with the plight of African-Americans, especially African-Americans in their early thirties and younger, of Africans in war-torn countries such as Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda, and of other peoples the world over.

What we have done and are continuing to do to the elephants is leading to irreversible systemic damage to their culture. It is a perfect reflection of what we are doing to each other, to ourselves. But what the elephants are teaching us, in particular, is that animal species other than our own have psychological lives that parallel and are quite similar to ours. To some people this will not be a surprise. Certainly, many people are aware that it is no case of anthropomorphism when they recognize in their cat, dog, or bird companions some distinct, recognizable emotion that requires no translation. It is easy enough to extend such an understanding to “undomesticated” animals, and the evidence is readily available to support it. But for the majority of us it seems that this is still remarkable news.

We have built up a number of psychological walls between what is demonstrable fact — that many non-human animal species have psychologically rich and complex lives — and that which perpetuates our singular insularity in a sea of so many other species, where we can imagine that we alone are capable of complex thought and self-reflection. We want those barriers against such recognition to remain unbreached because without them we’d have a much harder time exploiting and, more often than not, murdering countless numbers of those “others”. Although it should be fairly clear that we’re capable of coming up with new excuses when our old excuses fail us, and that even without real excuses we are still capable — indeed, willing — to exploit and to murder. This topic has been treated at greater length, and more eloquently, by others (see: Carol Adams, Umberto Eco, Albert Camus, etc.), so I’ll leave it here.

[The elephants] have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.

We are in a time and age that knows more pain and suffering — viewed on a global scale — than virtually any other known to historical records. The deaths from the conflicts in Rwanda, Darfur and Iraq and many other places flow into the deaths caused by starvation, malnutrition, AIDS and other diseases. So many lives displaced, so many lives bound by poverty to perpetual ruin; more names than could be written in a lifetime. In this time of suffering the elephants are showing us something important. Our two tribes are in crisis, though their crisis is perpetuated by ours. How we respond to the crisis of the elephants, and what we think about the response, will reflect, in the end, how we respond to our own. How we respond, and what we think, will illustrate our capacity for understanding the lives of “others”, and it will cause us to consciously bear the responsibility — one that has never been passed off, even in our supposed unconsciousness, without consequence — of our actions. In the end, how we treat “others”, whether human or non-human, is how we treat ourselves, for they are us and we are them in a world that is but one.

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It was fortuitous that, the day before reading the NY Times article, Kisha had me listen to an interview with rapper Killer Mike on the October 6th podcast of The Sound of Young America. In it, he discusses the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated countless black families, what life is about for gang members, and the cost of an endemically broken social order, all in terms of his personal history and experience. I recommend that you take the time to listen to it as well. (It is available via iTunes subscription or as an MP3 at the SYA site.)