Charles Siebert , "An Elephant Crackup? "
Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:
1. What evidence does Siebert provide that there is such a thing as an “elephant culture”? Is Siebert’s assertion a sign of anthropomorphism? Anthropocentrism? Or is it a statement of fact?
2. As Siebert’s discussion unfolds, elephants are described as experiencing trauma, being intentionally violent, and responsive to psychotherapy. Is this surprising? Is Siebert seeking to establish that humans and elephants are part of a continuum? Are essentially identical? Are on parallel paths?
3. Siebert’s piece ends with two acts of violence: a caretaker killed by an elephant in captivity; a villager killed and buried by an elephant herd. Why does he do this? Since the piece begins with violence, has Siebert gone full circle? Or has he put his readers in a better position to understand the violence?
Questions for Writing:
1. Throughout “An Elephant Crackup?” Siebert gestures towards modes of consciousness that differ significantly from the model of an individual thinking. He describes a herd of elephants as, “in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant.” He observes that saving elephants from extinction “will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.” And he cites Gay Bradshaw’s call for the development of a “trans-species psyche” that will allow humans to “be elephants.” How would one go about developing these new modes of consciousness? What makes it possible for Siebert’s sources to think in these ways?
2. Siebert notes that those who are concerned with the effects of trauma on the elephant population are now focusing on “the physiology of psychology”—that is, one the neurological foundation for psychological development. Based on the preliminary results of these studies, would you say that the turn to neurology provides cause for optimism about the possibilities of overcoming trauma? Or does the fact that trauma during the formative years results in “a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain” mean that there’s no saving young victims of trauma, be they elephant or human?
Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:
1. “Language,” as Christine Kenneally defines it, “is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.” Throughout “An Elephant Crackup?” Siebert casts humans and elephants as being in communication with one another. Is the kind of communication that concerns Siebert what Kenneally means by “language”? Or would Kenneally reject the idea an inter-species language? In tracing the evolution of language through the primates, has Kenneally overlooked essential evidence elsewhere in the animal kingdom? Or is the communication that Siebert describes simply an anthropocentric projection on to the animal kingdom?
2. In “Meat and Milk Factories,” Peter Singer describes in detail the practices of the pork industry. Should the interspecies empathy that Siebert calls for extend to pigs? Or does Singer’s discussion serve to expose the fact that such empathy is not natural? That is, couldn’t one argue that the human ingenuity that has gone into producing the pork industry is evidence that humans are predisposed to the domination of other life forms? If one develops a “trans-species psyche,” does this lead to a concern for the fate of pigs or only for elephants?
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