Picture a psychiatrist at her desk reviewing a case file. The report describes a young, teenaged male who, with several others his age, killed nearly a hundred victims. The case is astounding—not only because of the intensity and magnitude of the violence, but because nothing remotely like it has ever happened in the community before. Not even a single murder. As the psychiatrist turns the pages and reads on, the pieces of the puzzle start to come together. A few years before, the young killers had witnessed the massacre of their families and been orphaned. Afterwards, although still very young, they were relocated to another community with few adults to raise them; importantly, it was absent of older, mentoring males.
Resignedly, the psychiatrist writes her opinion: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She recommends intensive counselling and psychotherapy. Trauma and social breakdown—in this case, loss of a mother and community—compromise normal brain and behavior development, often resulting in hyper-aggression, violence and other asocial behaviors. Although treatment is called for, such developmental trauma, in the absence of family and friends who can psychologically, emotionally and physically support recovery, often leads to a pattern of psychobiological disorders. Trauma becomes neurobiologically etched and may be transmitted across generations. Unfortunately, the teenagers' story echoes those of many others, each unpleasantly familiar in their association with a string of wars and genocide in Uganda, Rwanda, Iraq and Sudan. However, there is something different and perhaps more disturbing about this account.
Advertisement
These teenagers are young male African elephants. At a South African park, in the 1990's, three young males attacked and killed 58 white and five black rhinoceroses; at a second park, young male elephants killed 40 white rhinoceroses. While these events have by far been the most dramatic, elsewhere in Africa and Asia, reports of elephant aggression are appearing more frequently. Moreover, violence is not just directed at other species. In yet another African park, male-on-male intraspecific mortality is responsible for 70% to 90% of adult male elephant deaths.
Until recently, these types of behavior have been almost unheard of, leaving conservation biologists searching for an explanation. Habitat destruction, starvation, social breakdown from poaching and culls, and the loss of herd coherence are factors known to severely threaten elephant survival. But the levels and types of atypical behavior being observed suggest an added dimension to the problem. Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part, revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths. Could it be that elephants, like humans, also suffer psychological trauma as a result of violence?
Until a few years ago, making such inference and diagnosing elephants with PTSD would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism. But no longer. Elephant psychopathology, chimpanzee infanticide and other un-animal-like behaviors are part of a growing body of research that suggests science is building toward a radical paradigm shift. Streams of new data and theories, critically from neuroscience, are converging into a new, trans-species model of the psyche. Humans are being reinstated back into the species continuum that Darwin articulated, a continuum that includes laughing rats, octopuses with personalities, sheep who read emotions from the faces of their family members and tool-wielding crows.
We now understand that all vertebrates, and it is argued even some invertebrates, share many biological structures and processes that underlie attributes once considered uniquely human: empathy, personality, culture, emotion, language, intention, tool-use and violence. Furthermore, we are able to see beyond species differences in ways we have never been able to before. Neuroimaging advances such as PET and fMRI can help map more elusive subjective qualities—such as emotion, states of consciousness and sense of self—to specific regions of the brain. In conjunction with a rich legacy of observational data and theories on animal behavior and human psychology, neuroscience is bridging long-standing conceptual and perceptual gaps.