THE ELEPHANT INQUEST.
T4ASTSunday afternoon, while a concert was being held at the Crystal Palace, an elephant belonging to a circus which had been performing there broke from its fastenings and killed its keeper. It then brushed through various partitions of wood and glass, and appeared in the main building, where a great number of persons were listen- ing to the music. It did not attempt to hurt any of the crowd, though it broke off with its trunk the uplifted arm of a statue, probably under the idea that this re- presented a man about to strike. After some time it allowed itself to be secured by another elephant. It was then decided to kill the animal, and after a dose of poison had failed a London gunmaker was sent for as executioner and shot the animal dead.
On the following Wednesday an inquest was held on the body of the man. If it had been one of the trials of animals held by jurists in the Middle Ages for the exhibition of legal subtlety, the evidence in favour of the elephant could not have been more clearly put. Mr. Sanger, its owner, admitted that the animal had once before killed a former keeper ; and he gave the facts which led to the death of the second. The facts speak for themselves. The first man had been discharged by Mr. Sanger fifteen months previously for gross brutality to the animals. He came back and asked to be employed again. This was granted, and he was taken on, not as a keeper, but as a labourer. The very first time he went into the stable the elephant, though it was quite dark at the time, instantly recognised the man's voice and at once crushed him to death against the stall. That the creature had acted only in a panic of horror at the reappearance of a tormentor was so well established at the previous inquest that it was retained in the menagerie. It was exceptionally docile, and was taken through towns and villages all over England. Why then did he kill the second keeper ? Because this man, after his Sunday dinner, declared that he would "pay out" the elephant for striking him with its trunk. He actually took a lance, one of those taken from the Arabs in the Soudan. (Those who have seen the trophies taken from the Maladi'a followers, now kept in the United Service Insti- tution, will realise what a horrible weapon this was.) Followed by another keeper also armed with a lance, he proceeded to " prod,"—i e., pierce the chained elephant. The tortured creature after backing as far as it could, "at length rushed forward to escape the lance, broke its chains, threw down the keeper and trampled on him." If the elephant had been a man, and had been put on his trial afterwards, would it be too much to anticipate that the verdict wonld have been one of justifiable homicide ? All these facts, it is worth remem- bering, were sworn to on oath. They leave a very unpleasant impression as to the management of the "elephant herd" in this country. It is perfectly clear that the animal was in each case influenced by resentment caused by the cruelty of one individual. Male elephants, apart from their occasional attacks of frenzy, are not as unaccountably docile and sub- missive as the females, and most accidents which do occur in their long lives are due to the gradual forgetfulness of this difference of sex and temper by men who are so accustomed to witnessing the unhesitating obedience of the one that they make too great demands on the forbearance of the other. At the present time the Indian Government, with the ex- ception of a few males kept for parade, only employs female elephants for this reason ; even so it is believed that the pay or pensions of mahouts is calculated with reference to the conviction that they pursue a dangerous trade. The native princes, on the contrary, keep male elephants in large numbers for purposes of State, and it is among the attendants of these animals that "accidents" most commonly happen. Experience, as well as common report, which declares that every elephant kills a mahout in its lifetime, shows that in far the greater number of cases the person attacked is the animal's own atten- dant. This at first sight seems a contradiction to the general behaviour of animals in captivity, or even in domestication Generally speaking, they are specially attached to the person who feeds them and gives them exercise, and if disposed to be savage, vent their anger on strangers. There are a few instances on record of horses attacking their grooms, but this, as a rule, is only because the attendant happened to be the only person near when the animal was in a bad temper. The only domestic animals which habitually attack their attendants are the bulls kept for stock-breeding in England, which are responsible for most intentional homicides caused by animals in this country.
The grounds for the which the elephant often harbours
towards its Indian mahout lie partly in the animal's tempera- ment, partly in the character of these men. As most elephants behave with propriety to their drivers, we must believe that either the greater number of the mahouts do their duty by the beasts, or that the latter are exceptionally forgiving. But there must be more than mere hearsay in the general belief that the mahouts commonly steal and appropriate a very large part of the elephant's allowance of food, that they are in consequence often half-starved and hungry, and that the men use their steel-hooked and spiked " ankus " in a very merciless way on animals which are often not in condition to do the work which is set them. As the cost of an elephant's keep is from RI to £8 per month, in proportion to the food given him, a proportion and quality which is fixed in reference to the work to be done, the margin for stealing is very great, being reckoned between the minimum necessary to keep the animal alive on low diet, and that required for keeping him in fine condition on the march in a campaign, when he is allowed extra rations, and even a bottle of rum per diem. No other animal is clever enough to know that overwork and underfeeding are probably caused by the direct agency of the man who maintains him. But it is pretty certain that the extraordinary intelligence of the elephant does enable it to put two and two together, and to conclude that the person who gives him little food ought not to punish him for not being up to his work. In any case the elephant bears no gratitude to the man who, if he can, gives him starvation rations, and is his daily slave-driver ; and as long as native usage holds that "the driver and three generations of his family shall live on the beast he is paid to nourish" it must be expected that the animal will occasionally try the experiment as to whether the next generation can possibly be worse than its present tor- mentor. It is sometimes forgotten that an elephant may live for seventy or eighty years, or even longer, in the service of man, and that in the unchanging East he may, through this long life, be farmed as a kind of property by the same family of mahouts ; that the brutality of the father, if he be a brute, is learnt by the children and grandchildren, and that, if the wretched elephant is in bad hands, he has to put up with practically two of our working lives of ill-treatment and semi- starvation. The wonder is, not that its temper occasionally goes amiss, but that it does not "break out" oftener. The inference is that the natural temper of the elephant is almost the best and most easy going of that of any beast. All Hindoo traditions and folk-lore agree in this. The elephant is the type of bonhomie and easy geniality. It is this belief which encourages its "public" to take liberties with it on which they would venture with no other animal whatever. Perhaps the gentlest of our giant domestic animals are the big shire horses. But no one would expect them to lie down on being pressed with a sharp-pointed goad, or to do work on insuffi-
dent food, when ridden and managed by a creature no larger in proportion to their bulk than a monkey, and armed with a sharp and painful weapon. Yet the shire horse has no memory for injuries and is at least as docile in his way as the elephant.
There is no doubt that the power of memory which the elephant possesses beyond all other beasts, and of reasoning, in which it is supreme, makes its ill-treatment especially dangerous, a danger which is only mitigated, but not removed, by its good nature and extreme patience. Though no one imagines that our English elephant herd is half-starved by the white attendants, there is no doubt that these men do not infrequently incur the ill-will of their charges. By long familiarity and constant control the men gradually forget that the creature has a will of its own, and that it has both memory and a power of resentment. They also seem to lose all consciousness of the enormous strength of the beast they manage. Many of the men come to regard them as being as much under control as a traction engine, which only needs the turning on or off of taps to make it advance or recede. As a rule, their only instrument of discipline is a whip ; but with this and plenty of shouting and scolding they can "get on the nerves" of an elephant very effectually. In a circus, and it is always in circuses and travelling menageries that these accidents occur, the men who attend the elephants often ride them in performances, and make them perform tricks. A good deal of hurry, some roughness, and occasional punishment are inevit- able in these performances, all of which the animal carefully remembers. One day it has a fit of temper, or turns sulky— they will sulk for hours—and then the keeper is attacked. Circus elephants have also a trick of killing people "accidentally." By a movement backwards, or to one side, they will quietly jam a man up against the wall of a stable or a shed. One of the elephants at Olympia did this some years ago, and the first keeper killed by Charlie" met his fate in this way. It should also be remembered that the elephant is one of the most nervous of all beasts, that one at the Zoo died of sheer fright caused by a thunderstorm, and that a highly nervous temperament of this kind may easily be worked into a frenzy by excitement following ill-treatment. But this is not the fault of elephant temper.
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