There was a beautiful, but gut-wrenchingly sad article about trauma in elephants in the NYT about 13 years ago. It's a super long read but it's highly recommend

There was a beautiful, but gut-wrenchingly sad article about trauma in elephants in the NYT about 13 years ago. It's a super long read but it's highly recommended if you're interested in this topic. It starts off by describing how elephant attacks are on the rise throughout the world, which for people in regions with wild elephants is totally unprecedented, describing how in the aftermath of government sponsored cullings roving bands of young elephants in places like Uganda would target humans and other animals. It then follows a Ugandan researcher at Cambridge interested in the parallels between the trauma in elephants and trauma in communities impacted by the Ugandan civil war (particularly the Acholi, targeted by the now infamous Kony for recruitment). "For Bradshaw, these continuities between human and elephant brains resonate far outside the field of neuroscience. ‘‘Elephants are suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of violence,’’ she told me. ‘‘It is entirely congruent with what we know about humans and other mammals. Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain organization and early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar. That’s not news. What is news is when you start asking, What does this mean beyond the science? How do we respond to the fact that we are causing other species like elephants to psychologically break down? In a way, it’s not so much a cognitive or imaginative leap anymore as it is a political one.’’ ... ‘‘I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,’’ Abe told me. ‘‘I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced-people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed — no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.’’ https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html