How come no one ever farmed elephants? They're basically cows

Aye, you'd generally capture them young and torture them until they do as told. Essentially kidnapping individuals to fight in battle while having to be wary of berserk rage from being forced to kill.

GEE BILL, 3 SECTIONS?

It bums me out that Elephants are intelligent instead of an animal like raccoons or something. They have opposable thumbs. Imagine little raccoon societies alongside our own.

Raccoons would just act like gypsies.

too stronk

...

If they're not allowed to act like elephants, they literally go insane.

Circus Elephants are known to have this nervous tic where they rock back and forth, because their natural instinct is to wander but they've spent virtually their entire lives locked in a cage, and the rocking back and forth is the most freedom that those cages typically afford them.

Yes, you have to mind-fuck them into acting in ways that amuse people, usually with a very severe training regime which punishes them severely for even minor infractions. Handlers have this special metal rod with a point that they use to jab at the Elephant's eyes, ears, and other soft spots in order to discipline them. Elephants often will not hesitate to trample a handler who dropped his disciplining rod, they just see the vulnerability and throw themselves at it in a psychotic rage.

It's a shame, because these are creatures smart enough to cry,dance, dream, and possess a sense of self-awareness while experiencing complex emotions.

>Imagine little raccoon societies alongside our own.
user, we already have those.

Well thats kinda of sad actually.
I am never playing as persians in age of empires again

Also it took asain/african countries from 4000 bc not even until the crucifixion of christ to completely eradicate one species and almost another entriely with their wars, elephants attack enemy and foe alike in their ranks or they just leave. ive heard tat even present day launch raids on indians in the night

They are bad slaves, but probably awesome friends

Probably because they take so long to breed and raise, elephant pregnancies last for almost 2 years, and that's not even mentioning the damage angry elephants can cause.

Elephants are a lot smarter than cows, user.

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t. Hannibal

Too bad the animal to develop proper tools first will always win and true parallel societies between animals would never happen. At least if you ignore the Fermi paradox.

how do you know they dream?

2 year gestation period, multi ton mammal. It can wreck your shit and provides less than it costs to farm it. Would you farm a highly intelligent, uppity, 15 feet tall cow that lactates and gives birth once every 5 years, if you had to feed it tons of food and look after it?

There is a CGP Gray video on youtube that covers this

Elephants mainly exist in few locations.

India/SEA and Africa.

Of those, India has a high chance of domesticating because of their high civilization. Yet they choose not to fully farm them. Reason is because of their respect for animals through morals.

Religions like Buddhism and Jainism promote respect and fairness to animals. Hinduism also to minor extent due to their influence on Hindu development.

Sub Saharan africa never really developed proper civilization level needed to farm large animals.

>Sub Saharan africa never really developed proper civilization level needed to farm large animals.

What are cows and camels?

Cows weight around 1/10th of Elephant.

The scale needed to maintain the ecosytem for elephants dwarf the ones needed for cows.

The returns on cows are also much larger than on elephants.

A lot of mammals, if not all mammals dream, we already know that. Cats dream about hunting, mice dream about exploring, etc. So far the only thing we know about elephant dreams is that they dream about elephants.

they way are more intelligent than cows

Prove it.

Are there any stories about elephants befriending humans? They have fucklong memories and would remember an altruistic person.

Feed to pound of meat issues. Elephants don't stop eating.

Raccoons are more intelligent than 99% of all life on the planet. Mammals in general are at the top of their class for intelligence, challenged only by birds among any other class of life on the planet (inb4 octopusfag). Raccoons are intelligent even by mammal standards, elephants just happen to be a notch under the very top of the heap alongside dolphins and the other great apes.

But raccoons are intelligent enough that, coupled with their claws, it's a pain in the ass to keep them in captivity.

How do we know this?

a zoo elephant ate my whole backpack once, no joke

This. Cows are already marginal for agriculture in many areas, an elephant exacerbates the problems of cows.

The only thing I can think of that would make elephants a game changer is if some area had extremely heavy soil to the point where a donkey/horse/cow couldn't pull a plow through it.

Mind you, I don't think any such soil exists.

I read somewhere that Elephants have burial rites and honour their dead. Wouldn't it be cool if we extended human rights to include dolphins and elephants at some point

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They're size makes it hard for anything (like a tiger) to get the jump on you, and they can lift tree trunks/beams to a roof with relative ease.
They're basically a hummer with a tow winch, and a will of its own.

news.mit.edu/2001/dreaming

literal spoonfeeding

I've always thought it be funny to have aliens show up and invite dolphins, elephants, and like 12 different birds to the UN.

That motherfucking two-legged jog is just absolutely fucking hilarious.

if for no other reason than the fact that in real life, elephants actually kind of suck to use as battle-infantry.

The best case you could make for them is the way that the SE Asians integrated elephants: as attachments to regiments of soldiers rather than in dedicated squadrons. Kind of for the same reason why machine guns started being deployed to infantry squads rather than clustered into nests. The machine gun is useful in a suppression role but without infantry support can be easily flanked, and for all the dakka it brings it really doesn't cause as many casualties as the infantry do, but it's better at keeping soldiers pinned down while assault flankers do the real damage. In the right situation an elephant can preform a similar role, but in a pitched battle they're worse than useless.

more like
t. Cato the Elder
Cato the Elder was one of history's first true naturalists, an aristocrat documenting nature as a side hobby where ever he traveled.

Hannibal was an elephant's worst nightmare, because not only did he have to put the elephant through the breaking process, he was then marching them into the horrifying melee of ancient combat. You could not imagine a more un-elephant behavior than fighting in battle, elephants get fucking terrified and they're just as likely to trample your own army trying to get the fuck out of there while going out of their god damned minds

It'd be the equivalent of being locked in a room with a bunch of vicious dogs ripping each other to pieces: You know that you could overpower them one-by-one, but if they all turn on you at the same time they'd rip you to pieces. Any sane person would be losing their mind with fear

Ancient soldiers knew this damn well, which is why as soon as the elephants got close skirmishers would start pelting them with shitloads of missiles, which was often enough by itself to make the elephants want to fuck off, but if not the line infantry would open up lanes in their ranks so that when the elephants charged in they'd get surrounded on all sides by hostile soldiers and be gutted from below. Romans also were known to exploit elephants' natural revulsion to pigs: either by shoving the pig in the elephant's face, or by coating the pigs in pitch, lining them up facing the elephants, lighting them on fire, letting go, and giving the elephants not one, but two entirely plausible elephant-reasons to shit yourself with fear and run away screaming like a sissy

The entire second Punic War could be taken as a case study in how and why elephants totally suck in war. World history would be very, very different if Hannibal had marched pre-made siege equipment over the Alps instead of going through all the effort of getting a herd of elephants across (all but a few of whom died in transit)

When the Roman ambassador Gnaeus Octavius killed the Seleukid elephant herd to fulfill a treaty, he was later killed by a local who was outraged at the slaughter. It's quite intriguing how even the ancients loved and pitied elephants.

I can't remember precisely but an elephant was killed at a circus game and it's sorrowful trumpeting caused a backlash against the senator that organised it. Didn't the Romans also believe that Elephants were religious and worshipped the stars?

Probably didn't even notice the different texture. They literally just eat, shit, piss and sleep.

Cows are still large animals.

If Hannibal had conquered Rome, Roman legions would each have a complement of war elephants, all considered citizens with land allotments for their families

>elephant was killed at a circus game
This was actually a major political scandal which embroiled none other than Pompey Magnus. The fact that there are multiple sources attesting to it speaks volumes as to just how scandalous it was in the time of the Romans

From Seneca in De Brevitate Vitae (XIII)

>"...does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human. O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds! When he was casting so many troops of wretched human beings to wild beasts born under a different sky, when he was proclaiming war between creatures so ill matched, when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, who itself was soon to be forced to shed more. He then believed that he was beyond the power of Nature. But later this same man, betrayed by Alexandrine treachery [i.e: poetic justice], offered himself to the dagger of the vilest slave, and then at last discovered what an empty boast his surname was."

1/2

2/2

This is what Pliny had to say about it in Natural History (VIII.7.20)
>"when they had lost all hope of escape tried to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing, so much to the distress of the public that they forgot the general and his munificence carefully devised for their honour, and bursting into tears rose in a body and invoked curses on the head of Pompey."

Long story short, Pompey lived at a moment in Roman history when the games were starting to mutate from simple competitions of skill and bravery punctuated with state executions of convicts, to an obscene slaughterhouse where event holders were coming up with ever more cruel and/or hilarious ways to kill a man for entertainment. Deciding that this was good for the morale of the public, the newly minted consul Pompey Magnus promises the plebs something that they've never seen before: an army of elephants verses an army of convicts. It would have been a grisly spectacle as elephants trampled dozens while getting gutted from underneath, and the last few elephants broke ranks and started running around the arena balling their eyes out screaming in sheer terror.

Needless to say, the spectators were uniquely horrified and cursed Pompey for it. The Romans considered the curse to be fulfilled by the way Pompey died 7 years later: a broken man, utterly humiliated by Julius Caesar, and murdered brutally for political gain almost as soon as he touched down in Africa, the homeland of the elephants he slaughtered for crass political gain.

Duricrusts fit the bill but I'm not sure they form in large enough areas that also contain elephants.

They are relatively poor for agriculture anyway

Why didn't Elephants ever build a civilization?

Elephants have all they need already.

Pompey was a dick.

What use would get get out of it?

>... by shoving the pig in the elephant's face...

I got the image of a few Legionaries tying squealing pigs to the ends of 10-foot poles, and then bopping War Elephants on the nose with them.

Compared to dogs, not compared to Elephants

Can you give us more on this event?

>Pompey was defeated by Caesar
>the name Caesar means elephant

Elephants have a matriarchal society friend, and as we all know
>matriarchy
>civilization
Choose 1

more body mass = more brain mass to control it
elefents will also revist the gravesite of loved ones to give respect and form family units

Because I am an elephant user. Like I said, we're very intelligent

Elephant aren't "basically cows" wtf is this board

"& Humanities" in action

but who's smarter between canines and felines?

>Come to Veeky Forums
>Posters don't know how to differentiate to/too and their/they're
I have no idea what I expected.

as long as there are asians who want ivory and whale meat, I doubt it

Dolphins will take over the world one day. Screencap this.

OP should have posted this question on Veeky Forums.

>I read somewhere that Elephants have burial rites and honour their dead.
An urban legend. Elephants stand over their dead because it attracts predators, not because they are mournful.

Anyone who tries to domesticate elephants should be hung, they are the sweetest animals with hearts of gold and a minds sharp as razors.
Leave elephants alone!

Why would they want to attract predators though? Their best option would be to move away from the body as far as possible as the predator will go for that first anyhow. Standing near just puts them at risk.

Also they can crush you with their foot and smack you with their noodle nose

Have you ever watched your dog growl or make sudden leg twitches whle sleeping? They dream just as we do.

youtube.com/watch?v=wI8XgJ3JebE

you mean like, stronger, bigger and smarter cows?

What the fuck was his problem?

The 3rd section is where the magic is born.

Thomas Edison was a show-man, plain and simple.

He was not a genius, the only thing "genius" about him was how swiftly he could run to the patent store with the inventions his engineers made for him, and how swiftly he would hog all the credit in an attempt to pass himself off as some kind of ubermensche

When Nicolai Tesla, an actual genius, came to work for him, they butted heads constantly until Edison fired him for being insubordinate.

And true to his show-men core, when he was faced with a competitor who had an objectively superior product his solution was to go on a massive speaking tour denouncing their product for being dangerous, and demonstrated the dangerousness of this product by electrocuting animals to death, including an elephant. This wasn't enough to save his flagging business so Edison actually got off his fat ass and invented something: the only invention which he could probably take exclusive credit for creating: the electric chair.

Of course he didn't know what the fuck he was doing and he accidentally killed a man in the most excruciating manner imaginable, as the electricity coursing through his body literally cooked him from the inside out.

Edison is the most grossly overrated "genius entrepeneur" in history.

How badly did the patent system fuck science? I heard before about that businessman in England who patented some basic apparatus he didn't invent and fucked over the scientists who had been using it for free beforehand. Now they were patenting every minor thing they invented out of fear someone would steal it.

>Farming elephants

We could barely farm humans and you expect us to farm the missing link between blue whales and gigant apes?

Badly

t. Scientist