Are we driving elephants crazy? Bizarre, violent elephant behavior is on the rise--and humans may be the culprits.

• Author: Siebert, Charles
• Position: ENVIRONMENT

All across Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, and attacking and killing human beings.

In recent years, elephants have killed nearly 1,000 people in India. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, and Uganda to Sierra Leone.

"Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence," says Gay Bradshaw, an elephant researcher and psychologist at Oregon State University.

It's not just the increasing number of incidents that's causing alarm, but also the perversity of the behavior. Since the early 1990s, for example, young male elephants in southern Africa have been assaulting and killing rhinoceroses.

In the past, elephant researchers have typically cited high levels of testosterone in adolescent male elephants, or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans, as causes of aggression.

But a new theory is gaining recognition: According to Bradshaw and others, today's elephant population is suffering from a species-wide trauma and the collapse of elephant culture as a result of decades of poaching, habitat loss, forced relocations, and culling (reducing the size of an animal's population).

In the 1980s, the African elephant population was cut in half by poaching. While a 1989 ban on the ivory trade probably saved elephants from extinction, the ban was weakened in 1997, and poaching has increased in recent years.

As a result, elephants are experiencing a "breakdown," says Bradshaw, and are displaying behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in human beings: unpredictable and asocial behavior, inattentive mothering, and hyperaggression.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures with a strong sense of family. They generally stay within 15 feet of their mothers for the first eight years of life, after which the females are socialized by the matriarchy, and the males go off with the bull elephants before coming back as mature adults.

When an elephant dies, its...