And when is the last time they were used? I still cannot imagine how it would be possible to train an elephant to remain calm and obedient during the bloodied frenzy of the battlefield but clearly it was achieved somehow.
More than you ever wanted to know about War Elephants here.
:smack: Shoulda checked wikipedia first. Thanks, dolphinboy, appreciate it.
I recall some trivia once that said there are no domesticated elephants; so most elephants other than those born in circuses are captured in the wild and trained.
Zoos also do captive breeding of elephants. In fact, maintaining healthy breeding populations (of any animal) usually ranks pretty high in any given zoo’s mission statement.
I was watching one of those historic photograph slideshows on Youtube this week, and saw picture of an elephant with a machine gun on its back with the barrel over its head. So they were definitely being utilized within the 20th century.
But they’re still wild animals - just trainable.
I think the word you’re looking for is “tamable”.
Elephants in war are actually more probably than horses. Horses are, by nature, skittish due to be prey animals. Elephants are also herbivores, but far less skittish.
My understanding of history is that handlers that rode elephants into war also usually carried a weapons of some with which to disable/kill any elephant that went out of control.
They were not at all ‘calm and obedient’. A two-edged sword at best; the standard tactic in response was to panic your opponent’s elephants so they fled and trampled on them rather than you. Mahouts were actually armed with poison spikes to kill their own elephant if that looked like happening … so naturally the riposte was to kill the mahouts first.
If you had elephants on your side you used them very carefully indeed, only in the right circumstances. Elephants are much much much smarter than horses.