Ivory is not the only valuable product which the elephant yields; his hide, very thick and very tenacious, can be utilized for many purposes. The bucklers made of it by the negroes are scarcely less precious than the shield of Ajax, which was formed of a bull’s hide sevenfold. The animal’s flesh is also eaten, although too tough and too strongly flavoured for an European palate.
In India and the Indian islands the chase is carried on to make prisoners, and not victims. Its most remarkable feature is the important and almost indispensable assistance which the tame elephants render man against their wild brethren, zealously aiding to reduce them into slavery; now serving as baits to beguile and attract, and now as gendarmes, or rather as convict-warders, to compel their obedience. In Ceylon, elephant-hunting is almost an affair of State; it is like a national war, in which the Government appeals to the goodwill of the population generally, both Europeans and natives.
As soon as it is known that a troop or horde of elephants has assembled in a forest, the natives set to work, and with trunks of trees fixed in the ground and supported by transversal bars and buttresses, construct a vast palisaded enclosure, or corral, whose entrance forms a kind of gullet so narrow that the animals can only enter one by one, and once drawn into it are unable to return. This being accomplished, a thousand men, Europeans or Cingalese, surround the forest; they enclose the herd in a circle which incessantly contracts, and drive them before them by waving their torches, and keeping up a grand tintamarre of tamtams, trumpets, and musket-shots. The frightened animals can find no other avenue of escape than the entrance to the corral, where are placed, moreover, as an attraction, some females trained to act as decoys.
When all, or nearly all the herd, has been driven into the enclosure, the entrance is strongly and firmly closed with ropes and beams. The elephants, perceiving themselves caught in a trap, naturally endeavour to effect their escape by the way they entered. A sufficient number of hunters then place themselves along each side of the avenue, and a few, mounted on the decoys, are stationed at its extremity. The moment that one of the captives has got entangled in it, his retreat is cut off by means of thick planks piled across the palisade, and he is allowed to make his way towards the entrance, which is also blocked up. There he encounters the decoys, which force him, by striking him with their trunks, to fall back against a neighbouring tree, to which he is speedily bound with ropes. This first operation accomplished, the females are led back to the corral, and the game is renewed, until all the animals have undergone the same fate, and each of them is thralled to a tree in the forest. Nothing now remains but to accustom them to a life of servitude; and this is done by depriving them of food for a short time, then administering it in small quantities, and proceeding from the articles they like the least to those they prize the most. The privation at first enfeebles them, and consequently calms their irritation, while they feel the greater gratitude afterwards for the alleviation which is so readily afforded them. This gratitude, and, still more, the dependance in which they find themselves upon man, who at his supreme pleasure grants or refuses their food, renders them in a few days docile and tractable. Thus their docility, and the important services which they render, mainly arise in the overmastering fear which man inspires in them.
“It is remarkable,” says Boitard, “that the elephant is not and never has been a domestic animal, but a captive who only obeys through terror. However tame he may be, he never fails to escape into the woods to resume his savage life if an opportunity arises. The need, therefore, arises that on a long march he shall have his driver, or mahoud, on his back, to guide him, threaten him, and prevent him from taking to flight. His love of liberty is as great as that of the wildest animals, and in the female elephants it even overpowers maternal love; therefore, when suckling their young, they are never released from their chains, for experience has proved that they will abandon them without regret if circumstances should enable them to effect their escape.”
The moral and intellectual qualities of the elephant have been greatly exaggerated. As far as his morality is concerned, we must pronounce him a cowardly, pettish, and rancorous animal, which retains a much livelier recollection of every injury done him than of the benefits he may have received. In an intellectual point of view he is certainly inferior to the ape and the dog, but he is superior to the Carnaria, as well as to most of the Herbivora. His faculties, perhaps, may be most justly compared to those of the horse, which would certainly have exhibited as much intelligence if Nature had gifted him with a trunk; for we must never forget that the development of an animal’s faculties greatly depends upon the perfection of his organs. Again, the horse is susceptible of a complete domestication, while the elephant, as Boitard has remarked, is a captive, ever dreading, never loving his master, and eagerly awaiting a favourable moment to escape from him.
After the Elephant, the chief of the animals inhabiting the forests is the Rhinoceros, ranged with him by Linné in the order of Belluæ (or enormous beasts), by Cuvier in that of Pachyderms, and by De Blainville in that of Gravigrades.
The name Rhinoceros (ῥἱν, nose, and κἑρας, horn) indicates at once the peculiarity which at the first glance distinguishes him from the other Pachyderms. He carries, in fact, upon the arch formed by his nasal bones one or two solid, curved, and sharp-pointed horns, which serve him as very formidable weapons. His ears are upright, pointed, and moderately large; the eyes small and half closed. The coarse thick skin, knotty or granulated on its surface, is of such tenacity and impenetrability about the short thick legs and ungainly body, that it resists the claws of the lion or the tiger, the sword or the shot of the hunter. It hangs about the neck in several large plaits or folds; another fold passes from the shoulders to the fore-legs, and another from the hind part of the back to the thighs. He has a moderately large and long head, a protruding upper lip, and a depressed skull. His manners are fierce, but not aggressive; he leads a lethargic life, and wallows on the marshy banks of lakes and rivers, where grows the vegetable food on which he exclusively feeds. He usually measures about twelve feet in length from the tip of the nose to the insertion of the tail; his height is about seven feet; and the girth of his body is nearly equal to its length!