The elephant as a person.

Our genetic blueprint provides an algorithmic seed that determines the strengths of our talents, abilities, and core personality traits.

However, behaviour is a product of our social environment. Culture is the software that runs upon the hardware of our brains. The cultural data set is what nurtures humanity in of homo sapiens sapiens. Anything that alters culture in profound ways will also shift the mindsets and behaviours that result.

We find something similar occurring presently in the culture of African Elephants. Due to so many elephants being murdered by humans, their culture is breaking down.

Babies were often spared from physical harm, though not mental and emotional. When elephants witness the murder of others, they are understandably severely traumatised, and they pass this terror onto others, inducing PTSD-like symptoms in other members of their society.

Calf's without adult male role models miss out on learning emotional self-regulation, and become sullen and un-socialised. Worse, their behaviour can be predatory and perverse, serially ganging up on rhinos to murder them, and then to sexually assault the corpses.

Grown-up orphans have no idea how to parent the next generation properly either, thereby introducing the next generation to their sick subculture. Only by reintroducing healthy older males were healthy cultural norms re-established.

We systematically destroyed the culture of these intelligent giants to such a degree, that they chose to destroy other endangered species in turn. They were simply perpetuating the wickedness that we have done to them.

New advances in machine learning suggest that we will soon make sense of elephant language, to understand what they are telling each other, and what they can tell us.

Perhaps by finally gaining a voice that we ourselves can hear, we will finally be forced to acknowledge elephants as persons in their own right, just as we are.