Elephants without borders

Ofri Ilani, Ha'aretz
March 13, 2008

A few months ago, when he was traveling in the border region between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Prof. Jeheskel Shoshani found the corpse of a large elephant that had been shot by hunters.

"It was a large male, and the poachers wanted its ivory, so they sawed off its head," he says. "When I saw that, I thought about the last moments in the life of this elephant. Elephants have language - they talk to one another with sounds that we can't hear. I asked myself what sound he made a moment before he died.

"I have studied the elephant brain, and there are many similarities between it and the human brain. It's possible that they remember more than we do. But because of one bullet, all these memories disappeared. It made me so sad. And the fact of the matter is, the poacher himself doesn't even get much money for it."

Article at the following link: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/963922.html