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One can know a lot about the human species’ cruelty to animals and still be staggered by the example of the elephant. It is a story of torture and genocide — or would be if those words weren’t reserved by custom for crimes against other people.

That they appear nowhere in his 7,700-word treatment of the subject, published last Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, is testimony to author Charles Siebert’s effort to avoid unduly “humanizing” elephants. No easy task.

In addition to notably long lives and memories, elephants have close familial ties and complex social structures. They meet death in the herd with close equivalents of human grief: “burying” a corpse with brush, guarding the site in a vigil, revisiting it for years. To look closely at such behavior — including a tide of violent retaliation against an oppressor — is to see our own, oddly mirrored.

Does “violent retaliation” sound like anthropocentric overstatement? How, then, to describe an elephant’s goring of a tourist or farmer who had done nothing, personally, to annoy? Or a herd’s selective trampling of crops and huts on the edge of its shrinking reserve? Or routine blocking of roads, and charging of vehicles that come too close?

Such events have become commonplace in and around the bits of habitat in Africa, India and southeast Asia that human encroachment has not yet taken from the elephants. After centuries of docility, scientists say, young male elephants, especially, seem to be reaching some kind of limit and displaying aggression that is undeniably focused and intentional. In one state in northeast India, elephants have killed more than 600 people in a dozen years.

But these attacks are no match for the wholesale slaughter and suffering visited on elephants by humans, beginning with relentless displacement from their home territories. In Uganda, ivory-seeking poachers are known to prefer grenades over guns; park managers “cull” oversize herds by shooting animals en masse, then tethering survivors to corpses until relocation trucks arrive.

Elephants are probably one of the few animals that could survive as a species if the only ones left were in zoos or large sight-seeing animal parks, but like humans, elephants seem to understand concepts like home and freedom. Can a few caged in on some atificial preserve ever feel that they have a home or freedom.

Part of a longer essay. The concept of commons, at least in the way some libertarians interpret it relates to the plight of African elephants among other environmental issues, Why I Am Not a Libertarian

The tragedy of the commons is a first-rate device for testing the efficiency of any human proposal for governing ourselves.

The tragedy of the commons is essentially a parable with a moral, like an Aesop’s Fable. In the parable, we all live in a village that shares a commons on which we, farmers all, graze our sheep. The moral of the story is that left to our own devices, we will each decide to add one sheep too many to the commons, destroying it for ourselves and for future generations. The short term benefit to each of us of an additional sheep outweighs the intangible gain of preserving the commons for our grandchildren.

David Boaz gives us the libertarian take on the “tragedy of the commons”:

When resources–such as a common grazing area, forest or lake–are “owned” by everyone, they are effectively owned by no-one. No one has an incentive to maintain the value of the asset or use it on a sustainable basis.

In other words, the libertarian answer to the tragedy of the commons is to eliminate the commons. No commons, no tragedy. If the commons was owned by a single individual who charged everyone else grazing fees, he would be more committed to preserving it for the future than a village of farmers.

But why is this necessarily so? I could argue the converse, that a village acting collectively is more likely to avoid short-term thinking than one man responsible only to himself.

Hume made the point that in most moral philosophizing, we carry on talking about the “is” until, suddenly, in mid-paragraph, we encounter an “ought”. There is no real-world bridge from the “is” to the “ought”; all such bridges are fantasies based on optimism and self-deception.

Where libertarianism crosses this chasm is when it passes from selfishness to enlightened self-interest. A human being who owns the Pennekamp coral reef in Key Largo is entitled to break up the reefs and sell the pieces to gift shops (in the absence of a government expressing the will of the majority and telling him he can’t.) He ought to realize that there is more gain in selling tickets to Pennekamp over many generations–that way, it will support his children and grandchildren as well. But most human beings, left in complete freedom to act, will select the short-term gain. This is what the Prisoner’s Dilemma teaches: we will select betrayal over cooperation because it grants an immediate benefit more tangible to us than the repetitive, long-term benefits of cooperation.

Not all Africans see the elephant the same way the poachers do, but the poachers are operating under the delusion of self interests and very obvious short term self interests at that. If the few remaining elephants are in a corral somewhere any future revenue they may have yielded is gone. Left to populate and wander in the wild there is benefit to the entire community based on revenue from tourism; there is no reason for a tourist to travel thousands of miles to see an elephant in a large cage. Libertarians are great allies on civil liberties front and imminent domain, but very short sighted on some other issues.

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