Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
by marci on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:29PM
(#24876154)
There were three african species, now there are two:
- the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant)
- the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)
Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
by thaumasiotes on Friday October 23, 2020 @02:53PM
(#24872601)
> were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation
That would be a highly unusual trajectory.
Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity.
And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
by DavidAdams on Friday October 23, 2020 @05:54PM
(#24874673)
My guess is that these elephants weren't actually domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than raised in captivity.
Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
by InfiniteRand on Saturday October 24, 2020 @01:21AM
(#24877152)
Was over-exploitation really the key factor in North African elephants going extinct? I always thought it was due to increasing desertification + the expansion of human settlement in North Africa, but that's just idle speculation
The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant