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.
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.