Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
savanna elephants. They now cheerfully carry tourists across both land and
shallow water, allowing their passengers to observe the wildlife of this rich
landlocked delta from their gently rocking backs. Unlike that poor tourist in
Bandipur who was killed by a feral Indian elephant, none of the tourists at
Abu have so far been harmed.
At the Garamba National Park in the Congo there is an African Elephant
Domestication Center. Poaching and invasion by Sudanese guerillas have
repeatedly disrupted the park's operations, but before the disruptions some
elephants were trained to carry tourists. It is possible that the Center will be
established again if peace returns to the area—as of late 2005 there were still
1,200 elephants in the southern part of the park despite continued bushmeat
and ivory poaching.
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Intriguingly, genetic studies have shown that the elephants of the
Okavango have interbred with forest elephants, and the trained elephants in
the Congo's Garamba were also forest elephants. It is possible that these shy
denizens of West Africa's rainforests may have milder temperaments than
savanna elephants, which may explain the guides' success in teaching them
to carry tourists. But the failure of native tribes to tame African elephants,
either forest or savanna, is an unusual gap in what has generally been a series
of success stories of domestication around the world.
In contrast to Africa, the inhabitants of Eastern Asia have been strikingly
successful in the taming of animals. One of the most remarkable events, one
that changed history and even changed our own gene pool, is the domestica-
tion of the horse.
Horses, camels, and the compression of space
The taming of horses triggered one of the most transformative events in
human prehistory. For the fi rst time people could travel faster and further
than it was possible to walk or jog. Horses compressed the world, so that in a
single lifetime an adventurous individual or an entire tribe of nomads could
travel for thousands of kilometers. Horses were as liberating for our ances-
tors as cars are to us.
