Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 92

tree species which resprout - or coppice - from the snapped trunk,
and ecologists recognize this as an evolutionary response to attacks
by elephants. 9 By breaking African trees such as mopane or knobthorn
acacia, elephants improve their food supply, as the shoots the dam-
aged trees produce are easier to reach and more nutritious than older
branches. 10 Trees that can survive the attention of elephants often
come to dominate the places in which the animals live: the ability to
coppice confers powerful selective advantages.
But somehow the obvious link - between coppicing and elephants -
appears to have been missed by people studying European ecosystems.
It is another example of Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Ecologists are
not always aware of the extent to which the systems they study have
been altered by humans: that the life they describe has been greatly
simplified and diminished.
Elephants could also explain why understorey trees in Europe, such
as holly, yew and box, are so resistant to breakage and have such strong
roots, though they carry less weight than canopy trees and are subject
to lower shear forces from the wind. They have to be tough, as they
take much longer to become massive enough to withstand toppling or
for their branches to grow out of the reach of trunks and tusks. The
ability of some trees to survive the removal of much of their bark could
be another adaptation: elephants often strip bark with their tusks.
Elephant-prooing could account for the birch tree's pied coat: the
black fissures make the white skin harder to strip cleanly.
The same evolutionary history could explain why traditional hedg-
ing, which relies on twisting, splintering and almost severing the living
wood, is possible: the trees we use to make hedges would have had to
survive similar attacks by elephants. Blackthorn, which possesses very
long spines, seems over-engineered to deter browsing by deer; but not,
perhaps, to deter browsing by rhinoceros.
up the trunk), Rackham says, are perhaps 'adaptations to recovering from the assaults
of elephants and other giant herbivores. The extermination of the great tree-breaking
beasts in Paleolithic times may have been mankind's first and farthest reaching influ-
ence on the world's forests.'