Elephants to be sued by the ACLU

in the early afternoon on Wednesday, the 24th of October 2007 by Chad

It’s the law of the jungle.

The mere whiff of a Maasai man’s clothing is enough to strike fear in African elephants and send them thundering to the safety of tall grasses, according to a new study.

Maasai men have been known to occasionally spear elephants, perhaps as a ritual to show virility.

Clothing worn by less threatening Kamba men, however, evokes a milder reaction.

"They think about people in the way you and I think about people," said study co-author Richard Byrne, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K.

"There are different types [of people] and they have different characteristic behaviors and—if I was an elephant—very different implications, some of them being the type who occasionally spear you."

Elephants, he added, categorize each group of people differently.

Wait, so you’re telling me, that rather than treat each member of the tribes as an individual, that elephants… discriminate? Just because someone coming at them is from one tribe and not another?

How could this be? I thought only white men were so evil according to the media. And here is a group of elephants, from Africa even, doing something that can’t occur naturally without the bwana devils.

National Geographic