Musth and Mentors

To Own a Dragon by Donald Miller, 30-32

"I learned a great deal about myself while watching a documentary a few years ago about elephants in a wildlife trust in Africa. There were twenty-five elephants, all of them orphans, and they had been brought to the trust twenty years before. They were becoming teenagers--in elephant years. The girls were adequate, getting along with the other elephants, but there were a few boys who were causing a great deal of trouble. The narrator talked about the frustrations these few elephants were feeling because they had gone into early musth cycles, which showed up as a green pus running down their right hind leg. This phase produced aggressive and violent behavior, the elephant equivalent of sexual frustration.

The narrator in the documentary said the elephant musth cycle begins in adolescence, and normally lasts only a few days. But among these orphans, the musth cycle was disrupted and had become unusually long. These elephants were taking out their aggression on rhinos that bathed at a local mud pool. An elephant would slowly lumber down to the pool, enter near a rhino, then spear it through the side with his tusks. The elephant would then lean his gargantuan forehead into the head of the rhino, holding the beast underwater until it drowned. The filmmakers followed these orphan elephants, who were always on their own, staggering about the wildlife refuge, fueled by a pent-up aggression they couldn't understand. They weren't acting like elephants--they didn't know what an elephant was supposed to do with all his energy, all his muscle.

Occasionally, two elephants in musth would meet, and the encounter was always violent, going so far as to uproot trees in the fray of their brawl. Then both beasts, bloodied, lumbered their separate ways alone--without a family, without a tribe...

Watching television that night, however, the narrator began to speak of a kind of hope for these elephants. Elephant development, apparently, begins very early. Female elephants are only capable of having children once every two years, and during those two years between babies, the young are cared for obsessively by their mothers. They are fed, sheltered, loved, and guided in their learning of basic survival.

It is only at the first musth cycle that a young male elephant leaves his mother and enters into the African wild, searching for a mentor, a guide. The green pus running down his hind leg and his smell like fresh-cut grass alerts an older, fully mature male, that this is a young elephant in need of guidance. Upon finding a mentor, the young elephant's musth cycle ends. The older and younger begin to travel together, to find food together, to protect each other--the older one teaching the younger what elephant strength is for, and how to use it for the benefit of himself and the tribe."

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