Pachyderm Anomie?

There was a fascinating and heartbreaking article in Sunday's New York Times about the breakdown of elephant society. Those who study the problem of Human-Elephant Conflict argue that "today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture."

The article is quite long, but worth reading.