Elephants on the Couch

Continuos sleep problems, aggressive behaviour, depression, apathy, nightmares – this is not a diagnosis exclusively for war veterans. We are talking about elephants with post-traumatic stress syndrom. This is a story about elephants, told by one of their leading advocates - the American researcher Gay A Bradshaw. She believes that the ancient relationship between man and elephant has fundamentally changed. Leaving a haunted, stressed animal behind. And the future is dark: ”Elephant society is breaking down. We are not only loosing population, we are changing the population. We may in the future if we continue like this have pockets of what we call elephants because they look like an elephant, but that’s not really an elephant anymore.”