Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

“These elephants were not in the intention to kill,” Officer Raj says. How does he know? Because the bodies were in one piece. “If an elephant is in an angry mode, the body will not be intact. It will get in pieces.” A book by Jayantha Jayewardene includes a list of the nine recorded methods by which an angry or musth-addled elephant has killed a human being. “Placing a fore foot on one limb of the victim and ripping off the other with the trunk” is number 3. (Elephants use a similar anchor-and-pull technique to strip an uprooted shrub of limbs and leaves to eat.) Rulers of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1600s were said to have taken advantage of this natural behavior, training elephants to serve as executioners. An engraving from An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon depicts an elephant so engaged. One forefoot rests on the malefactor’s torso, and the trunk is wrapped around the man’s raised left leg. Were it not for the caption (“An Execution by an Eliphant”) and the raggedly torn-off arm in the foreground, you could get the impression that Ceylonese monarchs trained elephants to serve as bodyworkers.