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November 30th, 2021 
Awake Goy Centuries of trophy and commercial hunting, isolation in captivity and poaching, have caused a baseline shift in the perception of iconic megafauna such as Asian and African elephants, which should actually be benchmarked with their species of 3,500 and 150 years ago, respectively. The shifting baseline syndrome can be defined as “ a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of human experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition ”. Indeed, in his famous Proboscidea monograph (1936), Henry Osborn depicts African elephants with very big ivory, in the same league with prehistoric stars, while Asian elephants sport average ivory, showing that 100 years ago the image of the Asian elephants was already severely damaged by the constant elimination of tuskers.
A plough-the-earth bull Asian elephant known as Bogeshwar in the wilds of Kabini, India. (Kushal M Guttedar / ©The World As It Once Was )
Last of the Plough-The-Earth Tuskers
For Asian elephants, isolation in captivity was the chief cause of elimination of the big tuskers and tuskers in general. The ancient Arthashastra writings from over 2,000 years ago prescribed the selective catching from the wild of 20-year-old tusked males, which were preferred to females or maknas (tuskless bulls). About 100 to 150 years ago, big-tusked Asian bulls appear in photos and drawings from all across Asia, including Burma, Cambodia, India, Thailand and Vietnam. They were used in parades, beauty contests and Colosseum-style fights.
An Asian elephant engraving in the ancient Vat Phou temple site, Laos shows an elephant with ivory as big as that of the woolly mammoths painted on the walls of the European caves. ( GuillaumeG / CC BY-SA 3.0 )
In the case of African elephants, trophy and commercial hunting thoroughly contributed to the elimination of the big tuskers, and captivity played only a minor role, in the case of the forest elephants exploited in the Belgian Congo. Ivory of one million African elephants passed through the Ivory House in London, and similar numbers ended up in places such as the United States and Germany. Many big tusks feature in those archive images: their measurements were never recorded, they were just transformed into piano keys, combs and billiard balls.
Research indicates evidence of over 50 plough-the-earth Asian elephants (and many more approaching that stature).
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Dr George Dian Balan is the author of The World As It Once Was . ALL profits from this book will be donated , starting with saving the last big-tusked elephants in Tsavo, Kenya. Dian is a multi-award winning fine art wildlife photographer; a scientific contributor to different magazines and books; an inspirational speaker on biodiversity and environmental issues at events in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, specialized in megafauna topics; and a member of the Pleistocene Mammals Society. George Dian Balan
Top Image : Arctic explorer Bernard Buigues contemplates the Jarkov woolly elephant tusks emerging from the frozen landscape in Siberia, 1998. These tusks are about three meters (10ft) and over 45kg (100lbs) each. There is a growing body of evidence that overhunting is the main cause of the extinction of the mammoths. (Francis Latreille / ©The World As It Once Was )
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