Hundreds of Botswana elephants dead in mysterious mass die-off | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of Botswana elephants dead in mysterious mass die-off

theguardian.com

102 pointsYeGoblynQueenne39 comments

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Disease seems like most likely culprit to me. Even if it's not Covid. Could be another virus.

That was my first thought. "Great, the Coronavirus is coming for the elephants now"

Around water points. Farmers poisoning would be my first candidate

Yep, looks clearly like environmental crime (again). Look no further...

New wave of predator and scavenger poisoning by small-stock farmers in Namibia and Botswana (2019):

https://africasustainableconservation.com/2019/07/25/new-wav...

Other animals and scavengers appear unaffected.

Researchers might want to look for calcium oxalate crystals in the urinary bladder.

The first thing I think of is that case of acacias killing antelope: https://jstor.org/stable/24997007

Maybe, but cyanobacteria are not an uncommon thing and kill animals all the time.

Unrelated to the topic, but damn does The Gaurdian have a long list of vendors they transmit data to or otherwise use for advertising/tracking. On the large blue rectangle, click through to "options", turn everything off, and click the dropdown that is labeled "vendors".

Not defending them but our local newspaper has double that list. Rando US news sites have five times that.

Most news sites have inordinate numbers of advertising vectors and tracking elements. One assumes it's because it literally pays the bills. Let an external and manager deal with it because it gets "inventory" filled fast.

But yes, you'd expect The Guardian to be a little more privacy focussed.

I agree, most news sites are awful about it. I don't hold The Guardian to a higher standard, because their reporting is often — but perhaps less so than most — just as questionable.

> "some of them have fallen straight on their face, indicating they died very quickly. Others are obviously dying more slowly, like the ones that are wandering around"

This seems a bit of a strange analysis. Could they not have all died, to borrow a phrase, gradually then suddenly?

Well that's a bummer.

On a lighter elephants note, they're incredibly capable at painting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLxO7MPUKH8

Good on you perhaps for injecting a lighter note, but I'd personally rather that these very upsetting events retain their gravity and perhaps shock us into action.

Case in point the Australian bush fires earlier this year.

Half a billion or so dead animals and millions of hectares of habitat burned to a crisp.

But cue happy news stories about someone rescuing a koala and feeding it milk from a baby bottle - something that makes absolutely not one jot of difference to the massive death and devastation contributed to by our (humans) shitty environmental stewarding.

Did we read the same article? The cause isn't known yet.

I'm not in favor of "shocking us into action" when we're not even informed of what it is we're acting on.

Quick, act! Sign this petition banning dihydrogen monoxide!

Any action is better than diluting the discussion with irrelevant information

> Any action is better than diluting the discussion with irrelevant information

At least you're aware enough of how embarrassingly dumb your comments are to use a throwaway account.

Its even more dumb of you to think that i created a throwaway account just to reply to you!

What if the action causes harm?

What about action to figure out what happened?

Interesting. Since this is from BBC Earth I guess it's legit, but from my earlier understanding, painter elephants typically go through long processes of torture to "learn" how to paint things for tourists. I will skip linking to any references since we are on the topic of a mass elephant death, but you can easily find them on the Web.

Or perhaps my understanding was incorrect all along?

I don't have specific information but elephants are very very very smart. And most smart animals very much enjoy being trained, they seem to enjoy the interaction and the challenge.

For example wild dolphins will sometimes come to humans just in order to play with them or to interact.

I don’t know... if you haven’t already, look up how are elephants “trained” so that they can carry tourists on their backs... or beg in the streets... it’s not pretty and it is torture.

All the videos of painting elephants I've seen include a handler that very clearly is holding their tusk or ear. I'd absolutely love this to be true but it quite honestly seems like puppeteering?

The handler is obviously present to manage the brushes, I presume the physical contact is more to do with signaling when to break for reloading/switching brushes.

Do you really think the linked BBC clip would have been made if it were "puppeteering"? The whole premise was working with the elephant to explore its creative side.

There are possibilities beyond intentionally controlling the elephant. There is for example the case of Clever Hans[1], a horse who was supposedly able to perform arithmetic: it was eventually concluded most likely that Hans was reacting to his trainer's unconscious cues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually Covid. We know it can jump multiple species and that people have been known to collapse all of a sudden.

They are not quite susceptible to this https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/12783989319495352...

"Rhesus macaques, cynomolgus macaques, Grivets, and common marmosets can become infected SARS-CoV-2 and become sick in a laboratory setting."

As well as felines, ferrets, minks, and dogs. Doesn't seem wholly out of the question, but I'm not an expert on whether elephants get coronaviruses.

Off topic but relevant:

There are times reading the news can be one hit after another to your mental health. Do please be sensible about reading all this stuff. Read when feeling mentally robust, possibly in the morning. Don't be afraid to just take a break from news for a period of days or longer.

There's a lot happening, ensure looking after yourself is one of those things.

edit: I found those pictures of all those dead elephants unexpectedly upsetting. Unlike all the upsetting news that one is expecting to be so and is around now.

Misery transcends known laws of matter in that it can be replicated endlessly. Our soul is really not designed to consume the most extreme and tragic occurrences of events around the world, the vast majority of which we have absolutely nothing to do with even if we tried. There is no "preservation of misery" like with thermodynamics - you can be miserable then spread it around and make many more people miserable, while not making yourself any less so.

Think about politics for example - how much have you been personally preoccupied with a certain political turmoil vs how much effect it had on your own life or the lives of those around you - or even your community. Only in the rarest of extremes does politics get directly to your doorstep.

Does it mean you don't need to be involved or care? Not at all, but focus on your surroundings more.

I didn't expect this kind of comment here, but I really appreciate that you left it.

I also was hit pretty hard by reading this article. There are a lot of very detailed pictures, and a lot of dead elephants, it's really tragic.

I posted the article. I'm sorry it caused you distress. The dead elephants are really not a pretty sight, I guess it's fair they should come with a big warning.

You should not be sorry. Thank you for posting it.

Thanks for writing the wraning comment.

Agree with the other commenter - thanks for your sentiment - this kind of thing hurts to see, but it should be seen.

Also, I think their point was that this kind of thing just hits a lot harder given the generally negative tone of the world around a lot of us.

Thank you for writing this comment, last couple of weeks/months haven’t been easy by any stretch. I’m glad I saw your comment before clicking on TFA, it could have very well sent me down a dark spiral.

As I'm fond of saying: Mental & emotional health is way more valuable than being informed, in my uninformed opinion.

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