By Thomas R. Trautmann
Due to their huge, immense measurement, elephants have lengthy been impossible to resist for kings as symbols in their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, staggering hunts, public demonstrate of reside captives, or the conspicuous intake of ivory—all of them tending towards the elephant’s extinction. The kings of India, besides the fact that, as Thomas R. Trautmann indicates during this research, chanced on a use for elephants that truly helped guard their habitat and numbers within the wild: war.
Trautmann strains the historical past of the conflict elephant in India and the unfold of the establishment to the west—where elephants took half in a number of the maximum wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but no longer China, significantly), a historical past that spans 3,000 years and a substantial a part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He exhibits that simply because elephants devour such substantial amounts of nutrients, it used to be uneconomic to elevate them from delivery. particularly, in a different type of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and proficient them, one after the other, via millennia. Kings have been hence forced to guard wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being shrink. via taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant family, Trautmann throws into reduction the constitution of India’s environmental historical past and the explanations for the endurance of untamed elephants in its forests.
Read Online or Download Elephants and kings : an environmental history PDF
Best strategy books
Shareholder Yield: A Better Approach to Dividend Investing
Shareholder Yield: a greater method of Dividend making an investment indicates step by step how to define returns in a low yield global. traders have flocked to dividend shares looking for yield; even if, fewer businesses are paying out much less in dividends as a result of felony, tax, and structural alterations within the US markets. Dividend funds are just one use of a company’s unfastened funds circulate; different makes use of of money comprise: percentage repurchases, debt paydown, reinvestment within the company, and mergers and acquisitions.
Internationalism and Mode Switching - Performance, Strategy and Timing
Dealing with a global operation is obvious by means of many as some of the most demanding actions in an company. Uwe Sachse bargains colossal solutions to the query of the way businesses behave once they have entered a specific international industry. the result of the empirical learn exhibit that the mode swap is a crucial choice for bettering functionality in overseas markets.
A evaluation of the Soviet military via maritime experts putting it in its household and overseas context assessing its current and destiny roles by way of taking a look at its ships, submarines, plane, its workouts and styles of deployment and by way of studying the Soviet Navy's personal writings.
- Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
- Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory
- The Ernst & Young Business Plan Guide (3rd Edition)
- Fast-Track Business Growth: Smart Strategies to Grow without Getting Derailed
- The Standout Business Plan: Make It Irresistible--and Get the Funds You Need for Your Startup or Growing Business
- The Operational Code of the Politburo
Additional resources for Elephants and kings : an environmental history
Example text
It also needs a large amount of water to drink, and a river or lake in which to bathe. Cooling in hot weather is a problem, for which the large, thin ears, with many blood vessels, are the main solution. Elephants do not have sweat glands all over to enable cooling; they have only a few, on the feet. 28 They need at least partial shade in hot weather, a second attribute tying them to the forest. Asian elephants, like African, move about in groups formed of a matriarch, her daughters and younger sons, and other relatives; such formations contain adult females, while adult males are solitary or in groups of young males.
Africana, respectively. The difference between the two varieties has a bearing on the history we are trying to trace. 20 Elephants belong to the order Proboscidea, whose closest relatives, from whom they separated millions of years ago, are the dugongs and manatees (Sirenensis) on the one hand, and the hyraxes, small burrowing animals, on the other. The great radiation of the Proboscidea, of which over 300 species have been recognized,21 occurred after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Elephants, as the largest living land animals, took the place once occupied by massive herbivorous sauropods among the dinosaurs.
Chanderi & Kalinjar 23. Kalinjar & Gahora 24. Gahora, Kantit & Chunar. Bihar: 25. Jharkhand 26. Southern Mountains 27. Murung. Bengal: 28. Mahmudabad & Khilafatabad 29. Arakan 30. Satgaon. Orissa: 31. Orissa & Jharkhand. Assam: 32. Kajliban 33. Sadiq 34. Mishmi. Deccan West: 35. Deogarh 36. Sultanpur & Rajpipla. Deccan East: 37. Bastar. South India and Ceylon: 38. Ceylon 39. Malabar 40. Kanara 41. Tirupati. There is very little overlap between these horse pastures (not of wild horses, of course, which are native to Central Asia) and the forests that show wild elephants in the Mughal period, or indeed two thousand years ago.