What do you think is causing elephant rage?

Question

I've watched a show recently on National Geographic Channel. It was about elephant rage. It was interesting. Is elephant rage normal among male bull elephants?, Or Is it a rather new phenomenon?

Answer 1

According to this story, the behavior has caused increased concern and monitoring began early in the 1990's.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?ex=1317960000&en=555595cd86596c93&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
" All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region...."

Answer 2

Definitely human enroachment and stress cause by humans on their habitat. Imagine people taking away your source of food, destroying your house and worse of all killing your family members. Thats our work, who wouldn't be in rage if that occurred to us?

But bull elephants do have occasional period rage, but that usually only affects humans if they are in contact and that has been a natural behaviour for them.

Answer 3

Any kind of a critter can go ape.
You could run away from a mad mouse but a mad elephant could give you a problem.

Answer 4

Elephants don't get outraged any more than any other creaure on the planet. Its just that, when THEY get enraged, people tend to notice it more.

Answer 5

I think that white mice are bullying them