353 



Congo) where elephants are particularly numerous. The 

 organization of this station was carried out by Captain 

 Laplume, the actual Director. 



Captain Laplume captured his first elephants in 1900. In 

 1903 he had caught fifteen of these animals. He has now 

 thirty-four. As the young captives became tamer, got older 

 and taller, Captain Laplume started train/ing them for agri- 

 cultural work (carrying, cart-traction, ploughing). 



The station now possesses sixteen elephants perfectly trained 

 to this work. The training of the young elephants is not 

 difficult. Some of the oldest animals are now put to regular 

 work. 



M. E. LEPLAE : As time is so short I will not read the paper, 

 but will only make a few remarks to supplement the printed 

 abstract. 



The African elephant is just as easy to train as the Asiatic 

 elephant. He is a very quiet and gentle animal, and it is not 

 at all difficult to train him. We started in the Congo by 

 capturing some young elephants by killing the mothers, and 

 we have now thirty-four trained elephants, some of which are 

 J\ ft. high, and are supposed to be about 15 to 16 years old. 

 They work very well, they carry packages on their backs, they 

 pull wagons, they plough in the fields, they do anything you 

 like. There is no difficulty at all in training them; the only 

 difficulty is, of course, that if you have a big herd of elephants 

 they eat every day a great quantity of forage. But that is not 

 a serious difficulty, because, as soon as you start growing 

 forage for them, you can give them as much as they want. 

 Then, of course, very few places would need thirty elephants 

 to work as a rule, and four or five on a farm, or perhaps ten, 

 could do a lot of work. Up to the present our elephants have 

 always been very gentle, and the men have never had any 

 trouble with them. Once or twice we have lost some of them 

 through stampeding, because they are in the back of the 

 Congo forest, and they never see motor-cars or anything of 

 that sort in those parts; there are, however, motor-cars in 

 the vicinity, and we shall have to make a new station on the 

 motor-car road and put the elephants there for a few months. 

 They are so tame that in a few hours they get used to any 

 noise. The first thing was to see whether the elephants could 

 be tamed and trained. Now we have to see if these elephants 

 can be put to an economic use I mean whether they can stand 

 hard work for a long time. At present they are working on 

 a road and pulling a certain weight every day for so many 

 miles; and after six months we shall know whether these 

 elephants can be practically used. Then we are going to 



