80 TRAPPING WILD ANIMALS 
mals. Though possessed of a proboscis, which is 
capable of guarding it against such dangers, it read- 
ily falls into a pit dug for catching it, only covered 
with a few sticks and leaves. Its fellows make no 
effort to assist the fallen one, as they might easily 
do by kicking in the earth around the pit, but they 
flee in terror. 
It commonly happens that a young elephant falls 
into a pit near which the mother will remain until 
the hunter comes, without doing anything to assist 
it, not even feeding it by throwing in a few branches. 
This, no doubt, is more difficult of belief to most 
people than if they were told that the mother sup- 
plied it with grass, brought water in her trunk, or 
filled up the pit with trees and effected the young 
one’s release. 
Whole herds of elephants are driven into ill con- 
cealed enclosures which no other wild animal could 
be got to enter, and single ones are caught by their 
legs being tied together by men under cover of a 
couple of tame elephants. Elephants which happen 
to effect their escape are caught again without trou- 
ble. Even experience does not bring wisdom. 
These facts are certainly against the conclu- 
sion that the elephant is an extraordinarily shrewd 
animal, much less one possessed of the power of rea- 
soning in the abstract, with which he is commonly 
credited. I do not think I traduce the elephant, when 
I say it is in many things a stupid animal, and I can 
assert with confidence that all the stories I have 
