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 training 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. Lepiat: 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 
74 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 
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