In order to deter poachers, hundreds of tons of elephants’ tusks are being incinerated in Kenya. But even for Romans, elephants were special: of all the animals cruelly slaughtered in the Roman arena, it was only the elephants that, on one occasion, moved the crowd to pity when they were put up against 20 armed gladiators.
In Book 7 of his encyclopaedic 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (killed in the explosion of Vesuvius in AD 79) turns from describing the physical world to the animal world and, first and foremost, man. His account is by no means an encomium — of all creatures, Pliny remarks, none ever shows more cruelty to its own species than humans. Then in Book 8 he turns to the rest of the animal kingdom, starting with the animal ‘closest to man in disposition’.
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