Musth
'intoxicated') is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants characterized by aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones.
Behavioral management for captive bull elephants in musth includes physical restraint and a starvation diet for several days to a week.
[1]: 155 Secretions and urine collected from zoo elephants have been shown to contain elevated levels of various highly odorous ketones and aldehydes.
The rumble has been shown to prompt not only attraction in the form of reply vocalizations from cows in heat, but also silent avoidance behavior from other bulls, particularly juveniles and non-receptive females, suggesting an evolutionary benefit to advertising the musth state.
[14] Some scientists opined this was an example of young male elephants permanently changed by the trauma of witnessing their breeding herds culled due to overcrowding in other South African parks.
These young bulls had been spared themselves due to their age and size although herd culls are properly done in entirety, i.e. leaving no survivors to suffer the equivalents of PTSD, survivor guilt, and other disorders or traumas later in life which can then create or exacerbate human-elephant conflicts or other forms of violence, according to Ron Thomson, a late 20th-century Zimbabwe game warden and Parks Board veteran.
It is established that functionally important decision-making abilities may be significantly altered by disruption of the natural structure of kin-based social relationships and that violent disruption "appears capable of driving aberrant behaviours in social animals that are akin to the post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by humans following extremely traumatic events" due to the pachyderms' intelligence, strong emotional family attachments, and prodigious memories.
I came with my big family, passing few mountains where noble, young male elephants with coarse hair and swaying walks have musth flowing from their cheek glands and elephant mothers with calves wave wild jasmine twigs, chasing striped bees that swarm on the sweet musth.
