by J. Douglas Johnson
An elephant never bothers about the impossible obstacles. Their obstinacy in the face of hardship is practically world-famous. For this reason an elephant herd trouping through the desert is also sometimes called a persistence.
Clearly this is not the “immovable object” kind of obstinacy, grumbly-grey and hard-headed as you might imagine the parched and cracked pachyderm. In fact elephants have often been associated with light-hearted whimsicality. There are even old stories of elephants taking it into their fancies to fly, and who therefore roam the savanna or deep into the jungle at night, collecting all the necessary balloons to float up to the moon.
While it is true that desert elephants live in perhaps the harshest environmental conditions imaginable, and elephants in both Africa and Asia suffer from poachers and from habitat fragmentation and decay, the elephant’s just pessimism is balanced by its buoyancy. Elephants always carry on, making their ways across vast distances, enduring hardships and mishaps ever with light hearts and light feet. Hence the beloved nursery rhyme, attributed to an unknown companion of Rudyard Kipling’s, but known by every grandmother and child from western Africa to India:
A pessimistic, doomed mood’ll
Do a number on your noodle.
But there IS good news.
The magnificent elephants
In pachydermic elegance
Are twirling two-by-twos.
these facts are of dubious origin, compiled by one J. Douglas Johnson, who should be kept under constant observation henceforth, tweeting @JustDouglas8 and Instagramming @justdouglas8