What Elephants Can Teach Us About Civil War

Elephants are changing. The various traumas of extermination—witnessing the deaths of their companions, developing in atypical social structures—are making elephants more aggressive. In this episode, we discuss the relationship between resilience and adverse experience, the developmental plasticity of thresholds for aggression, and the notion of an envelope of stress tolerance. Faced with a panoply of intensifying, existential threats, we ask where and when people will find the rage that elephants are finding.