If you’ve read my treatise “Claudius and the Camels,” you will recall he brought elephants with him when he sailed to Britain to conquer new lands. I mentioned we’d get to the elephants later. Now is later. There is some contention among historians whether it was Asian or African elephants that Hannibal fed liquor to in order to make them drunk, then poked them in the legs with spears to make them really mad, and finally pointed them at his enemies and hollered “Go, Gumbo, Go!” I believe they were African elephants. Why? Because there is one extant coin that we know of from Hannibal’s reign that has a profile of an elephant on it, and that baby had really big ears, ergo Elephas africanus. On the other hand, most historians suspect Hannibal used Asian elephants because they were smaller, ate less, and had nicer tempers unless you got them liquored up and stuck knives in their feet. Why, you might ask, would anybody think it’s a good idea to get an elephant drunk and then stab its legs until it wants to kill everyone? That’s almost as interesting a question as who figured out elephants can get drunk and then repeated the process on purpose. I have a theory about that. Fruit rots and ferments, right? Elephants eat fruit, right? Ergo, Indian elephants, especially the bachelors, were known to sometimes go on a forest destruction spree which they thought was riotously funny. Local villagers heard them coming and knew enough to flee the joint until the gigantic party-goers needed a nap to sleep one off. A side effect of being drunk is the suppression of most survival instincts. This is as true for elephants as it is for certain men I used to know. I believe one ancient Maharaja, who heretofore had used his elephants for grand entrances, decided upon an experiment. What would happen if he told his chief mahout to get one of his larger stable residents stupid drunk, then make him mad and point him at something he could barely make out with his gin-fizzed eyesight, something say like men running at him with lances or other elephants wearing the wrong team colors. The Maharaja’s experiment was a huge success, strewn with corpses, and war elephants were de rigor in the subcontinent thereafter. If you don’t believe me, watch the film Jodhaa Akbar. When Ashutosh Gowariker gathered the masses to film a particularly large battle scene for his grand opus, he hired 80 Asian elephants, decked them out in opposing team armor—40 pachyderms per team—and had them race at each other in technicolor. Well, they didn’t exactly race. Their mahouts made them lift their battle ready caparisoned trunks and trumpet meanly. Then they ambled toward the center and sedately passed by their opponents in separate lanes to reach the opposite team’s goal posts. If you freeze frame the battle scene you’ll see what I mean. The Indian film industry version of the SPCA won’t let producers make elephants try to kill people or each other any more in real life. Those scenes are edited in later with props. But the overall effect was very impressive and it just went to prove that in actual practice Indian elephants were used as effectively as stone-throwing canons more often and for more centuries than their larger cousins over in the African veldt. Regardless whether they were the eight feet tall, seven thousand pound Asian variety that ate three hundred pounds of fodder and drank fifty gallons of water a day or the even larger, hungrier variety, in 218 BCE, Hannibal decided to go where no man had gone before with a herd of elephants. He marched with them across the Alps, from north to south, all for the intended purpose of trampling his enemies in the Italian Po Valley and then continuing in trumpeting triumph to Rome. And wouldn’t that have been a sight to see? He started off with between 37-40 war elephants of which variety we may never know. It really doesn’t matter because fortunately for the Romans and unfortunately for the elephant squad, he ended up in the Po Valley with only one malnourished, frozen team member and aside from that silhouette on a coin, we don’t know what became of the lone survivor. How does one turn 38 or so emaciated elephants into a funny story? I’ve been wrestling with that question for some time and haven’t found an answer. But I have come up with some recommendations and topics for reflection. One: If you decide to go on a picnic with a pet that needs a few hundred pounds of food a day, don’t go where it snows. Better yet, don’t go at all. Two: If you happen to be in southeast India during a festival that includes many elephants with gold plated trappings covering their trunks and dancers honoring a deity standing on their backs, make sure there is a man with a sharp stick standing next to each and every elephant. Don’t be lured by the luxury, pomp, and ceremony. It only takes one sharp nail shoved into a tender foot to distract an otherwise sedate behemoth. Plus, you never know what juicy snacks the stars of the show may have been sipping when their mahouts weren’t looking. This rule applies to every elephant on display anywhere around the world, even the very sad specimens that are forced to carry foreigners, who are clinging desperately to their handholds, around a beaten path while their mahouts prod the tops of their heads with metal hooks. Now it’s true that most mahouts take very good care of their pets and sources of income, better care perhaps than of their wives and children, so this is not meant to be disrespectful of the majority of mahouts. It’s just that I know what it feels like to to have a metaphorical sore spot picked at continuously until I totally shock the offender by turning on him like a maddened female elephant intent on smashing his brains out. “What did I do? Why are you so mad? Jeez!” Therefore my advice is to stay well back until you first identify one or more mahouts and evaluate the hold they have on their best friend’s ears. Three: If you are Italian or an enthusiast of Roman history, have you ever considered how indebted you are to dead elephants? Seriously. You know how successful Hannibal was elsewhere and what became of the former heads of state when he decided to be the next Head Statesman. I’d like you to consider what history might have looked like had climate change shifted in his favor and made the pass an easy breeze for his Big Brigade. Or what if he’d chosen a different route across the Alps, one that wasn’t such a bad idea? Even yet, what if he’d picked a different time of year? Then what would have happened? I’ll tell you. There’s every possibility that Hannibal’s Carthaginian cunning would have paid off. After all, even with dead elephants he got as far as Central Italy in what is said to have been one of the most famous war campaigns in history. Consider the reactions of the defenders in the Battle of Cannae if they’d also had to face a battalion of thirty-seven or so drunken, well-fed, heavily-armored, and thoroughly annoyed elephants who felt like stomping to death anything opposing them? Would the home team have fled or turned into pancakes? Carthage might have inched closer to Rome, in that case, perhaps even reached its gates. Then Hannibal’s Hunch would have paid off big time. It turned out better for the Romans that Hannibal made a mistake what with the steep climbing, narrow ledges, snowstorms, and running out of food. Yet even today if someone is playing a memory game and the question is “Who crossed the Alps with elephants?” everyone in the room shouts “Hannibal!” But if the question is who fought the second Punic War, silence bounces off the walls. So I’m thinking win or lose, his elephants still led Hannibal to victory, in one way if not the other.