Fantastically Wrong: History’s Most Hilarious Misconceptions About the Elephant

Antiquity’s saddest elephant laments the cursive that someone wrote all over it.

In the “Heffalumps and Woozles” ditty from Winnie the Pooh, elephants—those would be the heffalumps—wear tuxedos and use their trunks as accordions and suddenly turn blue. Fantastical, to be sure, but it’s downright unimaginative compared to what European natural historians used to believe about the elephant: That it has no knees and it can’t have sex until it eats the ridiculously toxic mandrake root, and even when it successfully mates, dragons eat its baby.

Oh, also, you’ve been lied to. Elephants aren’t afraid of mice. Sorry. I know it was cute and all.

Now, it’d be easy to chalk up these misconceptions to the fact elephants are naturally distributed in Africa and Asia, and Europeans simply didn’t have enough contact with the animals to inform their judgements. The reality, though, is that the elephant has an old (and brutal) history in Europe.

The Foot Bone’s Connected to the Leg bone, the Leg Bone’s Connected to the…Wait, Where’s the Knee Bone?

Let’s start with the elephant’s unfortunate lack of knees, a myth that persisted through the Middle Ages. In his charting of the history of this misconception, imminent 17th century skeptic and all-around ornery fellow Sir Thomas Browne notes that even the ancient Greeks knew this wasn’t so. Western armies first fought elephants at the Battle of Gaugamela in present-day northern Iraq in 331 BC, where Alexander the Great squared off against Darius of Persia. Yes, men fought elephants. The so-called war elephant, you see, was an incredibly effective weapon in ancient warfare—if you could manage to feed them and keep them from stepping on your own soldiers. But Alexander overcame the Persians, captured their elephants, and sent the beasts back to Greece. Having seen elephants for themselves, the Greeks had no reason to doubt their possession of knees.

Hannibal’s army and their war elephants crossing the Rhône. It’d be way more awesome if not for the inherent cruelty.

Indeed, Aristotle’s description of the elephant is incredibly descriptive, and he quite thoroughly busted the myth that they have no knees. And later on in Roman times, everyone who was anyone knew elephants had knees, because those lucky enough to attend gladiatorial games were treated to the cruel slaughter of the animals hauled in from Africa. In fact, in his sprawling encyclopedia Natural History, Pliny the Elder specifically mentions the elephant’s knees when recounting a battle in Rome’s Circus between 20 of the beasts and a number of men:

“One of these animals fought in a most astonishing manner; being pierced through the feet, it dragged itself on its knees towards the troop, and seizing their bucklers, tossed them aloft into the air: and as they came to the ground they greatly amused the spectators, for they whirled round and round in the air, just as if they had been thrown up with a certain degree of skill, and not by the frantic fury of a wild beast.”

An inexplicably tiny war elephant (would seem to defeat the purpose of using an elephant) at top, with wild ones at bottom. From the Rochester bestiary.

 Yet after Pliny and Aristotle debunked the notion that elephants don’t have knees, the idea popped back up after the fall of the Roman Empire. For that we can thank the Physiologus, which was written between the second and third centuries AD. Pulling from all manner of ancient authors, this was the mother of all bestiaries. “The elephant has no knee joints enabling him to sleep lying down if he wanted to,” it claimed. From there the fallacy made its way into other bestiaries throughout the Middle Ages.

More skeptical natural historians eventually began to question this, though. The 13th century’s Albertus Magnus, for instance, noted that the elephant wasn’t missing knees—it just had stiff joints in its legs, limbs he claimed were the same girth from top to bottom, like pillars of meat. Such robustness, Magnus claimed, was necessary to support its weight.

Dangerous Sex, Slaughtering Mice, and Other Elephantoid Pursuits

The Physiologus also helped disseminate other fanciful elephant “facts” that had been bouncing around intellectual circles in the ancient world. Take for instance, the beast’s odd sex life. According to the book’s anonymous author, when elephants want to conceive, a male and a female must head “to the east near paradise,” where they’ll find the mandrake. This plant’s root has a long history of being used by humans as an aphrodisiac, though as a member of the nightshade family it contains powerful toxins that can kill in high doses. (It was once said to take the form of a human that screamed bloody murder when you pulled it from the ground, killing anything within earshot.) The elephants supposedly give it a nibble, and “the female immediately conceives in the womb.”

Elephants gather to mate around a mandrake, lower right, which they’ll eat as an aphrodisiac. The voyeuristic dragon is presumably there to watch and eat their babies.

 According to the Physiologus, when it comes time for the female to give birth, the male must be vigilant, for the elephant’s eternal enemy, the serpent, will snatch the baby. Pliny refers to it as a dragon, but he’s likely referring to a large constrictor. This fiend is “perpetually at war with the elephant,” he writes, “and is itself of so enormous a size, as easily to envelop the elephants with its folds, and encircle them in its coils. The contest is equally fatal to both; the elephant, vanquished, falls to the earth, and by its weight, crushes the dragon which is entwined around it.” In the Physiologus, the serpent seems decidedly smaller, as the male elephant “kills it by trampling on it until it dies.”

Not bad for a creature that’s supposedly afraid of the lowly mouse. And for this myth we once again have Pliny to thank, believe it or not. Elephants “hate mice and will refuse to eat fodder that has been touched by one,” he claims. Not so. As a researcher of elephant behavior told LiveScience in 2011: “In the wild, anything that suddenly runs or slithers by an elephant can spook it. It doesn’t have to be a mouse—dogs, cats, snakes or any animal that makes sudden movements by an elephant’s feet can startle it.”

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