Domestic Elephants

What if Elephants had been fully domesticated? First of all, yes, this would have been hard to pull off. They're friggin huge. The males are too unpredictable and aren't useful outside of warfare. The females are more easily tamed, but will run away from the males, so they're useless in warfare. Still, cattle and horses were domesticated thousands of years ago (8000 and 6000, respectively), so with that much time, I could see us domesticating the elephant.

So, what effects could this have? Obviously, there'll be more elephants, and no worry about them going extinct. Lots of ivory available. They could be very useful for livestock, though I doubt anyone would be hooking them up to a plow. Still, they're good for pulling down trees, and there's alot of meat on an elephant. Also, areas with Elephants (Africa, India) might progress better.

One effect, people walking the streets carrying big shovels.

"So George I see you're having a swimming pool put in."

"No just a new litter box for Nellie."

lol

Also, domesticated elephants would likely be somewhat smaller than their wild counterparts, judging from the size of cattle and aurochs.

"Sit Babar, Sit, Good Elephant"

I see the occurance of an Agricultural Revolution many years earlier than OTL. I mean, what else are you to do with all the fertilizer?

Dom> yeah, but horses went the opposite way (got bigger). I suppose it would depend on what they were bred for. If for meat, then no change in size or bigger. If for riding or plows, then smaller....

David Howery said:

Dom> yeah, but horses went the opposite way (got bigger). I suppose it would depend on what they were bred for. If for meat, then no change in size or bigger. If for riding or plows, then smaller....

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well, besides the fact that it was the animal used for riding that got bigger and the animal used for meat that got smaller slightly smaller elephants would be more useful overall than slightly larger elephants.

You know I'm not sure how edible heffalumps are, and they'd be a bit difficult to mount after an evening at the local, but wouldn't they be quite good at the heavy lifing? They could do wonders for the medieval building trade.

At a place in the Belgian Congo, tamed African elephants were used for pulling ploughs.

Isn't this scenario OTL in India, as much as is practical?, at least before machinery replaced them.

The trouble with elephants is that they eat a LOT. And even more in proportion with their weight, as their digestion is rather inefficient: next time in a zoo look at the amount of undigested fibre that comes through in their droppings, compared to with cows.

I mean, what else are you to do with all the fertilizer?

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I.e. its droppings. A animal does not make fertilizer out of nothing. It has to get all that plant matter from somewhere and eat it.

Anthony Appleyard said:

At a place in the Belgian Congo, tamed African elephants were used for pulling ploughs.

Isn't this scenario OTL in India, as much as is practical?, at least before machinery replaced them.

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There's a difference between tamed and domesticated. They need to meet these criteria to be domesticated:

flexible diet (not too cumbersome or expensive)
reasonably fast growth rate
ability to be bred in captivity
pleasant disposition
temperament which makes it unlikely to panic
modifiable social hierarchy so that it will recognize a human as its chief

Elephants have been partially domesticated in OTL, but not fully (though, to be honest, for complete domestication, you'd have to speed up their growth rate somehow).

You could use those Mederterain Island Elephants IIRC they were only the size of a large Draft horse.

Here's a weird twist on the idea. There was an oddball species of elephant in C. and S. America called Cuvieronius (IIRC) that survived until around 400 AD. Suppose it had been domesticable? Imagine Cortez running into an Aztec army that had an elephant contingent, with bowmen riding in howdahs....

They would be used to haul heavy things around, like they do in Sri Lanka.

And BTW, what's with all these "domesticated such and such threads"?