Elephant Musth Gone Bad

Apparently man has messed with elephants enough that we screwed up their social systems. When we put them in reserves it was partly for their own protection and partly for the protection of agriculture. Once there, the population needed to be kept to numbers that the parks could support. Officials set up culling programs in which males were killed to control population (and no doubt for the selling of ivory. It's much more effective to cull females to control population, I think).

Not having enough older male elephants had two interesting effects on the young male elephant population. Without their dads, uncles and grandfathers, young elephants got wild and crazy. They hit puberty (musth - I love that word, it's so SciFi) early and they started killing rhinos. They expressed their dominance by mounting rhinos like their elder counterparts may have, but without the elder males' guidance, they failed to stop before the rhinos died.

In the '90s when this study was published, the media took off with the rape factor. But, I find the rest of it much more interesting.