Analysis Of Charles Siebert's An Elephant Crack-Up

Great Essays
In many situations, human beings have no capability of dominating what they experience in the outside world. Events like accidents or opportunities are beyond individuals’ control and their range of prediction. However, there is a natural demonstrator living in individuals’ brain, determining how individuals perceive the outside world. Besides, the perception varies along with individuals’ experiences, belief, personality, and volition. Charles Siebert, in his essay “An Elephant Crackup?”, argues how scientists attempt to treat elephants’ posttraumatic stress disorder caused by human beings’ violent attack to their herds in a sanctuary where caregivers can join in elephants’ family based on a new “trans-species psyche”. The “trans-species psyche” …show more content…
The way individuals experience and interpreter the world depends on their own perspective that contains their experiences, personalities, and belief. The mental image created by the blind shows clearly how individuals’ mindset of life functions in the perception forming. A mental activity embellishes the inner picture of their sensory observation of the outside world. Sacks mentions that “[Tenberken] is essentially an artistic imagination, which can be impressionistic, romantic, not vertical at all, whereas Torey’s imagination is that of an engineer, and has to be factual, accurate down to the last detail” (334). Tenberken has an aesthetic description of what she experiences, because she is fond of romanticism and Renaissance. However, Torey imagines a precise structure of what he observes, due to his strength of visual imagery and his inspiration to have a solid skill to use visual imagery. Their personal interests and strengths shapes their perception of what they observe when they consciously transform their other senses rather than vision into a virtual visual image. This features of inner images represents the characteristics of the person’s mindset. Scientists attempt to shift their mindset from anthropomorphism to a new “trans-species psyche”. That is, they try to accept a mindset that is about thinking the issues of elephants as an elephant instead of from a position of human beings. As Siebert discusses the work guided by the new thinking pattern in “a sanctuary for orphaned and traumatized wild elephants”, “the human ‘allomothers’ stay by their adopted young orphans’ sides, even sleeping with them at night in stables. The caregivers make sure, however, to rotate from one elephant to the next so that the orphans grow fond of all the keepers” (363). Scientists construct an appropriate environment where elephants can feel

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