Honor your father and your mother.
Exodus 20:12 (ESV)
The Ten Commandments #5
When Gus Van Dyk was an ecologist at Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa, he became distressed over a series of attacks on the park’s rhino population. Badly mutilated rhino carcasses were discovered, over 50 in all, with wounds to the top of the shoulders and neck, which suggested, worryingly, elephants.
Elephant attacks on rhinos are not unknown, and jostles at watering holes are fairly common, but the volume of attacks was unusual. Further investigation by Van Dyk revealed that the suspects were a group of adolescent male elephants (their teenage years are the same as ours—between 12 and 20 years old). Imagine the swaggering attitude of aggression in teenagers when they are eight feet tall and weigh six tons!
This elephant gang involved young males who were flooded with reproductive hormones. The normal safeguard for this condition is a bigger, older bull elephant who tempers the aggression and puts the youngsters in their place.
In the late 1970’s, Pilanesberg National Park had been seeded with elephants from other national parks. Huge bull elephants were extremely difficult to transport, so young males, females and babies were introduced. As a result, there were no older bull elephants to establish a pecking order.
The answer, Van Dyk realized, was to bring in big bull elephants. Six large bulls were introduced who towered over the adolescents, and literally within hours, the younger males dropped their aggressive rampaging behavior and assumed their proper place in the larger social group.*
This story was published in an American academic paper as an example of the importance in human adolescence of a stable society and father figures who provide boundaries for teen males. The Bible teaches that loyalty and submission to a father’s role modeling is vital for passing God’s blessing from one generation to another. Honoring father figures resulted in a happy ending for the elephants at Pilanesberg and demonstrated a dramatic lesson from nature to the world. When Old Guys Rule* with dignity and strength, they wear a badge of honor for a past life well-spent and a present life full of meaning!
*As described in the BBC Earth Podcast (http://www.bbcearth.com/podcast)
Teenage elephants need a father figure 12/12/2018
*Old Guys Rule, a motto created by Don Craig to honor his father