SHOOTING ECCLESIASTICAL ELEPHANTS
Robert L. Randall
October 1, 1985
Before creating such classics as 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell was a policeman in the dusty village of Moulmein in Lower Burma. Once an elephant temporarily went berserk and tramped about wildly. The villagers ran for the authorities, who happened to be Orwell on duty alone. As he walked, rifle in hand, to where the beast was last sighted, thousands fell in behind him—clamorous, festive, anticipating the ripe spectacle of an elephant shoot. Orwell found, however, a quiet animal who now seemed intent on nothing more than grazing. "I did not want to shoot the elephant," he wrote. "I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. … At that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of 'natives'; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse. . . . And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim." When someone is angry at us, this at least indicates we are still considered significant. To be laughed at, however, to suffer another's discounting snicker, to have others deal with us in an amused, patronizing manner—these blows to our worth leave us barren and diminished. For us, as for Orwell, that will never do. So it happens that elephants of many ...
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