I like elephants.

This is not a controversial opinion. Most people like elephants. Why wouldn’t you? They’re great. They have large ears. They’re very intelligent. They like humans. They purr. They smile. At this point the internet generally agrees that elephants are pretty cute.

But there’s something I find very interesting about elephants. And that is the fact that, despite being incredibly cute, any alteration that you make to an elephant immediately makes it horrifying.

(Sidenote: This piece by Tim Andraka became internet-popular, but I’d encourage you to check out his other work, which is even more surreal, unsettling and whimsical than this. https://www.timandraka.com/posts/)

Obviously the above is an extreme example. If you removed my head and put a giant grinning mouth on the stump of my neck, I wouldn’t be particularly pleasant to look at either.

But consider Chaugnar Faugn, the Lovecraftian horror from Frank Belknap Long’s The Horror from the Hills:

Statue of Chaugnar Faugn by Loïc Muzy, for the RPG *Call of Cthulhu*‍ Éditions Sans-Détour

Or The Elephants by Salvador Dali:

This depiction of Chaugnar Faugn is just a bipedal elephant with smaller ears. There’s nothing really disturbing about that; I’d look fine with smaller ears. Probably better, actually. Similarly, there’s nothing inherently disturbing about giving something flamingo legs. I mean, look at jerboas!

Photo of *Dipus Saggita.* By Svyatoslav Knyazev - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/52745569, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91146858

That is a mouse on stilts. And it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

So then why does this not work for the elephant?

Because the elephant is nature’s perfect design. Any alteration you make to the body plan of the elephant will not only make it worse - it will make it horrifying. Nature has labeled the elephant sacred, and given us a dire warning to not mess with it.

At this point, many of you are probably thinking about mammoths.

Mammoths are, basically, just different elephants. (Not phylogenetically, but you know.) And many people love them dearly. Am I claiming that they’re horrifying?

No! Mammoths, in general, are great. If anything, they’re cuter than elephants. But this is because you have not fundamentally altered the elephant in any way. You have made the elephant bigger, yes. You have covered it in fur, certainly. But the fundamental body plan of the elephant remains entirely unchanged.

The more you begin to exaggerate the non-elephant features of the mammoth, such as the curvature of the tusks and the bizarre hump on the head, the more the end result ceases to be cute and becomes eldritch.

Furthermore, some of the lesser-known extinct relatives of the modern elephant are perfect demonstrations of the principle I have outlined.

This is Platybelodon. Yes, that’s really how its jaw worked. Yes, those are teeth on the end. I know, I don’t like it either.

This bizarre creature looks at first glance like its trunk has been cut in half by a particularly uncoordinated poacher. But it actually possesses a lower jaw that’s elongated to most of the length of the snout. Modern elephants have a significantly reduced lower jaw. But note that I say reduced - the elongated jaw is actually the basal state among Elephantimorphs. The shortened jaws of modern elephants are actually a recent development that only occurred in a few species - a statistical outlier, an anomaly.

If you ever feel as if we are living in the worst of all possible worlds, just remember: all the surviving proboscideans have shortened lower jaws. Our timeline is truly blessed.

The Problem with Elephants

Nilakash Roy-Faderman