In some cases, elephant fear is extreme. It has recently been recognized that those elephants who experience anthropogenic traumas such as culls, poaching, herd manipulation, habitat fragmentation and translocation go on to display highly unusual behaviours indicative of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These behaviours include interspecies hyper-aggression, non-consensual interspecies sex, interspecies mortality, decreased affiliative behaviour, nervousness, poor mothering and infant neglect, apathy, diminished social skills and a lack of birth-helping (Bradshaw & Schore, 2007). The effects of anthropogenic trauma can have long-term and inter-generational effects on elephants (e.g. Goldenberg et al., 2018). Diagnosing animals with human-derived psychiatric disorders is controversial but regardless of whether these diagnoses are appropriate, the fear indicated by the symptoms is very real and the causation is clear.