Violation by Sallie Tisdale

periods of recorded history. Even a prehistoric cave drawing of a mammoth shows the dark streaks of temporal-gland secretion.
    â€œIt’s important to note that there are two species of elephants, in separate genera,” she told me one hot afternoon last August. We were sitting, shoulder to shoulder, in her tiny office at the Oregon Graduate Center, a private research institute outside Portland. The walls were covered with posters and photographs of elephants—elephants mating, elephants walking, fetal elephants, elephants in various stages of dissection. “In one of these species—the Asian—musth has been recognized for hundreds and hundreds of years. In the other species, there has been some recent evidence of a musth-like phenomenon. But you can’t conclude that the two are the same, because the evidence is only starting to be gathered. You don’t just take a term out of the dictionary and plug it in somewhere else.” The first false assumption is that musth isa rut, she says, and the second is the application of that term to another species.
    â€œNow, my experience is with Asians,” she continued. “If these two states are the same thing, we should see the same behavior in both species, and we don’t. If I take urine at certain times in the musth cycle, and make an extract, I get several reactions from the cows. There’s an intense reaction at first—the cow checks the spot out. After that, there’s an avoidance. Such data are not consistent with a cow’s being attracted to a male, or signaling that she’s getting ready to go into estrus. I remember watching Hugo in the viewing room when he was in very heavy musth. He was dribbling urine. We let him out and let the cows in, one by one. The first one in was Pet. Normally, she strolls around while she’s waiting for the others to come in. This time, she stopped dead, and she seemed—well, it’s anthropomorphizing, but she looked nervous, timid. She went around the room practically on tiptoe. Okay, in the early days of the attempts at breeding the elephants she was bred several times to Hugo when he was well into musth, and he tends not to breed then but to beat up the cows. He almost killed her one day. So she remembers the smell of that musth urine—which does smell horrible. Males avoid each other in musth. Cows avoid musth bulls, too. If cows are afraid of a musth bull, then how is musth a rut? It doesn’t make sense. Musth is not a rut.”
    THE STUDY OF pheromones is a new one, as scientific studies go. The name wasn’t invented until 1959, and then only after considerable argument. The roots of the word are Greek for “carry” and “excite”—a good term for the myriad roles of these substances. Pheromones are chemicals used for communication among individuals of a single species. They are secreted as liquids and usually received as volatiles, and they constitute a conversation of sorts. Slime molds, algae, and fungi all use pheromones. Social insects, such as ants and bees, may use a dozen or more pheromones in a typical day—one to raise an alarm, another to mark a trail or a particular plant, another to signal social status or groupmembership. Barnacles collect on rocks and boats by following pheromone signals. When a honeybee stings, it releases a chemical that alarms nearby honeybees.
    Pheromones are also used in combination. Research on the Oriental fruit moth shows that not just one chemical but five must be present in a critical ratio in order to attract a male. There are releaser pheromones, which (like the honeybee sting) cause rapid behavioral responses, and primer pheromones, which affect physiology and trigger developmental changes; the most famous example of these is the pheromone that enables a queen bee to suppress ovarian development in worker bees. One of the most dramatic characteristics of pheromones is what the sociobiologist E.