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# Pity the Poor Beasts, Eh!
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/zhalko-zveria-a/
- Published: 2025-10-21T08:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:28:19.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Observations, Nature, Humour

Hannibal took some 37 war elephants with him across the Alps. Roughly as many as it takes to fill the runway at a Marina Rinaldi show.

The elephants were most probably of the North African subspecies. An elephant requires an enormous quantity of fodder, some 100 kg or more a day, which is very hard to supply on campaign, particularly in the mountains, where vegetation is scarce. It is difficult to imagine the logistics of provisioning such an army. Who brought up the hay or the grain? Where did they get it? And in what quantities?

Elephants have a remarkable structure of the leg: a cushion of fat in the foot, and limbs held almost straight, which made them far more sure-footed in the mountains than one might expect. Yet many of the animals perished on the descent down the steep and slippery slopes of the Alps, which proved more dangerous than the climb.

One elephant became a legend of the march, named Surus: he had a broken tusk, and he is thought to have been one of the last surviving elephants of the army.

By all appearances, the elephants were intended not so much to take part in the fighting as to produce a psychological effect: huge, outlandish, terrifying beasts, set against the backdrop of the mountains, seeming to announce by their very appearance, "We have come, and it will go hard with you."

Every time I think of this episode I feel unbearably sorry for these beautiful animals, but all their suffering served not merely exoticism but an operation of grand logistical sweep and strategy. The expedition is wrapped in legend, and the exact number of animals that took part, and that survived, is unknown, yet it is the elephants that make Hannibal's crossing of the Alps one of the most epic episodes of ancient history.

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