Rogue Elephants in the News: A Cultural-Discursive Study

Using a constructivist grounded-theory framework, the present article is an investigation of popular news media reports of captive elephant escapes and attacks in the United States from the last quarter-century. The article looks at the ways elephants in such events are framed discursively to understand how they are regarded across a range of people and institutions. This article uses the "rogue elephant" as a lens through which to explore the human-animal relationship, interrogate the language that constitutes that relationship, and examine the place of the animal in an increasingly anthropocentric society. The article offers a theory, grounded in the data, that the human-animal relationship is an exercise in controlling the uncontrollable. Additionally, building on the concept of animal resistance, the article identifies an issue at the center of the ongoing ecological crisis as a failure of imagination and hints at the beginnings of a new animal ethics.