Bret Devereaux

So BadAncient's stuff is generally excellent, but I actually have more than a quibble with this one - the question being if elephants were given wine before battle. The main point, that the source testimony on this in Greek is very thin is fair...https://twitter.com/AncientWorldMag/status/1389938010440015876 …

...but judgement here may have been rendered a bit too swiftly, certainly for a confident 'false' rating. As Trautmann, Elephants and Kings (2015) - by far, I'd argue, the source to be relied on on this topic - notes, there is evidence for giving elephants some sort of...

...concoction before battle in India as well. The issue here is musth, something oddly left unmentioned in the article, because it is central here. Adult male elephants enter a state called musth once a year where they are more focused on mating but also MUCH more aggressive.

Musth is an easily observable state because elephants discharge temporin from ducts on either side of their head during musth - you can *see* if an elephant is in this state. Trautmann (2015) compiles quite a few examples where these secretions...

...are associated with war elephants in an ideal state for battle; the aggression was prized even though it made the elephants extremely difficult to handle. It is thus little surprise that there is evidence for the use of diet, training and even intoxication...

...to try to induce this state (as an aside, 'musth' itself derives from an Urdu word meaning 'drunk' so the association with intoxication is in the etymology). So I suppose here I find the possibility of efforts to induce musth chemically at least plausible...