Those who can, do –armchair musings of human-elephant conflict

I read Dr. Upatissa Pethiyagoda’s (UP) article-‘pain of the elephant/human conflict’ published in The Island of 8.09.2020 with great interest. However, all of UP’s valuable ideas run the risk of being deemed useless by his concluding statement “those who can, do – those who can’t,-teach”; as this statement essentially signifies that those who teach, can’t do!

The original statement ‘He who can, does.- He who cannot teaches’ appeared in ‘Man and Superman’-a drama series written by no less a person than George Bernard Shaw (GBS) in 1903. One of the explanations offered by critics for this statement is that GBS felt that teaching per se – mind you this was in 1903 – was not exactly a recognised, valuable, appreciated discipline and was pursued by those who could not achieve anything worthwhile in their own discipline and had been relegated to teach it.

Today over a 100 years later, there has been a paradigm shift with teaching/learning becoming a requisite at all levels of professional development. In my chosen profession in surgery, teaching, be it lectures /tutorials /workshops etc., is considered as a sine qua non of a certain degree of professional competency. However, there still are a few surgeons who believe in the ‘those-who-can-do-those-who-can’t-teach theory. Unfortunately, surgery also having come a long way since 1903, the sad truth is that those who subscribe to the aforesaid theory, in reality can neither do nor teach.

Therefore the correct conclusion to UP’s valuable article should be those who can, do and those can do more, teach!

I sincerely hope that those who are entrusted with finding a solution to this complex conflict will be considering a host of strategies (inclusive of UP’s suggestions). The fact that, at any given time almost 60% of our elephant population is found outside the designated wildlife parks, there is a finite amount of land to be occupied by an increasing population of human beings as well as elephants making this a dynamic ongoing issue, and that in reality the species easier to relocate is the Homo sapiens and not the Elephas Maximus needs to be appreciated in approaching this elephantine problem.

It would be worthwhile to remember that for any difficult, complex problem there is an easy, simple solution, which is generally wrong.

Dr. Sumedha S. Amarasekara