TAME FOXES!!!!

[Elok]

Yes, which is the point; it's hard to plausibly deny that he had war elephants, yet the most obvious population of elephants to work with--the ones right in his backyard--are notoriously difficult to control. Either the Carthaginians had incredible elephant taming and domestication skills or they were somehow importing Asian elephants.

[kentonio]

Perhaps they're easier to control if you poke them with spiky sticks or whatever methods they used back before PETA.

[The Mad Monk]

Attempts to control elephants predate PETA by oh, say, 2500 years or so...

[Dry]

I think it was a JJ Norwich book where I read that African elephants are generally held to be untameable. Yet Hannibal took a bunch of elephants over the Alps. Did he have implausibly long trade links that let him import giant animals from thousands of miles away, or did he know something we don't about domestication?

As an RTW player, I noticed that the Carthaginian war elephants were less powerful than the Seleucide ones.
Which is weird as current African elephants are bigger than current Asian elephant.
So, back then, I made some searches and learned that the Carthaginians elephants were a different species than the current African elephant.
And here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant

The North African elephant (Loxodonta africana pharaoensis) was the subspecies of the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana), or possibly a separate elephant species, that existed in North Africa north of the Sahara until becoming extinct in Ancient Roman times.
[...]
The North African elephant was smaller than the modern African bush elephant (L. a. africana), probably similar in size to the modern African forest elephant (L. cyclotis). It is also possible that it was more docile and plainer than the African bush elephant, which is generally untamable, allowing the Punics to tame it as a war elephant by a method now lost to history.

[giblets]

Dry beat me to the punch

[BeBMan]

Perhaps they're easier to control if you poke them with spiky sticks or whatever methods they used back before PETA.

Some guy told me years ago that they did ehh ...poke them with sticks, but only as last resort - right into their brains, when they went out of control (and turned vs their own troops in rage).

Never checked that though...

/cents

[N35t0r]

Yeah, the elephants the Carthaginians (and earlier the Ptolemaic Greeks) used was a separate species which became extinct due to human exploitation and (possibly) climate change.