Today is World Elephant Day. Elephants are beautiful, powerful and intelligent creatures. One lovely fact about elephants is they think humans are cute, which is great because most humans find elephants cute too. Elephants have a lot of things going for ‘em, so likewise I want to assess how unnatural elephants would appear to someone who isn't used to them. Let's start with a cow as a base.
So imagine a cow, but it's all gray, and very big. Elephants are the largest land mammal after all. Anyway this big gray cow has horns in its mouth instead of on its head, and these long tusks frame the weirdest nose in the animal kingdom. Elephant trunks completely floor me because it's a nose, a hose, and an arm that can and will grab things. If primates didn't hit sapience first, elephants are one of the species I think could become truly intelligent given a few thousand more years. I also think parrots and octopi are in the same intelligence ballpark.
[Editor’s Note: Now, take all of the features of an elephant that make it seem like an eldritch beast to someone unaccustomed to them, and imagine you’re a Roman soldier on sentry duty in the Punic Wars. You have never seen an elephant before. And here comes the enemy army, riding on a fleet of giant boulder-like monsters with face-tendrils and bone-white spears protruding from their mouths. To paraphrase Blue from OSP, it does not take a lot of elephants to have a nightmarish amount of elephants on the battlefield.]
What magnificent beasts