Are we driving elephants crazy? Bizarre, violent elephant behavior is on the rise--and humans may be the culprits.

All across Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, and attacking and killing human beings.

In recent years, elephants have killed nearly 1,000 people in India. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, and Uganda to Sierra Leone.

"Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence," says Gay Bradshaw, an elephant researcher and psychologist at Oregon State University.

It's not just the increasing number of incidents that's causing alarm, but also the perversity of the behavior. Since the early 1990s, for example, young male elephants in southern Africa have been assaulting and killing rhinoceroses.

In the past, elephant researchers have typically cited high levels of testosterone in adolescent male elephants, or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans, as causes of aggression.

But a new theory is gaining recognition: According to Bradshaw and others, today's elephant population is suffering from a species-wide trauma and the collapse of elephant culture as a result of decades of poaching, habitat loss, forced relocations, and culling (reducing the size of an animal's population).

In the 1980s, the African elephant population was cut in half by poaching. While a 1989 ban on the ivory trade probably saved elephants from extinction, the ban was weakened in 1997, and poaching has increased in recent years.

As a result, elephants are experiencing a "breakdown," says Bradshaw, and are displaying behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in human beings: unpredictable and asocial behavior, inattentive mothering, and hyperaggression.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures with a strong sense of family. They generally stay within 15 feet of their mothers for the first eight years of life, after which the females are socialized by the matriarchy, and the males go off with the bull elephants before coming back as mature adults.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting week-long vigils over the body, coveting it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years and caressing them with their trunks.

This sense of cohesion is further enforced by their elaborate communication system, including a wide range of vocalizations and visual signals, from waving their trunks to subtle changes in the angling of the head, body, feet, and tail.

But the number of older matriarchs and female caregivers has drastically fallen, as has the number of older males, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. As a result of this social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by younger and inexperienced mothers. And many orphaned elephants are growing up without the traditional support system of elephant life.

Studies have shown that the perpetrators of the assaults on rhinos in South Africa have been adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot in cullings; in many cases, they were then tied to the victims' bodies until they were taken for relocation.

"The loss of elephant elders," Bradshaw says, "and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants."

Scientists and psychologists are beginning to pay attention to the elephants' revolt: By lashing out, it seems the elephants are challenging humans to preserve someplace for them.

"If we want elephants around," Bradshaw says, "then what we need to do is simple: Learn how to live with elephants."

Charles Siebert is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.