I was reading the section on elephants from Pliny the Elder's Natural History the other day, and came across this:

Of all other living creatures, they cannot abide a mouse or a rat, and if they perceive that their provander lying in the manger, tast and sent never so little of them, they refuse it and will not touch it.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny8.html

I'm sure we've all seen cartoons of elephants terrified of mice. Have any experiments been done to see if it is actually true that elephants hate rodents?

Bingley