User blog comment:GSFB/Night of the Living Dead Survivors vs Mughal War Elephants/@comment-4661256-20121212220630/@comment-5232784-20121214022109

But we are not talking about head shots generally; we are talking about hitting a specific place on the head, specifically in the middle, just a little above the eyes. If you are a scared zombie fighter and are confronted with a war elephant bearing bowmen and musketmen, its trunk wielding a huge weapon, its head no doubt moving, and its coming full on at you, you are not that likely to make a one hit kill shot; and remember, though the winchester is accurate, none of the people in the film are expert marksmen.

And I have never read where one panicked elephant would cause all other elephans to panic in  battle: indeed, in the battle of the Hydaspes, when Alexander's men were fighting war elephants, they commenced to both hacking their trunks and hamstringing the beasts; to say that a hamstrung elephant is panicking is an understatement, yet the Greeks did this multiple times, as well as killing mahouts with javelins (which can stop an elephant fighting or enrage it) and hitting their eyes with javelins (which can cause a panic), and the battle claimed 80 elephant lives, and more afterward had to be put down due to their wounds; what's more panicky than a dying, leaderless or blinded animal? Yet the elephants did not panic with just one elephant dying, hamstrung  or being blinded; they panicked after inflicting terrible causalties on the Greeks, who suffered mentally from that clash after the battle (see John M. Kistler's "War Elephants", chapters 7-8 (about the battle of the Hydaspes and its aftermath, respectively), pages 31-42).

The only way for one elephant's panic to cause all of them to panic is if the lead elephant does so: the whole number can panic if the lead elephant is injured (most likely VERY injured; war elehants were trained to refrain from panic due to injury by being stabbed with blades repeatedly). And if the lead elephant is not injured first during this fight...