In George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant", Orwell is faced with a very serious conundrum. An elephant got loose and killed an Indian. Orwell has an elephant gun and people begin to eagerly follow him as he walks towards a field where the elephant is grazing peacefully for the moment, so Orwell realizes that. everyone looks at him and becomes very embarrassed. “I was hated by a lot of people.” All the natives obviously wanted him to kill a man. His meat would feed a lot of people for weeks. a mistake to kill the elephant. The owner of the elephant would lose his most prized possession. Elephants were used for all kinds of work, especially in agriculture. Killing a Burmese's elephant would be like killing the elephant. a farmer's tractor running on fire Even though he really doesn't want to kill the elephant, he lets peer pressure get to him and he shoots it. He fires five bullets from the elephant gun and discharges his own smaller gun into the elephant's heart and throat. The elephant took more than half an hour to die, and it was very painful. The peer pressure was too much for him. George Orwell could have avoided shooting the elephant by using different techniques. First of all, if I were in George Orwell's place, I would just walk away. I'm used to being made fun of. It's not really that hard to leave. Orwell could have just walked back to town and forgotten the whole ordeal. People would have made fun of him, but that's okay. The warm and fuzzy feeling from within would have overpowered those hard and cold feelings coming from the middle of paper......wn, and countless others and long to finally kill him. A charging elephant is not something to be handled. Clearly, George Orwell could have avoided shooting the elephant. It would have taken a lot of willpower, but it was possible. He could have left. He could have found a solution to the problem. He could also have taken a risk and waited for the elephant to charge. Not shooting the elephant would have spared him a lifetime of troubling thoughts. "I often wonder if some of the others realized that I only did it to avoid looking like a fool." Orwell made a mistake, but he learned from it. Since he wrote this essay, we can all learn from his mistakes. That’s the beauty of texts like this. We can learn from mistakes we never have to make ourselves, as long as we pay attention and take the message to heart..