When he finds the elephant, Orwell says "I knew with perfect certainty that I should not shoot him." But when he sets his eyes on the crowd, he changes his position and says, “but I didn’t mean to shoot the elephant” (Orwell 199). He felt guilty for shooting the elephant when he described that the elephant was worth more alive than dead, but despite the many reasons not to shoot the elephant, he shot. Orwell describes “when I pulled the trigger, I neither heard the bang nor felt the kick…I fired again at the same place…I fired a third time. It was the shot that did it. » (199) The elephant shot represents the Burmese people trying to stay alive and being dominated by power.