A Spectacular Event: The Birth of an Elephant

If it is a bull, he will stay with his family until around ten or twelve years old, when his increasingly rough play will cause him to be sent off. He may join a group of young males or follow older bulls, but he will mostly be independent. In the next few years, he will enter “musth,” a state of high testosterone, urine dribbling, and aggression, responsive only to a bigger bull. Although he reaches sexual maturity young, competition means he may not sire children until nearly thirty. Ancient Indian poetry praises bulls in musth for their amorous powers, though Asian elephant keepers have long known this phase is highly dangerous to humans. Until 1976, scientists believed African elephants did not enter musth, a misconception corrected by observations in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park.

Gentle Giants

Elephants, unless threatened, are generally peaceful, gentle, and social creatures. John Donne, after seeing one in London in 1612, described it as “Nature’s great masterpiece…the only harmless great thing,” symbolizing a moral ideal and the grandeur of the universe in a lumbering gray form. Animals often symbolize virtues like loyalty or courage, but unlike humans, their actions are not chosen but instinctual.

Elephant Souls

To the ancients, the soul was what animated a being. For many religions, the soul is incorporeal and unique to humans, while modern science sees it as the problem of consciousness, believed to be unique to humans. The true nature of the soul and who possesses one is debated, but it’s often linked to traits like bright eyes, a dejected slump, or sudden inspiration.

Humans and Animals

Humans have historically seen themselves as distinct from animals by reason, language, art, technology, religion, and more. However, species like chimpanzees blur these boundaries due to their intelligence. Elephants, with their unique relatives like sea cows and hyraxes, challenge us to reconsider human differences.

Memory and Emotion

Elephants have extraordinary memories, critical for survival and emotional connections. Carol Buckley of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee describes a reunion between Shirley, a newcomer, and Jenny, who had briefly been in the same circus 22 years earlier. Their intense, emotional interaction showed a depth of memory and affection, culminating in a close bond until Jenny’s death.

Elephant Mentoring and Kindness

Stories of kind mentoring in new homes come from another elephant rescue site in Kenya, where orphans are raised to be reintroduced into the wild. This is a big adjustment, but older elephants who have gone through the same experience help the new releases, especially in welcoming them into a herd that is not their blood kin. In a 2011 National Geographic report, head keeper Joseph Sauni recounts how a young elephant named Irima ran away to try out his independence early. After a few days, a trumpety clamor was heard at the gate. “Irima must have told the group that he still needed his milk and orphan family and wanted to go back,” says Sauni, so Edo, a graduate of the center, walked Irima home. “The keepers opened the gate, and Edo escorted Irima all the way back to the stockades. Edo drank some water, ate some food, and took off again. Mission accomplished.”

Such solicitude is not limited to their own kind. In “Coming of Age with Elephants,” Joyce Poole tells the story of a ranch herder whose leg was broken by a matriarch in an accidental confrontation with her family. When his camels wandered back without him in the evening, a search party was sent out. He was eventually found under a tree, attended by a female elephant who fiercely prevented anyone from approaching. As they prepared to shoot her, the herder signaled for them to stop. He explained that after the elephant struck him, she “realized” he could not walk and gently moved him several meters and propped him up under the shade of a tree. She stood guard over him through the afternoon, night, and into the next day. Occasionally, she touched him with her trunk and chased away a herd of buffaloes that came to drink at the trough. The herder believed she knew he was injured and took it upon herself to protect him.

The Complexity of Elephant Behavior

These altruistic actions raise questions: Are they blind instinct or a mix of both instinct and choice? Poole illustrates how evolutionary theory alone is problematic in describing even survival-oriented interactions. Behavioral ecologists are trained to view non-human animals as behaving in ways not involving conscious thinking, simply programmed through natural or sexual selection. But watching elephants, Poole often felt they think about their actions and choices. For example, when a young musth male is threatened by a higher-ranking male, he usually drops out of musth immediately, lowers his head, and stops dribbling urine. Many biologists would explain this as genetically programmed behavior. However, Poole believes the young male consciously considers his options: to continue and be attacked, or to stop and be tolerated. She argues that the male may have some conscious control, adjusting behavior daily based on past experiences and rival assessments.

Such mechanistic explanations are also applied to human actions but do not fully capture the complexity of behavior. Properly nuanced discussions about animal activity can be materialistic without being reductive. Describing animals’ real abilities and intelligent or compassionate actions driven by more than mere instinct would elevate both animals and humans above pure determinism.

Moral Questions and Elephants

This moral question is at the heart of Tarquin Hall’s “To the Elephant Graveyard,” a real-life chronicle of hunting a rogue bull elephant. The suspect, a large “tusker,” seemed to have targeted drunk men resembling his former tormentor. The marksman, Dinesh Choudhury, always gives each elephant a chance to redeem itself, warning it before taking action. The story reveals that elephants, like humans, can be shaped by traumatic experiences.

Emotional Elephants

Like humans, most traumatized elephants do not become violent but respond in other ways. In “The Dynasty of Abu,” Ivan T. Sanderson recounts Sadie, an elephant failing to learn a circus routine, who dropped to the ground and bawled in frustration, showing deep emotional capacity.

Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” includes observations of captive elephants weeping, indicating they experience emotions similarly to humans. Despite Darwin’s physiological investigation into why elephants cry, it remains clear that elephants possess emotions and higher feelings, challenging the distinction between humans and animals.

Anthropomorphism and Understanding Animals

Anthropomorphism, or attributing human traits to animals, is a powerful taboo in science. However, recognizing animals’ emotional and behavioral complexity, as seen in elephants, helps elevate our understanding of both human and animal behavior beyond mere instinct.

Even if elephants were our equals in intelligence, their lives differ fundamentally from ours. They have poor vision but an exquisite sense of smell, revealing an olfactory landscape unknown to us. They don’t fall romantically in love. Their experiences are shaped by constant company for females and solitude for males. These differences make it hard to understand their perspective.

Humans are masters of projection, forming attachments to inanimate objects and expecting reciprocity. For sentient beings, the truth is more complex. They are not us, but their eyes reveal someone is there. Philosopher Martin Buber called this “the immense otherness of the Other,” reflecting on his connection with a family horse.

Science precludes researchers from interpreting animal behavior anthropomorphically. They came up with complicated explanations when the simple answer often involved comparing it to human behavior. Jane Goodall broke this convention by naming her subjects, a practice now common among elephant ethologists.

Challenges of Scientific Objectivity

Researchers worry about mixing human feelings into animal research because it’s irresistible. Scientific observation is supposed to be detached, but human hearts reach out to other sentient creatures. This better orientation contrasts sharply with the cold methods of British Raj officers, who learned about elephant physiology by causing them pain.

The taboo against anthropomorphism exists for three reasons. First, humans misinterpret each other’s thoughts and feelings, making it riskier to speculate about another species. Second, modern Western science views life mechanically, devoid of emotional terms like love or sorrow. Third, cultural and political concerns suggest recognizing human-like qualities in animals could debase human worth.

Intelligence and Emotions

Elephants exhibit behaviors indicating intelligence and emotions. They use tools, recognize themselves in mirrors, and have complex social interactions. Their self-awareness and emotional depth challenge the notion that only humans possess such qualities.

Elephants and Mourning

Elephants are unique among animals in commemorating their dead. They investigate and touch the bodies of their deceased companions, sometimes covering them with leaves and branches. This behavior suggests a profound awareness of death and loss.

While acknowledging differences between species, it’s crucial to recognize that animals, especially elephants, possess intelligence, emotions, and social behaviors. This understanding fosters empathy and respect, bridging the gap between human and animal experiences.

“Eerie and deeply moving”: Elephants, temporal glands streaming with heightened emotion, stroke and lay brush on a dead friend. iStockphoto

After burying the body in brush and dirt, family members may stay silently with it for over a day. Even unrelated elephants pause and stand by any deceased elephant, whether recently dead or just a skeleton. “It is probably the single strangest thing about them,” writes Cynthia Moss.

Even old, bleached bones will stop a group. Filmmakers can move bones to elephant pathways or water holes to capture them inspecting and moving the bones, sometimes carrying them a distance. It’s haunting and touching, and we don’t know why they do it.

The rumor that elephants have designated graveyards is false, though skeletons often collect in places like water holes, where the elderly tend to stay towards the end of their lives. Sometimes, the bones are moved around. A mother may carry her dead baby for days, standing vigil.

Elephants even react to carved ivory, recognizing it long after it’s been altered. Joyce Poole recounts a woman wearing ivory bracelets in Tsavo National Park; an elephant reached around her to touch the bracelets with her trunk. Elephants also become quiet and pensive in areas where relatives died, even years later, though the bones are long gone.

While they are always interested in the remains of their kind, elephants have been known to bury dead rhinos, lions, and humans. Sometimes, people were only sleeping and awoke trapped under heaps of foliage. Other times, injured or paralyzed by fear from an elephant rampage, the elephants solemnly performed burial rites.

The Half-Reasoning Animal

“Creatures, I give you yourselves,” said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. “I give you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return.”

For those who find this evidence sentimentalized, dubiously interpretable, or otherwise unsatisfactory, there are various solid measurements indicating elephants’ relative intelligence. At birth, an elephant brain is about a third of its adult size, while a human brain is a quarter. This greater span of growth outside the womb means nurture and learned skills play a more significant role in their maturation. The elephant brain is notable for its high level of spindle neurons (associated with sociability), large temporal lobes and hippocampus (memory processing), and convoluted neocortex (linked to cognitive complexity).

But when asking what these things mean as lived experiences, we return to observing quasi-mythical or human-seeming behavior and analyzing its significance. The faculty that tops the list of features distinguishing man from animal could unlock the rest of elephant experience: language. The Romans fancied that elephants had reason and understood human language but couldn’t answer them. What elephants may lack most is not language but the Rosetta Stone to prove they have it and clue us into what they’re talking about.

Animal Communication

Animal communication is tricky. Even lowly critters have mind-boggling ways of signaling information. Bees perform a “waggle dance” to convey directions, bats pick out their offspring’s cheeping among thousands, and dogs check social profiles through sniffing hydrants.

This does not necessarily rise to the level considered worthy of “language.” Even taking into account impressive forms of interchange, we risk diluting the term if we stretch it to encompass so much that human powers of complex abstract discourse cease to be extraordinary.

Since time immemorial, speech has been man’s most outstanding trait. There is an intricate link between language, beliefs, choices, moral reasoning, and self-determination. Cultures with a higher estimation of animals may see them as having language unknown to people. Everyday proximity to different creatures affects these beliefs, and while higher-order primates aren’t native to the West, in Asia and Africa, more natural interaction with smart animals leads to a more expansive view of animal potential.

Virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Dependent Rational Animals” (1999) analyzes language, focusing on dolphins. He reminds us that intelligent animal traits in us are not specifically human and places animals on a spectrum of intelligence, drawing out implications at each stage until arriving at conscious action.

Talking Beasts in Narnia

C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” contrasts ordinary creatures and “Talking Beasts.” Their speech gives them control over instincts by thought and self-direction. They are moral equals to humans, and anyone treating them as ordinary animals is suspect.

In Narnia’s creation, Aslan calls Talking Beasts into being, saying, “We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know” — impossible without new awareness. Aslan gives them themselves, meaning the power to rise above instinct and be responsible for actions.

Elephant Education

Elephants undergo extensive education: babies by families, fertile cows guided by experienced ones, independent bulls following older males. In the absence of these opportunities, the necessity is obvious, as in orphaned or separated babies and misbehaving males in poached areas. Society makes a difference.

While much of being a better elephant is conveyed by example, elephants vocalize prodigiously, engaging in elaborate discussions as part of every activity. Their vocal range spans ten octaves, and many sounds are inaudible to human ears. Katy Payne’s work revealed that they communicate infrasound, and Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell discovered they also communicate seismically, through ground waves, expanding their known range of contact. Elephants’ seismic sensitivity makes sense of behaviors like “synchronized freezing” and awareness of distant events.

Hard work and careful observation eventually provide explanations for seemingly spooky phenomena. Some people report a sixth sense about elephants’ presence, which could be felt viscerally rather than audibly. Lyall Watson’s “Elephantoms” (2002) explores such events, like a mother communicating with her calf to hide from approaching danger.

Lawrence Anthony and the Elephants

Lawrence Anthony’s 2012 death saw the rogue elephants he saved appear to pay respects, despite not visiting for 18 months prior. Payne describes a conversation with an Ntaba Mangwe park scout about extraordinary events: “You just tell what happened. Only God knows what it means.”

Language and Truth

Unpacking this exchange shows the dynamic presence of the unknown in daily life, the hope for understanding without presumption, and the importance of language in translating individual experience into common comprehensibility.

The website LettersOfNote.com archives letters, many from former slaves to their masters, powerful because they assert their independent minds and souls. This comparison is not to equate animal captivity with human slavery but to highlight the challenge of commanding attention from those in power.

The Story of Shirley

Longtime caretaker Solomon James reflected on freeing a zoo elephant, Shirley, after 46 years in captivity, highlighting the human impact on elephants’ lives.

Elephants in Entertainment

Elephants’ unfortunate allure to humans has led to various unhappy circumstances. In India, I encountered elephants giving blessings for coins. Luxury resorts in Thailand use baby elephants for tourist entertainment, often separating them from their mothers, causing psychological harm.

Mahout Culture and Globalization

Traditional mahout culture, treating elephants humanely and with respect, is disintegrating with globalization. Mahouts are less trained, and the bond between them and elephants weakens. However, demand for service and show elephants continues.

Elephants in America

Elephants were offered as royal gifts in Europe and traveled from court to court. In America, they became curiosities, fitting into exhibitionism and commerce. James Agee’s 1955 movie outline depicted elephants as noble creatures sent to reform human hearts.

Zoo Elephants

Zoo captivity is often inhumane, leading some zoos to send elephants to sanctuaries. The primary question is whether keeping elephants captive is defensible. Zoos struggle with this, as exemplified by Alaska Zoo’s attempt to keep Maggie, the state’s sole elephant.

Elephants and Ethics

The 2008 anthology “Elephants and Ethics” covers elephant captivity, including captive breeding programs billed as conservation efforts. The dilemma is whether it’s morally defensible to keep elephants captive. Some zoos have closed their elephant exhibits, concluding they can’t provide an ethical living standard.