February 27, 2014 • 29 mins
Empathic Elephants: The elephant is Earth's largest surviving land creature and an example of nature at its most majestic. But these amazing creatures also boast self awareness, a high intelligence and a startling capacity for empathy. Join Robert and Julie as they discuss humanity's troubled relationship with elephant kind. Image source: Neil Emmerson/Robert Harding World Imagery/Getty
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what did your relationship with the elephant? Hmm? I kind
of think of them as this kind of ambassador to
the animal world, Like you know, especially for kids, it's
(00:25):
kind of like the gateway to wonderful creatures with what
we think of is quinde a few merits. Yeah, I
mean kids seem to be really obsessed with with elephants.
I mean my son especially is crazy for them. Yeah,
he'll see see a picture of an elephant and he'll
go elephant because he'll raise his arm like it's a
trunk and go trumpeting noise and and and we'll say
(00:48):
it multiple times. Sometimes he'll say it when there are
no elephants around, just in celebration of thinking about elephants. Yeah,
or yeah, thinking he's an elephant, or and then if
he actually gets to see one in real life, it's
just all the crazier. Um, you know, we're just looking
at pictures of me. It goes nuts. And indeed there
they're unlike any any animal. I mean, they are that
you have this this large lit the largest living land creature. Uh.
(01:12):
And and so they're they're imposing in that respect, but
they're also they have this peaceful air to them as well.
Most of the time. Uh. They have this this trunk
that is that that again is unlike like just about
anything else you see in the in the animal world.
And I think it's because that trunk is so expressive. Yes,
it does has a lot of emotion to it. It's
reaching around, it's grabbing things, it's uh, it's it's they're
(01:35):
manipulating water with it and uh. And their their eyes
are very peaceful as well. So there's that we can't
help but empathize with the elephant on on on a
very basic level. That there's something just kind of sweet
and comforting about them, and and children especially seen in
tune to this. Yeah. And in terms of folklore, they
have long been associated with courage and wisdom. In fact,
(01:57):
if you creativity, if you look get Hinduism, you'll see
the origin of the elephant as a symbol of good
luck Ganesha um, you know, the the luck god, the
remover of obstacles. Yep, I have a Ganesha right here. Bam,
always carry one in my pocket. You said, Oh my gosh, guys,
if you could see this, he just produced Ganesha just
(02:18):
threw it on the table proof. Okay, So yeah, I
mean these are really important to us, um, just as
an idea of what an animal is and has is
kind of a mirror to ourselves. I mean, we can't
help but empathize with them. Yeah, and humans, Uh, there
are many cases of humans forging strong emotional bonds with elephants,
(02:39):
uh and uh. And there are a number of wonderful
conservation efforts out there, and I mentioned some of those
at the end of the show. Um, particular efforts you
might be interested in reading more about and potentially supporting
in some shape or another. But in mentioning the conservation
and in mentioning the emotional bonds between human uh and
(02:59):
elephant that that kind of leads to the large number
of negatives here, because of course, when humans are interacting
on a daily basis with an elephant, it means that
that elephant is in captivity and perhaps used for labor,
perhaps uh put an enclosure in a zoo. Generally that's
gonna be way too small for it. When we're talking
(03:19):
about conservation efforts. Those conservation efforts are in place due
to the what we have done to the to the
elephants natural habitat and what we have done to decrease
their numbers in the wild. Yeah, so a couple of things. So,
as you already mentioned, there's the captivity angle, and so
we typically see an elephant at the zoo right and
Fred Berkovitch of the Sandy Zoo rightes that in Africa,
(03:41):
elephants can cover over fifty miles or eighty kilometers in
a day if food is scarce, but rarely walk that far.
More often they cover a few miles during the day,
and they sometimes spend most of their time near water source.
Now contrast that with twenty two hundred square feet. That
is the amount of space that is recommended by the
(04:02):
American Zoological Association. Joyce Pool, she is the research director
of the Ambo Celly Elephant Research Project, rights, just a
thought by a z A logic, that's the Zoological Association.
We might suggest that human beings, being about two percent
the body weight and of an elephant, would do just
find living in forty four square feet if we were
(04:25):
provided food, water, and a breeding partner. So we began
to look at that, and then you began to look
at the whole poaching situation. And consider that we have
lost six of force elephants in the Congo basin due
to poaching during the first decade of this century. And
she says at that rate, they could go extinct in
(04:45):
ten years. And then we of course have seen the
recent violence in the Central African republic Um and that
is there's a ton of poaching going on there just
to fund military operations. Yeah, and then you have plenty
of examples to of elephants coming into conflict with with
farmers because here you have and it's a tough situation,
(05:06):
because you have you have farmers that are trying to
to to a farm the small area of land, grow
crops uh to to feed their family, make money. And
then the elephants come through. The elephants. Each adult elephant
is gonna need some of three four hundred pounds of
food per day, and they're going to make short work
of a small human farm uh. And then and there
they tend to be pretty destructive in their in their
(05:28):
their style of eating. If you've ever seen a footage
of elephants, you know, just pushing over trees to get
to the to the greens. Uh. You know, that's that's
their style, and so they can they can really care
a farm apart in in very short order. So you
end up with with humans and uh and and elephants
coming into conflict in that situation. Yeah, and that's habit lost, right.
(05:48):
I mean, you would probably do the same thing if
you lost a good deal of your land, you would
move on to another area. And then of course that's
where the conflict with humans comes into play. Yeah, though,
I mean, because they tend to eat grass as lee,
these bamboo bark roots. But if there's a crop of bananas,
if there's a crop of sugarcane or what have you,
you know they're going to go for that. Um. Now,
it's to put the throughout a few more numbers here
(06:11):
to just put this in the in perspective about about
where elephant populations are. According to Defenders of Wildlife, at
the turn of the twentieth century, there were a few
million African elephants in about a hundred thousand Asian elephants um.
Today they are in estimated four hundred and fifty thousand
to seven hundred thousand African elephants in between thirty five
thousand and forty thousand wild Asian elephants, with the with
(06:33):
the Asian elephant being you know, far more on the
endangered into the spectrum. Yeah, and we should keep in
mind to that the average lifespan of an elephant in
the wild is sixty to seventy years UM. So when
we start to think about that, and we we begin
to see them, um the devastating effects of poaching and
habitat loss in captivity in some areas, then you can't
(06:56):
help but anthropomorphize them and begin to think, oh, they
live for seventy years on par with what humans are living.
To you know, what else is similar to humans? How else, um,
do they really differ from other mammals? Now I mentioned
African and Asian elephants earlier. That's an important distinction. There
are two major species of elephant. There's the African elephant,
(07:19):
and we can divide those into two subspecies, the savannah
and the forest. And while the the Asian elephant, on
the other hand, we can divide that into four subspecies
Sri Lankan, Indian, Sumatran, and borneo. Now, how can you
tell one from the other, Well, it's pretty simple. Once
it's been pointed out to you, Julie, Well, this is
kind of neat the African elephants actually their ears are
(07:41):
shaped like the continent of Africa. And then of course
with the Asian elephants, their ears are smaller. Yeah. The
the African elephants ears look like they're made for sailing
on the high seas, and the Asian elephants ears are
are more sort of floppy and subdued and smaller. Yeah.
You know, it's really cool about those ears too. Is
besides being able to pick up on bois and sound,
(08:01):
they have tons of tiny veins that transact their surfaces
and they carry blood to the rest of the body
and they act like a cooling system. Yeah, it's really
really amazing elephants here is is essentially there to cool
the body. Uh. It's kind of like the big fins
you would see in some of these prehistoric dinosaurs, you know,
where they it's all about getting the blood vessels up
into a surface they can be used to cool. Yeah.
(08:23):
So if you see them flapping their ears over over
again on a hot day, that's them just trying to
cool themselves down. And of course they're trunks, their trunks yes, yeah,
when they're when they're born, you have I mean, we're
talking about how how instantly we attach emotionally to elephants,
even more so if you see a baby elephant, baby
elephant is among the most adorable things you could possibly
(08:44):
look at. And uh, when they're born, though, their trunks
don't really have any muscle tones, so they just kind
of flop around and then they're having only nurse straight
up with their mouths. Yeah, and they're just again we
talked about it before, they're so adaptable. Those those trunks
they're used to smell, to eve, to drink, to retrieve food,
to trumpet and as we'll talk a little bit more
(09:04):
about in a second caress, but before we do so,
let's talk a little bit about elephant intelligence. Yes, elephants are,
of course extremely intelligent. They have they have memories that
span years. That wold adage and elephant member it never
forgets well, it's it's based in truth. They have they
have long memories and they need those long memories because
(09:25):
you know, we mentioned earlier about how about how vast
there range tends to be. So you'll have a herd
of elephants it's led by a matriarch, and they're having
to go across vast stretches of land, and they're gonna
have to remember like where's the water, Where's where's the
good food? Where they where the good eats? Where should
I not go? Like where's an area that might be
h certain death? Uh you know to uh to venture into?
(09:49):
And as you say, that requires quite a bit of memory. Um.
It turns out the elephants can hear one another's trumpeting
calls up to five miles or eight kilometers away. In
according to biologists Grea Turkolo, who is part of the
Elephant Listening Project, a very very cool project. The females
do most of the talking. There's no syntax in their language,
(10:09):
so there's no evidence that they form sentences, but they
can recognize each other's voices. In fact, uh, they can
identify at least one hundred other individual elephants by voice.
And this was borne out in a sound playback experiment
by Karen McComb, who is an animal psychologist at the
University of Sussex in the UK. Now, one interesting thing
(10:31):
about those trumpeting communications that the elephants use. Um, they
can communicate over these long distances also by producing a
sub sonic rumble. They can travel through the ground faster
than through the air. You know, there's have you ever
seen like an old Western where like any of American
trackers putting putting his ear to the ground, you know,
because because sound waves are going to move faster through
(10:53):
the ground. Uh, it's similar situation. So other elephants then
receive the messages through the sensitive skin on their feet
and on their trunks, and it's a belief this is
how potential mates and social groups communicate. Yeah, and just
so you know how sensitive their skin is, they can
detect a fly landing on it. So there's quite a
(11:13):
level of um sensitivity there. And I want to tell
us I mentioned the Elephant Listening program has been in
the work since has delivered some really intriguing data on
elephant communication that really helps us to better understand the
social bonds the elephants have with one another. Now, in
terms of numerical skills, elephants actually outperform great apes, chips
(11:37):
and human children at the task of figuring out the
quantity of something that is put in a bucket. And
in fact that their understanding or their numbers sense is
so nuanced that they can easily tell the difference between
five and six rocks, for instance, um as opposed to
something pretty easy like one and two. Now that's interesting
(11:59):
because we've talked in the past about the algorithmic thinking
in young children and their their way of understanding numbers
is that they might not be able to tell the
difference between five and six, they can tell the difference
between six and three. I've got three, um, you know,
three cheerios is definitely less than six, but five cheers
as the six cheerios. I don't know. I'll just take
whichever hand is you know comes out to me first.
(12:21):
So yeah, I mean elephants can distinguish to that degree.
It's pretty amazing. Now, that's one way to look at
an elephant intelligence. But but to really get into the
guts of it, you have to start looking at their society,
and they're there in their communication within that society. Yeah. Really,
at the core of elephant society, we're talking about matriarchs
who are the oldest elephants and families with complex social relationships. Yeah,
(12:46):
you'll have a herd that is it's led by the oldest,
often the largest female. Uh, and it's just going to
be an all female herd with some young ones in
there that they're all sort of collectively looking after, though
of course with the with the actual mom for that
providing most of the the care and assistance. Meanwhile, the
male elephants, they tend to be just loners out there
(13:06):
roaming on their own. Occasionally they'll take up with another
male or so, Yeah, you get some bachelor pods from
time to time, but for the most part, it's just
you know, they're they're doing their own thing. And it
kind of comes back to what we've talked about before
when it comes to the gender divide in in a species,
that the female is the species and the male is
just necessary for reproduction. Well, it's kind of the whole
takes the village concept because the females typically remain with
(13:29):
their families their whole lives, and they rear their calves
alongside their mother's grandmother's sisters and aunts, and they all
helped to take care of the calves um. And this
is really cool to these elephant families are really fluid
in their association patterns, meaning that not all members are
together all of the time. So if a food sources scares,
(13:49):
that means that a couple of them might pair off
and then meet up later on. And you know, it
works out for genetic diversity that the males are separate anyway,
because you can have this, you know, a close net
grew of females that are all related. Uh, you need
the genes, you need some extra genes to come in
from outside of that community. And thus these uh, these
loaners out there on the outskirts. Yeah, and it's also
(14:11):
interesting that the females do do a lot of the talking,
and I think that ties back to the matriarch and
again the raising of the calves. So of course it
would make sense that among elephants chatter, you hear more
female voices trying to coordinate what they're gonna do, when
they're going to do it, and particularly the matriarch. If
if there's uh, if food is scarce and they really
have to figure out directions and where they're going to go,
(14:33):
then the matriarch is usually a person who tries to
coordinate that effort. Now, of course, one part of being
um in a community of humans is that we are
self aware of our our place in that community and uh,
and it seems that that it's a similar situation for
the elephant. Elephant is one of the very few creatures
aside from humans, that can pass a self awareness test.
(14:55):
We've talked about this in the past, I believe, with
a few other animals, but the elephants can recognize themselves
in a mirror. The only other animals that can really
pull this off humans apes, dolphins, And if you understand,
based on some arguments, you could say that an octopus
can do this, but you have to have a very
different type of tests for them because their brains are
(15:17):
so different and and even among you know, humans, apes
and elephants, I mean, the elephant's brain is different from
an ape or a humans brain, uh in in in
some respects. You know, it's as you can never do
a one to one when you're comparing the human brain
to another species. But when they when they look at
themselves in the mirror, they quickly realize that that they
are looking at themselves. They'll look behind the mirror and
(15:39):
then it will quickly descend into them sort of goofing off.
Like what happens if I put my trunk in my
mouth while I'm looking in the mirror? What do I
do this? What do I do that? Yeah, but it's
essential to note that they are self aware. They're not
just uh, you know this this animal out there sort
of encased in the mud of of existence. They know
they exist and and that should really carry more way
(16:00):
when we think about what elephants are and how we
interact with them. All right, we're gonna take a quick break,
but when we get back, we are going to talk
about this self awareness, this sort of society um is
rich bonds the elephants have, and how they actually exhibit
a very human phenomenon called emotional contagion. All right, we're back.
(16:27):
Emotional contagion. We we see different examples of this with
humans over and over again. It can be, you know,
at a party and there's this emotional contagion going on,
depending on you know, how someone is is acting and
how people are looking to others um to respond to that.
Should they join in on whatever behavior is being exhibited?
(16:48):
Oh yeah, I think we've all definitely been a part
of the sort of social conversations where the conversation is, uh,
isn't as kind of a medium zone, and then somebody
kind of takes the wheel and it's increasingly going into
uncomfortable territory and you feel that need to to step
in and change the subject move you know, pulled up,
pull the vehicle back on the road. Yeah. And so
what you see here is that this, this very kind
(17:09):
of human thing is happening among elephants, this emotional contagion.
Researcher Josh Plotnik of the University of Cambridge in the
UK studied the behavior of twenty six elephants in captivity
over the course of year, and he found that when
an elephant would show distress, the other elephants would a
doubt that same emotional state. An example of this distress
(17:31):
would be in this case, like thinking they saw a
snake in the grass, you know, something that's a definite,
uh potential danger to the the the elephant community, and
they're going to react, and then that emotional state quickly
spreads to the other elephants. You're concerned, why I'm concerned
to what are you concerned about? And they would act
just as a human would. They they swiftly go to
(17:51):
each other, right, and they touch each other's faces and
I don't think humans do this genitals, and they put
trunks in each other's mouth and they chirp their w
You're trying to make some very soothing chirping noises to
say it's all right. Yeah, And this is really important
because you know, there are a number of cases of
observed empathy in elephants. There's a two thousand three study
(18:14):
from Catherine Paine's Elephant Listening projects we mentioned earlier observed
a dying calf like numerous responses both from its own
family and others in the herd. Uh. There's a two
thousand six paper that looked at the behavioral reactions of
elephants towards a dying and decease matriarch um. But this, uh,
this this empathy study with these twenty six captive elephants. Uh,
(18:35):
it provides us a little like more sort of hard
evidence for uh empathy, for this emotional contagion and uh
and and you need that because again we talked about
how we talked before about how humans anthropomorphizes anything, and
there's always there's already a lot that's that's that's human
like in the elephant. So we have to be careful
(18:57):
in steadying them, not to just keep on the rest
of our human baggage and starting, you know, putting on
little hats. Yeah, I know, I was thinking about that.
I was just thinking about our pensant for just trying
to turn anything into a smile life face, even if
it's an inanimate object. But then I thought too, in
some of these cases, it's so very clear that the behavior,
it seems very clear that the behavior is spelling out
(19:17):
these sort of community bonded social phenomena that you would
see and within humans, within the human tribe um. But again,
it's very difficult to quantify that in a scientific way. Um.
And that's why, as you say, this experiment with the
twenty six elephants is so important, because it does give
a scientific community some sort of foothold in that arena.
(19:41):
But it's it's hard to re enact a lot of
what people anecdotally see. And one of the things that
I'm thinking about is this idea of grieving elephants, and
not just elephants grieving for one another, but this case
of someone named Lawrence Anthony. Now he was a conservationist
and an author known as the elephant Whisperer, and in
(20:02):
two thousand and twelve he had a heart attack. Now,
he had taken a group of wild elephants and he
had rescued them and rehabilitated them on the day that
he died. They traveled something like twelve hours to reach
his house and they had not been to his home
in eighteen months. And so of course people who saw
(20:25):
this began to construe this as the elephants keeping vigil.
They actually hung out for two days at his home.
And again the problem here is how do you take
a scientific lens to this. You can't. You can't re
enact this experiment, right, And I mean, if you were gonna,
you know, to play the critic here, you could say, well,
(20:46):
the elephants move around a lot anyway, and if they
have long memories, as we as we mentioned earlier, so
it's in you know, of course they would come back
to a place they'd been to before, where they had
presumably received you know, some comfort, maybe maybe even food,
what have you. That's true. And another interesting account involving
memory in place has to do with South Africa in
(21:10):
the late twentieth century at Kruger National Park. Yes, that's
where they were calling the elephant population, so that they
were having some attempt to conserve the elephant. But they
were afraid that if the the elephant population grew too large,
then it would be increasingly difficult to look after them.
So they went in there and they started calling, you know,
whole groups of elephants. And they found that after this
(21:33):
had happened, after the blood had hit the ground, uh,
that the the elephant families in the park UH knew
not to go back there. Like they they equated that
area with death and with danger. Even if that area
was ended up having some very tempting vegetation, they knew that.
All right, the food looks good there, but that is
a place of death. That is where the humans kill us.
(21:55):
Yet now, immediately after the calling operation UM, and this
was actually after the rangers cleaned up the area and
they removed all the bodies, the elephant families did come
to the scene and they inspected it. They smelled the earth,
and then they say they never returned to that, as
you say, And so some of the ideas here are well,
perhaps the screams of terror were the tip off here,
(22:17):
and of course the smell would have been another tip off.
But yeah, again, even when it was a habitable area,
they never went back to it. It was as if
that earth had been stained and they knew it. Yeah,
the earth has been stained. That's that's the uh. That's
the the what really has been driven home from me
as we've researched this this podcast, because in the elephant,
(22:39):
you have a creature that is self aware, that is
capable of empathy. It has a very strong argument for personhood.
Like when we're talking about um giving a level of
of of of rights that we ascribed to to to
a human if we were to ascribe that outside of
the human community, like the elephant would, uh would be
(23:00):
a certifiable candidate for that. And yet we have treated
them so harshly throughout human history and continue to treat
them harshly today, even though again we have some wonderful
conservation programs, some wonderful efforts out there, and there are
some people who devote their lives to caring for elephants
and uh and to changing the you know, the course
(23:21):
of their fate. But UH, it's it's rough when you
when you really look at what they are and how
we've treated them well. And the problem, I think is
that in order for for elephants to continue to exist
on Earth, humans really have to change their behavior. And
it's not just humans stopping poaching it. It's all tied
to politics and to socioeconomics as well, and again to
(23:45):
our a really bad habit of taking land and converting
it for for uses that really, in the long run
aren't going to do us any good and aren't going
to do wildlife any good. Yeah, and now they're on
the farmland front, there have been some efforts who use
sort of like like spice compounds to treat the area
around farms to keep the to keep the elephants from
(24:06):
coming in and eating the crops. And apparently those those
efforts have proven pretty successful where they've been applied. Yeah,
And I mean there, as you said, there are conservation
groups that are doing a great job, and we should
definitely mention them because I think that this is going
to make the difference in the long run about what
we can do about the situation. Yeah, and there I
did need to stress they're more elephant organizations out there
(24:26):
than we really have have time to mention here, But
I just want to highlight a few that stood out
to me. The first I'm going to mention because it's uh,
it exists in my home state of Tennessee. The Elephants
Sanctuary in Holding Wall in Tennessee. It's a sanctuary for
captive elephants, you know, elephants that have been in zoos,
elephants that have been in circuses, etcetera. They have seven
hundred acres and they provide three separate and protected natural
(24:50):
habitat environments for Asian and African elephants. If you want
to learn more about this, you go to www. Dot
elephants dot com. They have a wonderful website. You can
you can see pro whiles on the individual elephants. You
can adopt an elephant, you can you know, you can
contribute to monetarily to help feed the various elephants. It's
a it's a wonderful project. Also check out the African
(25:11):
Wildlife Fund at a WF dot org. Check out Save
the Elephants had Saved the Elephants dot org and just
one Asian elephants specific organization there is Elephant Family dot org.
I wanted to share two quick personal stories. Okay, I
worked at a zoo once. I think we all know that. Yes,
(25:33):
And on April Fool's Day, without fail, you would get
a million phone calls and do you know what people
would say that the elephants are loose? No, it would say,
may I speak with Ellie and you would say Ellie who,
and they would say font over and over again. The
second thing is that when a while I worked there,
(25:54):
I had a reoccurring nightmare of elephants just stampeding the
entire zoo. And I think that the guy the lead
singer for Aerosmith, Steven Tyler, even Tyler even showed up
like like leading it, like riding one of the elephants.
And that's when I kind of knew that I might
be having some sort of moral crisis when it came
(26:14):
to captivity and animals, you know, just not to to
just really pound in our crimes against elephants too much.
But that of course brings up another example of something
horrible we've done through the elephants over the years is
used them in warfare. Liken, Like, how awful is that? Like?
Here is warfare? This this this particularly human creation where
(26:36):
we have one group trying to not only compete for resources,
but to outright destroy other communities. And we've enlisted other
animal species in this, not only horses, but the the
self aware empathic elephant. Yeah, it is really tragic and um,
and I should mention because really I still am on
the fence about Zeus and we could probably do an
(26:58):
entire episode about that. It Uh, you know that the
zookeepers there are absolutely passionate about those animals, and they
do take a lot of the money and they put
them into um species survival programs for various animals, including elephants,
elephants um and some people would say that you might
not even know what an elephant was unless we had
(27:18):
zoos or many other animals. So, um, you know again
on the fence about that, Yeah, it's it's it's a
weird area to find yourself in because like with my
own son, again, he's crazy about elephants, so how can
we not take him to the zoo to see the elephants.
But at the same time we we it just feels
so sad to see them in such a small enclosure.
But it kind of underlines the whole situation with elephants.
(27:39):
We find ourselves in this place where we've we've already
taken so much of their habitat, we've reduced their numbers,
we've we've enslaved them for our own purposes, and we
have to we're slowly waking up and realizing, well, what
can we do to make the best of this already
crappy situation. Yeah, and really I think they come to
symbolize the inherent problem that humans have with animals, that
(27:59):
complex relationship that we've talked about, particularly when we've referenced
the books Some some we eat, some we love, and
some we hate, and the ways that we behave toward animals.
All Right, So there you have it, uh, a little
insight into the world of the elephant, of the mind
of the elephant, and the empathy of the elephant, and
our empathy for the elephant. If you have some information
(28:22):
you would like to share with us, you want to
share an elephant story that that you know particularly resonates
with you, your own experience with elephants, or what you
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(28:44):
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(29:06):
and does not involve trumpeting and listening to the ground,
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(29:27):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what did your relationship with the elephant? Hmm? I kind
of think of them as this kind of ambassador to
the animal world, Like you know, especially for kids, it's
(00:25):
kind of like the gateway to wonderful creatures with what
we think of is quinde a few merits. Yeah, I
mean kids seem to be really obsessed with with elephants.
I mean my son especially is crazy for them. Yeah,
he'll see see a picture of an elephant and he'll
go elephant because he'll raise his arm like it's a
trunk and go trumpeting noise and and and we'll say
(00:48):
it multiple times. Sometimes he'll say it when there are
no elephants around, just in celebration of thinking about elephants. Yeah,
or yeah, thinking he's an elephant, or and then if
he actually gets to see one in real life, it's
just all the crazier. Um, you know, we're just looking
at pictures of me. It goes nuts. And indeed there
they're unlike any any animal. I mean, they are that
you have this this large lit the largest living land creature. Uh.
(01:12):
And and so they're they're imposing in that respect, but
they're also they have this peaceful air to them as well.
Most of the time. Uh. They have this this trunk
that is that that again is unlike like just about
anything else you see in the in the animal world.
And I think it's because that trunk is so expressive. Yes,
it does has a lot of emotion to it. It's
reaching around, it's grabbing things, it's uh, it's it's they're
(01:35):
manipulating water with it and uh. And their their eyes
are very peaceful as well. So there's that we can't
help but empathize with the elephant on on on a
very basic level. That there's something just kind of sweet
and comforting about them, and and children especially seen in
tune to this. Yeah. And in terms of folklore, they
have long been associated with courage and wisdom. In fact,
(01:57):
if you creativity, if you look get Hinduism, you'll see
the origin of the elephant as a symbol of good
luck Ganesha um, you know, the the luck god, the
remover of obstacles. Yep, I have a Ganesha right here. Bam,
always carry one in my pocket. You said, Oh my gosh, guys,
if you could see this, he just produced Ganesha just
(02:18):
threw it on the table proof. Okay, So yeah, I
mean these are really important to us, um, just as
an idea of what an animal is and has is
kind of a mirror to ourselves. I mean, we can't
help but empathize with them. Yeah, and humans, Uh, there
are many cases of humans forging strong emotional bonds with elephants,
(02:39):
uh and uh. And there are a number of wonderful
conservation efforts out there, and I mentioned some of those
at the end of the show. Um, particular efforts you
might be interested in reading more about and potentially supporting
in some shape or another. But in mentioning the conservation
and in mentioning the emotional bonds between human uh and
(02:59):
elephant that that kind of leads to the large number
of negatives here, because of course, when humans are interacting
on a daily basis with an elephant, it means that
that elephant is in captivity and perhaps used for labor,
perhaps uh put an enclosure in a zoo. Generally that's
gonna be way too small for it. When we're talking
(03:19):
about conservation efforts. Those conservation efforts are in place due
to the what we have done to the to the
elephants natural habitat and what we have done to decrease
their numbers in the wild. Yeah, so a couple of things. So,
as you already mentioned, there's the captivity angle, and so
we typically see an elephant at the zoo right and
Fred Berkovitch of the Sandy Zoo rightes that in Africa,
(03:41):
elephants can cover over fifty miles or eighty kilometers in
a day if food is scarce, but rarely walk that far.
More often they cover a few miles during the day,
and they sometimes spend most of their time near water source.
Now contrast that with twenty two hundred square feet. That
is the amount of space that is recommended by the
(04:02):
American Zoological Association. Joyce Pool, she is the research director
of the Ambo Celly Elephant Research Project, rights, just a
thought by a z A logic, that's the Zoological Association.
We might suggest that human beings, being about two percent
the body weight and of an elephant, would do just
find living in forty four square feet if we were
(04:25):
provided food, water, and a breeding partner. So we began
to look at that, and then you began to look
at the whole poaching situation. And consider that we have
lost six of force elephants in the Congo basin due
to poaching during the first decade of this century. And
she says at that rate, they could go extinct in
(04:45):
ten years. And then we of course have seen the
recent violence in the Central African republic Um and that
is there's a ton of poaching going on there just
to fund military operations. Yeah, and then you have plenty
of examples to of elephants coming into conflict with with
farmers because here you have and it's a tough situation,
(05:06):
because you have you have farmers that are trying to
to to a farm the small area of land, grow
crops uh to to feed their family, make money. And
then the elephants come through. The elephants. Each adult elephant
is gonna need some of three four hundred pounds of
food per day, and they're going to make short work
of a small human farm uh. And then and there
they tend to be pretty destructive in their in their
(05:28):
their style of eating. If you've ever seen a footage
of elephants, you know, just pushing over trees to get
to the to the greens. Uh. You know, that's that's
their style, and so they can they can really care
a farm apart in in very short order. So you
end up with with humans and uh and and elephants
coming into conflict in that situation. Yeah, and that's habit lost, right.
(05:48):
I mean, you would probably do the same thing if
you lost a good deal of your land, you would
move on to another area. And then of course that's
where the conflict with humans comes into play. Yeah, though,
I mean, because they tend to eat grass as lee,
these bamboo bark roots. But if there's a crop of bananas,
if there's a crop of sugarcane or what have you,
you know they're going to go for that. Um. Now,
it's to put the throughout a few more numbers here
(06:11):
to just put this in the in perspective about about
where elephant populations are. According to Defenders of Wildlife, at
the turn of the twentieth century, there were a few
million African elephants in about a hundred thousand Asian elephants um.
Today they are in estimated four hundred and fifty thousand
to seven hundred thousand African elephants in between thirty five
thousand and forty thousand wild Asian elephants, with the with
(06:33):
the Asian elephant being you know, far more on the
endangered into the spectrum. Yeah, and we should keep in
mind to that the average lifespan of an elephant in
the wild is sixty to seventy years UM. So when
we start to think about that, and we we begin
to see them, um the devastating effects of poaching and
habitat loss in captivity in some areas, then you can't
(06:56):
help but anthropomorphize them and begin to think, oh, they
live for seventy years on par with what humans are living.
To you know, what else is similar to humans? How else, um,
do they really differ from other mammals? Now I mentioned
African and Asian elephants earlier. That's an important distinction. There
are two major species of elephant. There's the African elephant,
(07:19):
and we can divide those into two subspecies, the savannah
and the forest. And while the the Asian elephant, on
the other hand, we can divide that into four subspecies
Sri Lankan, Indian, Sumatran, and borneo. Now, how can you
tell one from the other, Well, it's pretty simple. Once
it's been pointed out to you, Julie, Well, this is
kind of neat the African elephants actually their ears are
(07:41):
shaped like the continent of Africa. And then of course
with the Asian elephants, their ears are smaller. Yeah. The
the African elephants ears look like they're made for sailing
on the high seas, and the Asian elephants ears are
are more sort of floppy and subdued and smaller. Yeah.
You know, it's really cool about those ears too. Is
besides being able to pick up on bois and sound,
(08:01):
they have tons of tiny veins that transact their surfaces
and they carry blood to the rest of the body
and they act like a cooling system. Yeah, it's really
really amazing elephants here is is essentially there to cool
the body. Uh. It's kind of like the big fins
you would see in some of these prehistoric dinosaurs, you know,
where they it's all about getting the blood vessels up
into a surface they can be used to cool. Yeah.
(08:23):
So if you see them flapping their ears over over
again on a hot day, that's them just trying to
cool themselves down. And of course they're trunks, their trunks yes, yeah,
when they're when they're born, you have I mean, we're
talking about how how instantly we attach emotionally to elephants,
even more so if you see a baby elephant, baby
elephant is among the most adorable things you could possibly
(08:44):
look at. And uh, when they're born, though, their trunks
don't really have any muscle tones, so they just kind
of flop around and then they're having only nurse straight
up with their mouths. Yeah, and they're just again we
talked about it before, they're so adaptable. Those those trunks
they're used to smell, to eve, to drink, to retrieve food,
to trumpet and as we'll talk a little bit more
(09:04):
about in a second caress, but before we do so,
let's talk a little bit about elephant intelligence. Yes, elephants are,
of course extremely intelligent. They have they have memories that
span years. That wold adage and elephant member it never
forgets well, it's it's based in truth. They have they
have long memories and they need those long memories because
(09:25):
you know, we mentioned earlier about how about how vast
there range tends to be. So you'll have a herd
of elephants it's led by a matriarch, and they're having
to go across vast stretches of land, and they're gonna
have to remember like where's the water, Where's where's the
good food? Where they where the good eats? Where should
I not go? Like where's an area that might be
h certain death? Uh you know to uh to venture into?
(09:49):
And as you say, that requires quite a bit of memory. Um.
It turns out the elephants can hear one another's trumpeting
calls up to five miles or eight kilometers away. In
according to biologists Grea Turkolo, who is part of the
Elephant Listening Project, a very very cool project. The females
do most of the talking. There's no syntax in their language,
(10:09):
so there's no evidence that they form sentences, but they
can recognize each other's voices. In fact, uh, they can
identify at least one hundred other individual elephants by voice.
And this was borne out in a sound playback experiment
by Karen McComb, who is an animal psychologist at the
University of Sussex in the UK. Now, one interesting thing
(10:31):
about those trumpeting communications that the elephants use. Um, they
can communicate over these long distances also by producing a
sub sonic rumble. They can travel through the ground faster
than through the air. You know, there's have you ever
seen like an old Western where like any of American
trackers putting putting his ear to the ground, you know,
because because sound waves are going to move faster through
(10:53):
the ground. Uh, it's similar situation. So other elephants then
receive the messages through the sensitive skin on their feet
and on their trunks, and it's a belief this is
how potential mates and social groups communicate. Yeah, and just
so you know how sensitive their skin is, they can
detect a fly landing on it. So there's quite a
(11:13):
level of um sensitivity there. And I want to tell
us I mentioned the Elephant Listening program has been in
the work since has delivered some really intriguing data on
elephant communication that really helps us to better understand the
social bonds the elephants have with one another. Now, in
terms of numerical skills, elephants actually outperform great apes, chips
(11:37):
and human children at the task of figuring out the
quantity of something that is put in a bucket. And
in fact that their understanding or their numbers sense is
so nuanced that they can easily tell the difference between
five and six rocks, for instance, um as opposed to
something pretty easy like one and two. Now that's interesting
(11:59):
because we've talked in the past about the algorithmic thinking
in young children and their their way of understanding numbers
is that they might not be able to tell the
difference between five and six, they can tell the difference
between six and three. I've got three, um, you know,
three cheerios is definitely less than six, but five cheers
as the six cheerios. I don't know. I'll just take
whichever hand is you know comes out to me first.
(12:21):
So yeah, I mean elephants can distinguish to that degree.
It's pretty amazing. Now, that's one way to look at
an elephant intelligence. But but to really get into the
guts of it, you have to start looking at their society,
and they're there in their communication within that society. Yeah. Really,
at the core of elephant society, we're talking about matriarchs
who are the oldest elephants and families with complex social relationships. Yeah,
(12:46):
you'll have a herd that is it's led by the oldest,
often the largest female. Uh, and it's just going to
be an all female herd with some young ones in
there that they're all sort of collectively looking after, though
of course with the with the actual mom for that
providing most of the the care and assistance. Meanwhile, the
male elephants, they tend to be just loners out there
(13:06):
roaming on their own. Occasionally they'll take up with another
male or so, Yeah, you get some bachelor pods from
time to time, but for the most part, it's just
you know, they're they're doing their own thing. And it
kind of comes back to what we've talked about before
when it comes to the gender divide in in a species,
that the female is the species and the male is
just necessary for reproduction. Well, it's kind of the whole
takes the village concept because the females typically remain with
(13:29):
their families their whole lives, and they rear their calves
alongside their mother's grandmother's sisters and aunts, and they all
helped to take care of the calves um. And this
is really cool to these elephant families are really fluid
in their association patterns, meaning that not all members are
together all of the time. So if a food sources scares,
(13:49):
that means that a couple of them might pair off
and then meet up later on. And you know, it
works out for genetic diversity that the males are separate anyway,
because you can have this, you know, a close net
grew of females that are all related. Uh, you need
the genes, you need some extra genes to come in
from outside of that community. And thus these uh, these
loaners out there on the outskirts. Yeah, and it's also
(14:11):
interesting that the females do do a lot of the talking,
and I think that ties back to the matriarch and
again the raising of the calves. So of course it
would make sense that among elephants chatter, you hear more
female voices trying to coordinate what they're gonna do, when
they're going to do it, and particularly the matriarch. If
if there's uh, if food is scarce and they really
have to figure out directions and where they're going to go,
(14:33):
then the matriarch is usually a person who tries to
coordinate that effort. Now, of course, one part of being
um in a community of humans is that we are
self aware of our our place in that community and uh,
and it seems that that it's a similar situation for
the elephant. Elephant is one of the very few creatures
aside from humans, that can pass a self awareness test.
(14:55):
We've talked about this in the past, I believe, with
a few other animals, but the elephants can recognize themselves
in a mirror. The only other animals that can really
pull this off humans apes, dolphins, And if you understand,
based on some arguments, you could say that an octopus
can do this, but you have to have a very
different type of tests for them because their brains are
(15:17):
so different and and even among you know, humans, apes
and elephants, I mean, the elephant's brain is different from
an ape or a humans brain, uh in in in
some respects. You know, it's as you can never do
a one to one when you're comparing the human brain
to another species. But when they when they look at
themselves in the mirror, they quickly realize that that they
are looking at themselves. They'll look behind the mirror and
(15:39):
then it will quickly descend into them sort of goofing off.
Like what happens if I put my trunk in my
mouth while I'm looking in the mirror? What do I
do this? What do I do that? Yeah, but it's
essential to note that they are self aware. They're not
just uh, you know this this animal out there sort
of encased in the mud of of existence. They know
they exist and and that should really carry more way
(16:00):
when we think about what elephants are and how we
interact with them. All right, we're gonna take a quick break,
but when we get back, we are going to talk
about this self awareness, this sort of society um is
rich bonds the elephants have, and how they actually exhibit
a very human phenomenon called emotional contagion. All right, we're back.
(16:27):
Emotional contagion. We we see different examples of this with
humans over and over again. It can be, you know,
at a party and there's this emotional contagion going on,
depending on you know, how someone is is acting and
how people are looking to others um to respond to that.
Should they join in on whatever behavior is being exhibited?
(16:48):
Oh yeah, I think we've all definitely been a part
of the sort of social conversations where the conversation is, uh,
isn't as kind of a medium zone, and then somebody
kind of takes the wheel and it's increasingly going into
uncomfortable territory and you feel that need to to step
in and change the subject move you know, pulled up,
pull the vehicle back on the road. Yeah. And so
what you see here is that this, this very kind
(17:09):
of human thing is happening among elephants, this emotional contagion.
Researcher Josh Plotnik of the University of Cambridge in the
UK studied the behavior of twenty six elephants in captivity
over the course of year, and he found that when
an elephant would show distress, the other elephants would a
doubt that same emotional state. An example of this distress
(17:31):
would be in this case, like thinking they saw a
snake in the grass, you know, something that's a definite,
uh potential danger to the the the elephant community, and
they're going to react, and then that emotional state quickly
spreads to the other elephants. You're concerned, why I'm concerned
to what are you concerned about? And they would act
just as a human would. They they swiftly go to
(17:51):
each other, right, and they touch each other's faces and
I don't think humans do this genitals, and they put
trunks in each other's mouth and they chirp their w
You're trying to make some very soothing chirping noises to
say it's all right. Yeah, And this is really important
because you know, there are a number of cases of
observed empathy in elephants. There's a two thousand three study
(18:14):
from Catherine Paine's Elephant Listening projects we mentioned earlier observed
a dying calf like numerous responses both from its own
family and others in the herd. Uh. There's a two
thousand six paper that looked at the behavioral reactions of
elephants towards a dying and decease matriarch um. But this, uh,
this this empathy study with these twenty six captive elephants. Uh,
(18:35):
it provides us a little like more sort of hard
evidence for uh empathy, for this emotional contagion and uh
and and you need that because again we talked about
how we talked before about how humans anthropomorphizes anything, and
there's always there's already a lot that's that's that's human
like in the elephant. So we have to be careful
(18:57):
in steadying them, not to just keep on the rest
of our human baggage and starting, you know, putting on
little hats. Yeah, I know, I was thinking about that.
I was just thinking about our pensant for just trying
to turn anything into a smile life face, even if
it's an inanimate object. But then I thought too, in
some of these cases, it's so very clear that the behavior,
it seems very clear that the behavior is spelling out
(19:17):
these sort of community bonded social phenomena that you would
see and within humans, within the human tribe um. But again,
it's very difficult to quantify that in a scientific way. Um.
And that's why, as you say, this experiment with the
twenty six elephants is so important, because it does give
a scientific community some sort of foothold in that arena.
(19:41):
But it's it's hard to re enact a lot of
what people anecdotally see. And one of the things that
I'm thinking about is this idea of grieving elephants, and
not just elephants grieving for one another, but this case
of someone named Lawrence Anthony. Now he was a conservationist
and an author known as the elephant Whisperer, and in
(20:02):
two thousand and twelve he had a heart attack. Now,
he had taken a group of wild elephants and he
had rescued them and rehabilitated them on the day that
he died. They traveled something like twelve hours to reach
his house and they had not been to his home
in eighteen months. And so of course people who saw
(20:25):
this began to construe this as the elephants keeping vigil.
They actually hung out for two days at his home.
And again the problem here is how do you take
a scientific lens to this. You can't. You can't re
enact this experiment, right, And I mean, if you were gonna,
you know, to play the critic here, you could say, well,
(20:46):
the elephants move around a lot anyway, and if they
have long memories, as we as we mentioned earlier, so
it's in you know, of course they would come back
to a place they'd been to before, where they had
presumably received you know, some comfort, maybe maybe even food,
what have you. That's true. And another interesting account involving
memory in place has to do with South Africa in
(21:10):
the late twentieth century at Kruger National Park. Yes, that's
where they were calling the elephant population, so that they
were having some attempt to conserve the elephant. But they
were afraid that if the the elephant population grew too large,
then it would be increasingly difficult to look after them.
So they went in there and they started calling, you know,
whole groups of elephants. And they found that after this
(21:33):
had happened, after the blood had hit the ground, uh,
that the the elephant families in the park UH knew
not to go back there. Like they they equated that
area with death and with danger. Even if that area
was ended up having some very tempting vegetation, they knew that.
All right, the food looks good there, but that is
a place of death. That is where the humans kill us.
(21:55):
Yet now, immediately after the calling operation UM, and this
was actually after the rangers cleaned up the area and
they removed all the bodies, the elephant families did come
to the scene and they inspected it. They smelled the earth,
and then they say they never returned to that, as
you say, And so some of the ideas here are well,
perhaps the screams of terror were the tip off here,
(22:17):
and of course the smell would have been another tip off.
But yeah, again, even when it was a habitable area,
they never went back to it. It was as if
that earth had been stained and they knew it. Yeah,
the earth has been stained. That's that's the uh. That's
the the what really has been driven home from me
as we've researched this this podcast, because in the elephant,
(22:39):
you have a creature that is self aware, that is
capable of empathy. It has a very strong argument for personhood.
Like when we're talking about um giving a level of
of of of rights that we ascribed to to to
a human if we were to ascribe that outside of
the human community, like the elephant would, uh would be
(23:00):
a certifiable candidate for that. And yet we have treated
them so harshly throughout human history and continue to treat
them harshly today, even though again we have some wonderful
conservation programs, some wonderful efforts out there, and there are
some people who devote their lives to caring for elephants
and uh and to changing the you know, the course
(23:21):
of their fate. But UH, it's it's rough when you
when you really look at what they are and how
we've treated them well. And the problem, I think is
that in order for for elephants to continue to exist
on Earth, humans really have to change their behavior. And
it's not just humans stopping poaching it. It's all tied
to politics and to socioeconomics as well, and again to
(23:45):
our a really bad habit of taking land and converting
it for for uses that really, in the long run
aren't going to do us any good and aren't going
to do wildlife any good. Yeah, and now they're on
the farmland front, there have been some efforts who use
sort of like like spice compounds to treat the area
around farms to keep the to keep the elephants from
(24:06):
coming in and eating the crops. And apparently those those
efforts have proven pretty successful where they've been applied. Yeah,
And I mean there, as you said, there are conservation
groups that are doing a great job, and we should
definitely mention them because I think that this is going
to make the difference in the long run about what
we can do about the situation. Yeah, and there I
did need to stress they're more elephant organizations out there
(24:26):
than we really have have time to mention here, But
I just want to highlight a few that stood out
to me. The first I'm going to mention because it's uh,
it exists in my home state of Tennessee. The Elephants
Sanctuary in Holding Wall in Tennessee. It's a sanctuary for
captive elephants, you know, elephants that have been in zoos,
elephants that have been in circuses, etcetera. They have seven
hundred acres and they provide three separate and protected natural
(24:50):
habitat environments for Asian and African elephants. If you want
to learn more about this, you go to www. Dot
elephants dot com. They have a wonderful website. You can
you can see pro whiles on the individual elephants. You
can adopt an elephant, you can you know, you can
contribute to monetarily to help feed the various elephants. It's
a it's a wonderful project. Also check out the African
(25:11):
Wildlife Fund at a WF dot org. Check out Save
the Elephants had Saved the Elephants dot org and just
one Asian elephants specific organization there is Elephant Family dot org.
I wanted to share two quick personal stories. Okay, I
worked at a zoo once. I think we all know that. Yes,
(25:33):
And on April Fool's Day, without fail, you would get
a million phone calls and do you know what people
would say that the elephants are loose? No, it would say,
may I speak with Ellie and you would say Ellie who,
and they would say font over and over again. The
second thing is that when a while I worked there,
(25:54):
I had a reoccurring nightmare of elephants just stampeding the
entire zoo. And I think that the guy the lead
singer for Aerosmith, Steven Tyler, even Tyler even showed up
like like leading it, like riding one of the elephants.
And that's when I kind of knew that I might
be having some sort of moral crisis when it came
(26:14):
to captivity and animals, you know, just not to to
just really pound in our crimes against elephants too much.
But that of course brings up another example of something
horrible we've done through the elephants over the years is
used them in warfare. Liken, Like, how awful is that? Like?
Here is warfare? This this this particularly human creation where
(26:36):
we have one group trying to not only compete for resources,
but to outright destroy other communities. And we've enlisted other
animal species in this, not only horses, but the the
self aware empathic elephant. Yeah, it is really tragic and um,
and I should mention because really I still am on
the fence about Zeus and we could probably do an
(26:58):
entire episode about that. It Uh, you know that the
zookeepers there are absolutely passionate about those animals, and they
do take a lot of the money and they put
them into um species survival programs for various animals, including elephants,
elephants um and some people would say that you might
not even know what an elephant was unless we had
(27:18):
zoos or many other animals. So, um, you know again
on the fence about that, Yeah, it's it's it's a
weird area to find yourself in because like with my
own son, again, he's crazy about elephants, so how can
we not take him to the zoo to see the elephants.
But at the same time we we it just feels
so sad to see them in such a small enclosure.
But it kind of underlines the whole situation with elephants.
(27:39):
We find ourselves in this place where we've we've already
taken so much of their habitat, we've reduced their numbers,
we've we've enslaved them for our own purposes, and we
have to we're slowly waking up and realizing, well, what
can we do to make the best of this already
crappy situation. Yeah, and really I think they come to
symbolize the inherent problem that humans have with animals, that
(27:59):
complex relationship that we've talked about, particularly when we've referenced
the books Some some we eat, some we love, and
some we hate, and the ways that we behave toward animals.
All Right, So there you have it, uh, a little
insight into the world of the elephant, of the mind
of the elephant, and the empathy of the elephant, and
our empathy for the elephant. If you have some information
(28:22):
you would like to share with us, you want to
share an elephant story that that you know particularly resonates
with you, your own experience with elephants, or what you
you personally think about the any of the information we've
discussed here today. You can reach out to us in
a number of different ways. As always, go to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you will
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(28:44):
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can reach and get in touch with us as well
(29:06):
and does not involve trumpeting and listening to the ground,
although if you want to record some sort of files
of trumpeting noises that you would like to make do
you can do so, and you can include your thoughts
about today's episode or any other episodes and send them
via email to blow the Mind at Discovery dot com
(29:27):
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