Elephants Call Each Other by Name

Or, as the elephant might’ve said: Humans finally learned our names.

A mother elephant leads her calf away from danger in northern Kenya. She knows their names, and they know hers, new research finds. Credit: George Wittemyer. All images used with permission.

When someone says “Hey, Rob,” I come running. It’s my name. I know it. Other people know it. And when people call out for me, I respond. Dogs do it, too. At least good dogs. But they’re responding to names we humans give them, and their response is intimately linked to the promise of a treat or a pat on the head, not to a lot of abstract thinking. To my knowledge, our dog Mango has never learned to call the other dogs in our neighborhood by name. Frankly, they barely speak.

Across the animal kingdom, vocalizing and recognizing names is thought to be rare. It’s been found in parrots, sperm whales and dolphins, however. Male bottlenose dolphins learn to use and remember the whistled names of both friend and foe.

Now the use of distinct names has been discovered in elephants—at a surprisingly elevated intellectual level. When one elephant wants to get the attention of another—even a cousin or other member of the clan—it shouts out the pachyderm equivalent of “Hey, Rob.”

Scientists suspected this sort of naming was going on, given elephants’ known communication abilities and memory skills. Now they’ve proven it.