Elephants, Whales and Animal Connections-A Researcher’s Perspective
I walked into the ELP office just as I would on any other day only to find the office packed with chattering people. I was completely unaware of what event was taking place, but soon found out that the horde of people joyfully holding plates of assorted cakes was part of a going away party for Tanja Boehme. Admittedly, I was unaware of her work until that day, but after talking with her about her research before her return to Germany, I will be anxious to see what she achieves in the future and the impact she could have on re-shaping how we view animals’ mental capacities and the ethics by which we treat them.
With an education and 15-year professional background in chemistry and as a recent student of fine arts, art history, and philosophy, Tanja utilizes her unique perspectives to inform both her research and artistic methodology. Philosophers often identify language as the defining distinction between human and animal and fail to attribute the capacity for language to animals because, as Tanja says, language may be considered a “thing which only belongs to humans” and is part of “those [concepts] that make us human.”¹ Tanja has spent much of her time travelling to zoos across Germany and closely observing elephants and other species. Tanja’s observations inspire her research and artistic production of performance, audio, and video works that challenge her audiences “to see, to be seen, and to question what [they] see” with “the aim of creating a dialogue.”
Tanja began her research with the question of whether whales and elephants have any interest in the others’ calls and the significance of that connection. In November of 2017, upon travelling to zoos in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Leipzig and playing whale songs for the captive elephants, Tanja was able to visually record the reactions of the elephants at each location. In response to the whale songs, the elephants exhibited fascinating behaviors. At different locations, as described by Tanja, the elephants “seemed to take up a thinking position and put their leg up [on the ledge] and tilted their heads.” Tanja notes that because we cannot know exactly what elephants were thinking, we can only see their behaviors and make interpretations of what the elephants may be thinking from their responses. These new insights create many more opportunities for potential investigations to better understand and evaluate the significance of these striking behaviors.
Tanja’s fascination with elephants began 15 years ago when she first saw wild elephants in Botswana and decided to backpack all the way from Zambia to Cape town. Years later, Tanja found herself at Tierpark, a zoo in Berlin, watching the captive Asian and African elephants and was captivated. Tanja’s current art and research also draws from her past work as a safari guide and an intern with both an elephant researcher and The Pacific Whale Foundation in Hawaii. Moreover, anecdotes on animals’ ability to learn language without prompting, such as Koshik, the Asian elephant who can imitate human speech in Korean, evidenced for Tanja elephants’ intelligence and encouraged her research exploration². Similarly, South African biologist Lyall Watson’s observation of what seemed to be communication between a lone elephant matriarch and a blue whale off the Cape shore of South Africa inspired Tanja to first begin to explore the linguistic or behavioral connection between whales and elephants: the topic of her current research ventures³.
The results of Tanja’s investigations led her to ELP to better understand elephant and whale vocalizations. Tanja cites her visit to the home of the founder of ELP, Katy Payne, as inspiring as they spoke about Katy’s research with elephants and whales and her experiences in Africa. Tanja also met with Michelle Fournet, a postdoctoral research fellow with experience with marine animal communication at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, who agreed to test techniques for playing elephant calls to humpback whales in Alaska for Tanja’s research. Over her short 12 day stay in Ithaca, Tanja formed important connections and will be able to return to Germany, go on to Alaska in the summer of 2020 to play elephant calls for whales, and eventually to Gabon where elephants pass by the ocean to determine if there is any acoustic connection. Tanja has many more behavioral and philosophical questions to drive her research and acknowledges that her duty is to “open the way to change and a new way of thinking” through her research and artistic practices.
References
¹Andrews, K., & Radenovic, L. (2013). Animal cognition. International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/
²Crew, Becky (2012). Koshik the elephant can speak Korean. Scientific American. Retrieved fromhttps://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/koshik-the-elephant-can-speak-korean/
³Watson, L. (2003). Elephantoms: Tracking the elephant. WW Norton & Company. Retrieved fromhttp://www.corelight.org/sacred-activism/elephant-prayer-circle/articles/articles-and-stories/except-from-elephantoms/
