Recognizing Their Dead: Elephant Reactions to Death

Researchers and investigators have only scratched the surface of understanding the extensive array of complex elephant behaviors, their underlying cognitive mechanisms, and their relationship to elephant sociality. Along with elephants’ noted intelligence and complex social lives, they continue to astonish investigators with behaviors that are more common among humans than other animal species¹. Self-recognition in a mirror, purposeful cooperation, and aiding distressed individuals are all behaviors elephants exhibit that hint at their deeper emotional lives². One elusive behavior, however, may prove elephants to be more like humans than was previously imagined: elephants share a special interest in the remains of deceased elephants.

Elephants, along with humans, dolphins, and chimpanzees, are one of the few species to show interest in ailing or deceased members of the same species and one of the only species whose fascination remains undeterred by the state of decomposition of the remains. African elephants exhibit strong behaviors when they encounter the body of another elephant including examining the body with the trunk, touching and pulling the body with their feet, nudging the body with their tusks, and rocking back and forth while standing over the body³. Such behaviors have been reported to persist for weeks after an elephant’s passing and are often accompanied by streaming temporal glands which are located behind the eyes and indicate an elevated emotional response². An understanding of elephants’ intense reactions to death, which seem to mirror that of humans, may be crucial to our understanding of their cognitive capabilities.

Oria and her son, Oria 3, are unrelated to the dead calf’s family but are clearly very agitated and respond intensively. Both Oria and Oria 4 try to raise the body up with their trunks and Oria 4 gives three loud roars. In the second sequence another female, also unrelated, tries to get the unresponsive body onto its feet using her trunk and tusks. Over several days, hundreds of elephants diverted their movement through the clearing in order to visit the dead calf. Responses were highly individualistic, ranging from a short pause, through gentle touching and smelling, to more agitated and even violent efforts to raise the body. © Elephant Listening Project

Although the observation of elephants’ interest in their dead is a rare occurrence, the information provided by anecdotal observations remain invaluable to further understanding these unique elephant behaviors. The deaths of two matriarchs which were observed and recorded 10 years apart, occurred in Samburu National Reserve. In 2003, Iain Douglas-Hamilton observed the death of Eleanor and vividly reported how, not two minutes after she collapsed with a swollen trunk and broken tusk, a matriarch of a different family, Grace, rushed, with streaming temporal glands, to her side³. Grace touched Eleanor with her trunk and feet and managed to lift the fallen matriarch to her feet with her trunk, but Eleanor collapsed again under the stress of her own weight. Despite being left by her family, Grace spent another hour vocalizing and attempting to nudge and lift Eleanor unsuccessfully. After Eleanor’s death hours later, Douglas-Hamilton reported 5 different families, 4 of which were unrelated to Eleanor, visited her body during the following weeks. Similarly, in 2013, doctoral student Shifra Goldenberg, tracked the death of one of the last remaining matriarchs at Samburu National Reserve, Queen Victoria². Weeks after the matriarch’s death, Goldenberg recorded three unrelated families intimately inspecting Victoria’s bones. These observations suggest that elephants may be interested in the sick, dying, and dead elephants regardless of kinship⁴.

Despite reports of elephants’ fascination with elephant corpses, there had been no attempts to experimentally investigate this behavior. It was not until 2006 when Karen McComb and her team in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, published a study where they conducted the first controlled experiments to investigate the extent of elephants’ natural attraction to the remains of deceased elephants⁴. McComb tested African elephants’ preferences by presenting them with ivory, elephant skulls of matriarchs and non-matriarchs, rhino and buffalo skulls, and wood. Based on the elephants’ reactions to these objects, McComb found that they seemed to choose objects relating to other elephants, such as ivory (the most highly favored) and elephant skulls, preferentially over other items. The results also showed that there was no strong preference for investigating the skulls of the elephants’ matriarchs over skulls of unrelated females⁴. This corresponds with researchers observations that elephants may not specifically select bones of relatives for investigation. Instead, elephants may be attracted by olfactory and tactile cues that allow them to recognize any individual with whom they were familiar in life. Therefore, as McCombs mentions, myths such as elephant graveyards — specific locations where elderly elephants go to die — are better explained by mass deaths due to hunting or drought rather than by purposeful selection by elephants. Nevertheless, elephants may be more likely to visit any location in their home range that has elephant remains⁴.

Elephants have been highly regarded as cognitively advanced creatures, and many of their behaviors show a resemblance between those of elephants and humans. Elephants’ interactions with the remains of other elephants may reveal a more profound emotional basis for these behaviors that are reminiscent of human displays towards death. However, elephants’ curiosity with death is still not fully understood, and the debate on the question of elephants’ ability to experience empathy and grief suggested by their behaviors still persists⁵. Furthermore, the commonalities between elephant and human behaviors may also be relevant to the ethics of how they are treated. Elephants’ interest in one another in life and in death, as indicated by McComb’s research in accordance with various field observations, adds to the growing index of striking elephant behaviors that call for further study.

References:

¹Jabr, Ferris. “The science is in: Elephants are even smarter than we realized.” Scientific American 26 (2014). Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-is-in-elephants-are-even-smarter-than-we-realized-video/

²Parker, Laura (2016). Rare Video Shows Elephants “Mourning” Matriarch’s Death. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/elephants-mourning-video-animal-grief/

³Douglas-Hamilton, I., Bhalla, S., Wittemyer, G., & Vollrath, F. (2006). Behavioural reactions of elephants towards a dying and deceased matriarch. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 100(1–2), 87–102. Retrieved fromhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159106001018#fig1

⁴McComb, K., Baker, L., & Moss, C. (2006). African elephants show high levels of interest in the skulls and ivory of their own species. Biology Letters, 2(1), 26–28. Retrieved from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0400

⁵King, B. J. (2013). When animals mourn. Scientific American, 309(1), 62–67. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26017823.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A3b372906aa811f2f75a9b0bdbc50108c