Empathic 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 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. 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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

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 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 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? 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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?

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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

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

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.

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 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 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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