What follows are excerpts from Caitrin Nicol’s excellent article “Do Elephants Have Souls?” in The New Atlantis - Winter/Spring 2013. The article is reproduced in full in this blog under "Articles" category of this blog. This post is a compilation of some remarkable elephant behaviour referred to in that article.
I
One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical — a matriarch’s recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water — to the passionate — grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend.
Carol Buckley, co-founder of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, a retirement ranch for maltreated veterans of circuses and zoos, describes the arrival of a newcomer to the facility. The fifty-one-year-old Shirley was first introduced to an especially warm resident of long standing named Tarra:
Everyone watched in joy and amazement as Tarra and Shirley intertwined trunks and made ‘purring’ noises at each other. Shirley very deliberately showed Tarra each injury she had sustained at the circus, and Tarra then gently moved her trunk over each injured part.” Later in the evening, an elephant named Jenny entered the barn — one who, as it turned out, had as a calf briefly been in the same circus as Shirley, twenty-two years before.
There was an immediate urgency in Jenny’s behavior. She wanted to get close to Shirley who was divided by two stalls. Once Shirley was allowed into the adjacent stall the interaction between her and Jenny became quite intense. Jenny wanted to get into the stall with Shirley desperately. She became agitated, banging on the gate and trying to climb through and over.
After several minutes of touching and exploring each other, Shirley started to ROAR and I mean ROAR — Jenny joined in immediately. The interaction was dramatic, to say the least, with both elephants trying to climb in with each other and frantically touching each other through the bars. I have never experienced anything even close to this depth of emotion.
We opened the gate and let them in together.... they are as one bonded physically together. One moves, and the other shows in unison. It is a miracle and joy to behold. All day ... they moved side by side and when Jenny lay down, Shirley straddled her in the most obvious protective manner and shaded her body from the sun and harm.
They were inseparable until Jenny died a few years later.
II
In Coming of Age with Elephants, Joyce Poole tells the story of a ranch herder whose leg was broken by a matriarch elephant in an accidental confrontation with her family. When his camels wandered back without him in the evening, a search party was sent out. He was eventually discovered under a tree, attended by a female elephant who fiercely prevented anybody from approaching. As they were preparing to shoot her, the herder frantically signaled for them to stop. When they were finally able to draw her far enough away for them to go and get him, he explained that after the elephant had struck him, she “realized” that he could not walk and, using her trunk and front feet, had gently moved him several meters and propped him up under the shade of a tree. There she stood guard over him through the afternoon, through the night, and into the next day. Her family left her behind, but she stayed on, occasionally touching him with her trunk. When a herd of buffaloes came to drink at the trough, she left his side and chased them away. It was clear to the man that she “knew” that he was injured and took it upon herself to protect him.
From whence come these altruistic actions? Are they the product of blind instinct in the animal, the residue of ancestral behavior benefiting kin, whereas for humans they would be a generous and morally commendable choice? Or is the truth somewhere in between, some combination of the two, for both of us?
III
The moral question referred to in the previous story is at the heart of Tarquin Hall’s To the Elephant Graveyard (2000), a real-life chronicle of the hunt for a rogue bull elephant that reads almost like a detective novel where nothing is as it first appears. The victim is a drunk man plucked from out of his house and impaled in his own yard. The suspect is a large “tusker” who seems to have sought him out in the village for that express purpose, with no provocation, and has done this to thirty-seven previous victims. A marksman is contracted by the Indian government to shoot the bull and put a stop to this behavior. Hall, a journalist based in New Delhi, believes something fishy is up and finagles his way into the search party so he can expose it.
Having tracked the elephant deep into the northern forest, one night they encounter a legless man who turns out to be his former owner. Many years ago, the man purchased the “tusker” on a whim, having a lifelong affection for the creatures but not knowing anything about them. Further, being often away from home on business, the owner heedlessly left him in the care of a vicious scamp, returning one day to find him tied up to a tree, malnourished, and scarred from frequent beatings.
The keeper (who was nowhere to be found until he was discovered locked up for fighting in a bar) was immediately fired, and a kinder one employed to nurse the elephant back to health. But a few weeks later, the old keeper showed up again, belligerently drunk, demanding money from the owner and taunting the elephant.
At the sight of his tormenter, the elephant broke out of his restraints and smashed the keeper to the ground repeatedly, crushing the owner’s legs on the way out.
“I believe the elephant did this to me deliberately,” the owner says. “He wanted me to live in agony. He wanted me to remember him every day for the rest of my life. And so I have done for the past ten years.” The elephant, in those ten years, has ranged all around killing dozens of men in like manner — drunks who resembled his old foe. The owner does not want revenge, he says, because he blames himself for what has happened; but if they can shoot the elephant, he goes on, they “would be ending a lot of pain and misery. Most of all his.”
As a kind of trial, the elephant’s chase poses a question familiar from real trials held in courtrooms every day: how much are violent offenders warped by atrocious pasts responsible for what they do? How relevant is this to what becomes of them, when there is a fundamental obligation to protect society?
IV
Like humans, most traumatized elephants do not become violent, but just absorb their hurts in confusion and sadness and respond to them in other familiar ways.
In (1962), the zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson recounts the story of an elephant named Sadie, who was practicing but failing to learn a circus routine. Finally she gave up and bolted out of the training ring, causing her to be chastised (not cruelly, he stresses) “for her supposed stupidity and for trying to run away.” At this, she dropped to the ground and dumbfounded her trainers by bawling like a human being. “She lay there on her side, the tears streaming down her face and sobs racking her huge body.” He continued:
In almost half a century of close association with the Abu [elephants], including and even after reading a substantial part of the vast literature concerning these majestic creatures, I have not encountered anything that has moved me so greatly, and I write this in all seriousness and humility. Its ineffable pathos constantly brings to mind that most famous verse “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). What on earth are we to make of a so-called “lower animal” crying?
If you shoot an animal, you may expect it to make whimpering noises.... That any animal, and especially one weighing 3 tons, should lie down and sob her heart out in pure emotional frustration is something else again. It almost looks as if, despite all that we like to believe, we humans are not the only creatures that possess what we call emotions and higher feelings. In fact, if we insist upon making a distinction between ourselves and other animals in this respect, we will then have to provide a special niche for the Abu.
V
“The proper study of mankind is man, but when one regards the elephant, one wonders.” Attributed to Alexander Pope.
If the core elements of life, sensation, and emotion are so widely distributed as to encompass a huge swath of the animal kingdom, what is the moral difference between a species with higher capabilities and one without? In his thoughtful 1985 essay “Tool, Image, and Grave ,” the philosopher of biology Hans Jonas takes up three activities attributed solely to humans and explores their deeper implications. As it happens, given what we know today, elephants arguably meet all three tests.
On one count, elephants fail the tool test, for they do not make artifacts they then reuse. However, they do use objects as intermediaries between them and their environment, such as sticks to scratch between their toes and remove bugs from other areas, or twisted clumps of grass like Q-tips to clean inside their ears or whisks to swat at flies. As J. H. Williams recounts in Elephant Bill (1950), work elephants in Asia collared with bells have been known to plug up the bells with mud so that they can go and steal bananas in the middle of the night unnoticed — a purposeful modification of someone else’s tool.
Elephants dig holes for water, cover them with plugs of bark and grass, and return later to their secret stash. Elephants learn by trial and error what sorts of materials do and do not shock them in their efforts to break through electric fences — and in at least one recorded instance (described in Lawrence Anthony’s The Elephant Whisperer [2009]), followed the buzzing of the fence all the way around to its origin, the generator, which, having been stomped to smithereens, allowed them to untwine the fence and go their merry way.
Jonas’s second example, image-making, is a capability which “displays a total, rather than a gradual, divergence from the animal’s.” The activity is biologically useless, he notes, and requires sufficient mental abstraction to distinguish between reality and representation — that is, between the sensations of the present moment that all animals experience and the form of something else in memory or the imagination. Image-making is the transference of this metaphysical idea onto a physical substrate; even for a portrait or some other picture modeled on something real and present, the copy is distinct from the original but linked to it by a nonmaterial concept.
Some elephants, however, make art of their own accord — mostly, as it appears, abstract, but some bordering on representational. Ruby, who spent almost her entire life at the Phoenix Zoo and was given paints for recreation after her keepers observed her always doodling in the sand, would commonly select paint colors that matched events around her, such as visitors’ shirts outside her cage or the red, yellow, and white of a fire truck that had pulled up with flashing lights earlier in the day.
The best documented example, however, is Siri of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York, who was observed in 1980 by her keeper to be drawing with a pebble on the floor of her enclosure — all alone, often at night, entirely of her own volition. The most striking of these markings was a little design that looked for all the world like the Chinese character for Buddha; the keeper, David Gucwa, bestowed on it the cheeky and evocative title “To Whom It May Concern,” and from that point on began to supply her with paper and pencil. He would sit quietly with sketch pad in his lap and pencil sitting nearby, and without any prompting or guidance Siri would draw.
Many of the drawings — collected in a lovely 1985 book titled after that first etching, cowritten by Gucwa and reporter James Ehmann — actually do somewhat resemble corporeal entities: a butterfly, a bird, a person.
This is likely happenstance, though; by and large the drawings are much more emotionally than rationally expressive. Be that as it may, clearly there was something in Siri’s inner life she felt compelled to bring forth. The question of what to make of it is a revealing example of the cryptic expanse between the intent of the artist and the significance to viewers.
To some, of course, the whole thing is simply a send-up of the very concept of modern art — “people today pay money to acquire stuff that I would pay money to get rid of,” carped one biology professor sent a packet of Siri’s work for comment. On the other hand, on being shown the drawings two senior zookeepers immediately resolved to go vegetarian, blown away by this glimpse into an uncharted realm of animal psyches. “I don’t even step on spiders anymore,” one said, “and I don’t like spiders. Nothing is simple anymore.” Stephen Jay Gould called the portfolio “fascinating” but cautioned, “I have a hard enough time assessing my own motivations; Lord only knows what goes on inside the brain of an elephant.”
Art scholars, for their part — more content than scientists to coexist with endless ambiguity, and indeed to revel in just that kind of clue into the deep unknown — were universally enthusiastic, all remarking on the energy and lyricism and even joy, and affirming certain spatial forms and techniques that indicated the work was more than merely random scribbling. Like the prehistoric cave paintings Jonas points to, it is a creative message defying both meaninglessness and easy understanding, calling across improbable distances of time or consciousness or species to whomever it may concern.
Incidentally, in an entirely different kind of “image test,” elephants are distinguished as well: they can recognize themselves in mirrors . Very few other animals have been shown to do this, mainly dolphins and great apes. The test is performed as follows: While the animal is unconscious, some part of its anatomy out of its range of vision is marked with odorless paint, and often for control a corresponding location is marked with a clear version of the paint. When presented with a mirror wherein the mark is reflected, it turns to that location on its own body to explore it, indicating both self-awareness and an understanding of the meaning of the mirror. Human beings begin to pass this test at about eighteen months of age.
Jonas’s final and strongest criterion is the grave, which would seem to separate man from animal unambiguously. The “commemoration of the dead perpetuated in the cult of the grave” bespeaks an awareness of mortality that is the foundation of metaphysics: “in considering ‘the afterwards’ and ‘the there,’ [man] also considers ‘the now’ and ‘the here’ of his existence — that is, he reflects about himself. With graves, the question takes on concrete form: ‘Where do I come from; where am I going?’ and ultimately, ‘What am I — beyond what I do and experience at a given time?’” For man, his sense of self, sense of history, and sense of the intemporal, however inchoate, are gestured at with his remembrance of those who have passed on.
But here he is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that — whatever it may mean to them — purposively commemorate their dead, in a way Joyce Poole calls “eerie and deeply moving”: “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, “they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches.”
After burying the body in brush and dirt, family members may stay silently with it for over a day; or if a body is found unattended by elephants not related to it, they may pause and stand by for some time. They do this with any dead elephant, recently deceased or long departed with only the skeleton remaining. “It is probably the single strangest thing about them,” Cynthia Moss writes:
Even bare, bleached old elephant bones will stop a group if they have not seen them before. It is so predictable that filmmakers have been able to get shots of elephants inspecting skeletons by bringing the bones from one place and putting them in a new spot near an elephant pathway or a water hole. Inevitably the living elephants will feel and move the bones around, sometimes picking them up and carrying them away for quite some distance before dropping them. It is a haunting and touching sight and I have no idea why they do it.
VI
At birth, an elephant brain is about a third its adult size. A human brain at birth is a quarter its adult size, whereas for chimps it is half and for most mammals the figure is more like 90 percent. A greater span of growth outside the womb like this accompanies a more important role that nurture and learned skills play in the animal’s maturation — as infants they are more helpless and dependent than an average mammal, but as adults there will be much more that they can do. The elephant brain is also notable for its high level of spindle neurons (associated with sociability), very large temporal lobes and hippocampus (the primary seat of memory processing), and convoluted neocortex (linked to general cognitive complexity, common to other intelligent species such as dolphins and higher-order primates).
VII
The outlook for elephants today is grim. All the other land giants have already met their appointments at the end of the world. The elephants will not have the space to just be who they are forever.
For Lyall Watson, a march to the edge of the world by one park’s sole surviving elephant prefigures this eventuality. Wandering along the cape one day, Watson witnessed a remarkable meeting worth recounting at length:
It is a sound that sneaks up on you, something you feel rather than hear, a rumble which is more visceral than cerebral, threatening to addle your mind.... I knew that blue whales can make high-energy, low-frequency moans that last for thirty seconds or more, but I had never heard one before when watching blue whales off Baja California or Peru. I supposed that the sound of ship engines and generators might have masked it, but I hadn’t imagined that the calls would fall within our range of hearing anyway….
The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself. Perhaps an interference pattern set up between the whale call and its echo from the rocks below? That too seemed unlikely, and I was still puzzling over it when I realized that the whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge, sweeping my gaze across the cliffs, over the great milkwood tree — and then swiftly back to the tree again, where my heart stopped….
Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant. A fully grown African elephant, facing left, staring out to sea! ... A female with a left tusk broken off near the base, looking for all the world like the stub of a large cigar. I had never seen this elephant before, but I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.” This was the Matriarch herself. But what was she doing here?…
She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded, submerged, by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing!
My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place….
The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind.
I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man....
This tableau is oddly reminiscent of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: the signals piped out over the border, from one domain into another as alien as it is infinite, with such poignant hopefulness that they may be heard at all, much less understood. Out of great loneliness, the elephant went to the edge of her world and poured her soul into the void — and out of great providence, someone was there to answer.
From some combination of existential loneliness and intrepid curiosity, we also have for decades now been calling out for someone past the borders of our known experience. Meanwhile, although we’ve been working on it for millennia, the real depths of terrestrial intelligence are almost as unplumbed. Whether there are millions or just one, what does it mean that there is such a thing as Elephant?
Listen with your ears, your eyes, your heart, your mind, your soul for the message from these kin as improbable as life itself, different and yet the same. We are not alone.
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