Behavioural Reactions of Elephants towards a Dying and Deceased Matriarch: A case Study of Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary
The scientific study of how different animals respond behaviorally, physiologically, and psychologically to the death of their companions is known as comparative thanatology. Thanatological behaviours have been reported in non-human primates, marine mammals like whales and dolphins, and even birds. Several species of whales and dolphins have long been known to care for or attend to dead or dying individuals, while primate mothers have been observed to carry around their dead offspring long after death.
Depending on the species, animals exhibit different behaviours upon experiencing the death of other members of their species, but most signal alarm or grief in one form or another. Behavioural ecologists have suggested that animals with large brains and highly developed cognitive abilities show similar responses to the dead.
Even though there are a few anecdotal accounts about Asian elephants’ reaction to death in connection with members of their herd, scientists have for the first time observed and recorded the behavior of free-ranging Asian elephants towards dying and dead elephants.
Human grief is often described as a natural response to the loss of someone or something that’s significant. We may feel a variety of emotions, like sadness or loneliness. But can such emotions ever be experienced by non-human animals as well?
We feel an inexplicable connection with large, charismatic mammals such as the elephants. There may be several reasons behind this, such as their intelligence, playfulness and closeness to family. However, a trait that stands out in particular is their capability of experiencing complex emotions, such as grief.
Numerous instances have been recorded across the world wherein these gentle giants were found to react when coming across the remains of other elephants, regardless of the strength of relationships they might have shared with the deceased individuals.
Some caressed the remains by touching them gently with their trunks and feet, while others smelled and tasted them and even attempted to lift and carry them around. Interestingly, some elephants have been found to carefully cover the bodies with soil, leaves and branches, almost as if performing burial rituals.
Champa, the 67 year old elephant residing in Dalma left for her heavenly abode a few days back.
She was suffering from arthritis and had not been sitting for a while, when she did, she did not stand up again and went in a coma. Later that day she passed away.Champa and Rajini are the two elephants that were domesticated and taken care of by Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary. Champa who passed away recently was 67 and the one left behind, Rajini is only 19. (Elephant’s average life span is 70-80 years).It has been observed by the caretakers that Rajini had been refusing food and is behaving sad and depressed since the death of her mate. Tears had been falling down continuously from her eyes.
The separation from a loved one, from one she has been with her entire life is probably hurting Rajini. Geipert’s attachment theory plays a huge role in this conversation, it decides how people process grief.
Attachment styles that are developed where eay in our lives are shaped by primary caregivers and interactions around us. For Rajini, Champa was both. Her withdrawal from social cues and refusing food is her way of stating how big her grief is.We have been recording her sharp fall in vitality, deterioration of mental health (on account of crying since the incident) and impaired emotional and social functioning.
Unfortunately for Rajini, she is the only elephant left under Dalma’s caretakers, making her more lonely from her keen and lack of support might effect her mental health more.Here we can also see the classic Kubler-Ross stages of grief pattern taking place.Rajini can be said to be at the denial / shock or the first period of the scale. She is not able to accept the death of her loved one and has been emerged in grieving and crying as a result of shock .Other stages include- anger when one cannot deal with their feelings, the sadness manifest itselfs as anger ,Depression, as they continue life without this person and Acceptance that is the last stage of this model and leads to freedom from the grief and helps the patient live on their life at ease.
Studies have also suggested that certain elephants specifically visit the bones of their deceased relatives. However, the common aspect in all these incidents is the eerie stillness of the elephants while inspecting the remains.
In elephant researcher Joyce Poole’s words, “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.”
When a 55-year-old matriarch, Victoria, passed away in June 2013 at Kenya’s Samburu National Park, several elephants, related and unrelated, came and huddled around her body. Ecologist Shifra Goldenberg observed that Malasso, Victoria’s 14-year-old son, was one of the last to leave.
On a later observation of Victoria’s remains, two fresh cuts were found, one in her cheek and the other at the top of her mouth, both of which seemed to have occurred after death. Goldenberg explained, “We think possibly [Malasso] tried to lift her, because he has these long tusks.”
Another elephant that lingered near the body was Victoria’s youngest daughter Noor. When she finally left the remains, liquid was streaming out of her temporal glands, a reaction that has been associated with fear, stress and aggression in African elephants.
Like their African counterparts, Asian elephants too have been found to experience distress in response to dead or dying individuals.
An important aspect which may shed some light on these happenings is that both African and Asian elephants form strong social bonds and complex social structures, characteristics which scientists have often pointed out to be existent in highly conscious living beings.
Most family groups consist of related females and their young exhibiting strong social ties; males generally leave their family groups after reaching adolescence, sometimes going on to become part of all-male groups with certain long-lasting relations.
Elephant interactions being essential for the passing down of knowledge through generations. Hence, some researchers suggest that elephants inspect their dead in an attempt to glean important information through touch and smell, which could aid in their own survival.
In particular, matriarchal knowledge may prove to be critical to the survival of individuals. Social relationships and consequently social communication, therefore play a crucial role in an elephant’s life and may thus significantly impact the elephant’s interactions even during and beyond death.
The Elephant Acoustics Project focuses on studying acoustic communication of Asian elephants along the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong landscape in North East India.
On January 17, 2020, a day when we were observing elephant behaviour in the Kaziranga National Park, around early evening we came upon an adult male elephant who stood still for a long time, caressing the skull of a deceased elephant.
He then also tossed around with his feet what seemed to be pieces of leftover skin from the ears of the dead elephant. During our prolonged observation, he did not feed or drink despite both food and water being easily accessible in his immediate surroundings.
His tail was frequently raised, a behaviour commonly seen in disturbed Asian elephants. He would attempt to move away from the remains yet keep coming back to them every time as if strangely drawn to them. Subsequent discussions with the Park staff revealed that the deceased elephant had also been a male, suspected to have died of natural causes.
The question then remains: Can we really say that elephants grieve? In an attempt to answer this, we could perhaps turn to anthropologist Barbara J King’s definition of the emotion: “To qualify as grief, surviving individuals who knew the deceased must alter their behavioural routine. They might eat or sleep less, or act listless, or agitated. They might attend their friend’s corpse”.
Grief in itself may mean something different to each individual, but according to Charles Darwin, there is a certain universality to it that may potentially connect us and our mammalian relatives.
We may not be able to determine as of now whether elephants “grieve” in the human sense of the word, but some things are certain: Elephants display a significant interest in their dead and their behaviour in such situations is markedly different as compared to that under normal circumstances.
Can they comprehend or anticipate death? Do they mourn? Or are these complex ways of responding to death that are beyond our current understanding? All of these are things we are yet to decipher.
“Witnessing elephants interact with their dead sends chills up one’s spine, as the behaviour so clearly indicates advanced feeling,” said elephant researcher George Wittemyer. “This is one of the many magnificent aspects of elephants that we have observed, but cannot fully comprehend.”
One of the most moving displays of elephant emotion is the grieving process. Elephants remember and mourn loved ones, even many years after their death. When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes. While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk. Researchers don’t quite understand the reason for this behavior. They guess the elephants could be grieving. Or they could they be reliving memories. Or perhaps the elephant is trying to recognize the deceased. Whatever the reason, researchers suspect that the sheer interest in the dead elephant is evidence that elephants have a concept of death.
Researchers have described mother elephants who appear to go through a period of despondency after the death of a calf, dragging behind the herd for days. They’ve also witnessed an elephant herd circling a dead companion disconsolately. After some time, and likely when they realized the elephant was dead, the family members broke off branches, tore grass clumps and dropped these on the carcass. Another researcher noted a family of African elephants surrounding a dying matriarch. The family stood around her and tried to get her up with their tusks and put food in her mouth. When the rest of the herd finally moved on, one female and one calf stayed with her, touching her with their feet.
The researchers reached this conclusion after reviewing data from field observations of elephants that lingered at the carcasses of their dead mates. They also surveyed the available literature on how elephants respond to the remains of other elephants. In all, they reviewed 32 original observations of wild elephant carcasses from 12 sources across Africa.
Often, the field observers noted, pachyderms nudged and touched carcasses. They also returned to the remains repeatedly during varying stages of decay from fresh carcasses to sun-bleached bones. “Elephants show broad interest in their dead regardless of the strength of former relationships with the dead individual,” write Shifra Z. Goldenberg and George Wittemyer, the two experts behind the study.
Elephants have long been known to linger at the carcasses of other jumbos. They have been observed trying to lift or pull dead elephants as if seeking to raise them. “During our own observations, we also witnessed elephants visiting and revisiting carcasses during which they engaged in extensive investigative behavior, stationary behavior, self-directed behavior, temporal gland streaming, and heightened social interactions with other elephants in the vicinity of a carcass,” the researchers explain.
While it remains a bit of a mystery why elephants engage in this kind of behavior, we do know that the pachyderms are highly intelligent and social animals with famously long memories. Elephants in a herd live in complex social groups and form relationships that last decades.
Arguing that elephants mourn their dead may risk anthropomorphizing the animals. Yet the recurrent nature of this well-attested phenomenon, which has been observed in different herds, indicates that interactions with the dead serve a social or biological purpose for elephants.
“Witnessing elephants interact with their dead sends chills up one’s spine, as the behavior so clearly indicates advanced feeling,” said Wittemyer, a member of the conservationist group Save the Elephants who is a wildlife expert at the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University.
Previous studies have indicated that African elephants display an awareness of the death of other members of their group and show compassionate behaviour towards those in distress. In both African savannah and forest elephants, there are reports of individuals responding to sick, dying, or dead elephants by staying near or guarding them, and even displaying empathetic behaviours. They have even been observed to revisit the carcass and cover it with dirt, leaves or branches.
We often imagine grief in response to a loved one’s death to be a uniquely human trait. A team of researchers led by Raman Sukumar from the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru have shown that Asian elephants show distress in response to the death of other elephants, indicating an advanced awareness of death.
“My colleagues and I have been studying elephants for over decades now and you start making a number of behavioural observations in the course of doing other work,” says Sukumar. Many years ago, Sukumar observed an elephant standing guard over a dead calf. This, coupled with other anecdotal information and literature on African elephants, inspired him to study responses to death in Asian elephants.
The study began when Sukumar and his colleagues, Nachiketha Sharma and Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel, made several chance observations of Asian elephant behaviour in Bandipur National Park and the adjoining areas of Mudumalai National Park of the Nilgiri-Mysore – Wayanad Elephant reserve in southern India.
The researchers observed elephants approaching and exploring their dying companions before, during, as well as after death. They appeared to coordinate their actions to help the dying animals — for example, by gripping a dying calf from both front and rear to keep it from falling. The elephants guarded the body of an already dead adult female and stayed close by as forest officials conducted inspection and autopsy.
The team also recorded loud trumpets by an adult female in the presence of a dying calf. Such vocalizations and trumpets by adult females in the presence of a dying calf could be signals of distress, as Asian elephants are known to use vocal signals such as chirps, trumpets, roars, and rumbles when distressed.
James R. Anderson, professor of psychology at the Kyoto university calls the paper timely. “For anyone interested in the extent to which other species might share the same psychological and emotional reactions to the death of a conspecific [a member of the same species], this paper is especially interesting,” he says, adding that this is the first scientific report on death-related behaviour in Asian elephants.
Anderson compares and contrasts these observations with the ritualistic behaviour post-death that can be seen in some social insects. These typically dispose of the bodies of other dead insects, possibly to prevent disease from spreading in the nest. According to Anderson, the most conclusive and impressive result to come out of the study is the show of empathy and concern in Asian elephants with respect to a dying newborn and their interest in corpses. “It is valuable to see their reactions in the rarely witnessed context of death,” he says.
The researchers mention in the discussion of their paper that it would be interesting to collect physiological data on surviving individuals, to get a clearer picture of the likely emotional correlates of behaviours surrounding death.
https://lagatar.in/chandil-champa-elephant-kept-tied-in-makulakocha-of-dalma-died-after-illness/
This article which has been compiled & shared for general information purpose has been excerpts of many authors from online Google platform .Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Pashudhan Praharee
Reference-on request
