Asian Elephants mourn and bury their babies, Indian study finds

March 2, 2024 6:23 AM

Asian Elephants mourn and bury their babies, Indian study finds. A study conducted between 2022 and 2023 finds elephants travel a great distance to bury their young with care.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (14 comments total)

Just WOW
posted by rubatan at 7:28 AM on March 2 [1 favorite]

I don't understand why this is news. Is it rare to have known since childhood that elephants do this?
posted by flabdablet at 7:42 AM on March 2

From TFA:

Elephants are known for their social and cooperative behaviour but calf burial had previously only been "briefly studied" in African elephants — remaining unexplored among their smaller Asian cousins, the study said.

I don't know the research on this well enough to know if there are older studies out there that the researchers may have missed, or "unverified" records in oral histories, memoirs, or travelogues. I heard all sorts of Cool Elephant Facts as a kid, but they were mostly about African elephants, and I don't remember having heard much, if anything, about calf burial.
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:49 AM on March 2 [3 favorites]

There's no possible ethical framework that justifies the way we treat animals other than "because we want to and we can."
Humans suck.
posted by signal at 7:50 AM on March 2 [12 favorites]

I didn't know this, and sarcastically implying "everyone knows this" is not good social lubrication. Also there's a difference between "everyone knows this" and "a rigorous scientific study has been done."
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:30 AM on March 2 [10 favorites]

No sarcasm intended. I'm genuinely surprised that this isn't common knowledge and that this isn't just one of the myriad studies demonstrating that the ocean is, to a 95% confidence level, wet.
posted by flabdablet at 9:08 AM on March 2 [3 favorites]

Do elephants have language? They have such big ears.
posted by Verg at 10:10 AM on March 2

this isn't just one of the myriad studies demonstrating that the ocean is, to a 95% confidence level, wet

I think you'd be surprised how often water turns out not to be wet, or to be wet for different reasons and in a different way than long believed. That's what science does.

Some day it's going to turn out that elephants had all the answers but we were too busy exploiting and killing them to learn how to communicate with them.
posted by praemunire at 10:46 AM on March 2

I'm from a country to which elephants are native and I've been around elephants dozens - maybe hundreds - of times throughout my childhood, and I have read voraciously about elephants, always, anything I could get my hands on. And I had never heard that they BURY their babies. I'm still not sure, after reading this article, how the heck they do it. (But I'm gonna try to find out!)

Actually I half suspected that this claim is fake just because it's so outlandish to my ears. *Burial*. Seriously?! I swear if the names of the scientists who published this weren't hindu names, I'd suspect this of being some kind of weird political propaganda from Indian minorities, given the current political climate. That's how new this news is to me.

I've definitely heard that they mourn their dead, that they weep and trumpet over the bodies of their family members who die, and I also have a vague recollection of reading once that pigs as well as elephants sometimes decorate the bodies of their dead family members with leaves and twigs and stuff (but I may be mixing up this last one with something I read in a novel, so I'm not 100% sure there). But I've never once heard of elephants BURYING their babies. Nope, nope, nope. I do not think this is common knowledge.
posted by MiraK at 11:04 AM on March 2 [8 favorites]

This morning I learned that spotted hyenas give birth through their clitoris. Yeah. Not joking, look it up. It's a pretty big clit, big enough that it's called a pseudo-penis, but that does not make it sound a jot less painful.

Anyway, today was shaping up to be a weird animal news day for me, so I'm here to share that with others.
posted by MiraK at 11:14 AM on March 2 [6 favorites]

There's no possible ethical framework that justifies the way we treat animals other than "because we want to and we can."

For me it’s a little more complicated than that. Elephants, and specifically asiatic elephants, are on the list of a dozen or so species that can pass the mirror test, even if most individuals fail. Doesn’t necessarily mean they have a consciousness like ours but it does mean we can’t blanketly rule it out like most species.

Harming animals in general should be avoided, of course, but killing those that pass the mirror test - including elephants - should be treated as fully murder. There is every possibility they have some rudiments of the “I” in “I think therefore I am.”

My personal view is that it’s an altogether different thing from fish or chickens where… you’re kind of fucked up if you’re inflicting needless pain on the squishy version of a Boston Dynamics robot, but ordering either for dinner doesn’t imply you erased a “self” from the universe. I take an increasingly dim view of animal exploitation the further up the cognitive complexity chain you go from there (eg I don’t eat beef or pork as an ethical matter), but that’s just me.

reading once that pigs as well as elephants sometimes decorate the bodies of their dead family members

Elephants mourning their dead is common knowledge. Pigs I’ve never heard of doing that, anywhere - they’re clever-ish and they do exhibit understanding of object permanence, but AFAIA give zero indication of MSR (Mirror Self Recognition). On preview: I’d forgotten about the hyena thing and I dearly hope to resume that state soon.
posted by Ryvar at 11:25 AM on March 2 [1 favorite]

I'm genuinely surprised that this isn't common knowledge

Let me introduce you to the 10K.
posted by Mitheral at 1:20 PM on March 2 [3 favorites]

MiraK, it sounds like they take the bodies to human-dug irrigation ditches, and presumably then cover them with leaves or whatever. So not bury in the sense that they dig a hole, but they actually pick up the bodies and move them physically to a place where they can inter them, which is a step beyond just covering up a body where it fell, whether or not you'd call it burying in the human sense.
posted by tavella at 3:34 PM on March 2 [4 favorites]

I didn't know this either, and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about elephants - so thanks for posting this, so interesting.
posted by j810c at 5:56 PM on March 3