How Elephants Grieve and Remember

When an elephant comes upon the bones of another elephant, something changes in its behaviour. The animal slows, grows still, and begins to explore the remains with its trunk, running the sensitive tip over the bleached skull and the great curved tusks, sometimes lifting and carrying the bones, sometimes standing in silence for long minutes. Elephants show this response to the remains of their own kind and largely ignore the bones of other species. They appear to recognise death, and to be moved by it.

The Weight of Loss

The accounts have accumulated over decades of observation. A herd will gather around a dying member, attempting to lift it to its feet, placing food and vegetation beside it, remaining with the body long after the animal has died. Mothers have been seen carrying the bodies of dead calves for days, unwilling to leave them behind. When at last the herd moves on, individuals may return to the place, revisiting the bones in the years that follow.

We must be cautious about what we claim to see in this. To call it grief is to reach for a human word, and we cannot climb inside an elephant's mind to confirm that it feels what we would feel. But the behaviour is consistent, it is specific to their own species, and it serves no obvious practical purpose. The most parsimonious explanation that fits the evidence is that elephants experience something in the presence of their dead, an emotional response rooted in the powerful social bonds that tie a herd together. Whatever its exact nature, it is not nothing.

Those bonds are the key to understanding elephant society. A herd is a family of related females and their young, led by the oldest and most experienced female, the matriarch. The bonds between them are lifelong and intense, maintained through constant touch, vocalisation and shared care of the young. When one of them dies, the fabric of the group is torn, and the response to death may be, at bottom, the response to that tearing.

The Library in the Matriarch's Mind

If grief reveals the depth of elephant feeling, memory reveals the depth of elephant intelligence, and the two are closely linked. The matriarch is the living archive of her herd. Over a lifetime that can stretch past sixty years, she accumulates knowledge that no single season could teach: the location of water holes that fill only in the driest years, the routes between feeding grounds, the places of danger and the places of safety. In times of drought, herds led by older matriarchs survive better, because their leaders remember where to go when the familiar sources fail.

Elephant memory extends to individuals as well as places. They recognise and remember other elephants they have not seen for years, greeting old associates with evident excitement. There is evidence that they remember particular humans too, distinguishing between the voices and even the scent of people who have threatened them and those who have not, and reacting with appropriate wariness or calm. The old saying that an elephant never forgets is an exaggeration, but it points at a genuine truth: these are animals whose survival depends on remembering, and who are built to remember well.

This combination of long memory and strong feeling has a sobering implication. Elephants that have witnessed the killing of their family members, in culls or at the hands of poachers, can carry the effects for years, showing signs of lasting disturbance in their behaviour. When the older animals of a population are killed, it is not only lives that are lost but knowledge, the accumulated wisdom of the matriarchs that cannot be replaced in a single generation. To kill an old elephant is, in a sense, to burn a library.

What the bones and the memories together suggest is a creature living a rich inner life across a span of decades, bound to its family by ties we recognise because they are not so very different from our own. We are only beginning to understand elephants. What we have learned so far should make us humble, and careful, about how we treat them.