Elephants do grieve, and they are one of the few animals who are similar to humans in mourning patterns. Believe it or not, elephants cry. They bury their dead and pay tribute to the bodies and to the bones.
Their funeral ritual involves touching the body with their trunks, having a moment of silence, and covering the body with leaves and branches. An elephant will even stay by a dead friend or family member for multiple days.
But a growing number are challenging our species' monopoly on grief. They've identified mourninglike behaviors not just in cetaceans, but in elephants, giraffes, chimpanzees and other primates and, possibly, turtles, bison and birds.
Elephants
They've been observed covering bodies with leaves and branches and will often investigate bones. Elephants will also stop to inspect a body that isn't from their own herd, suggesting a general awareness of death. One family was even filmed mourning a matriarch after her death.
FUNERAL RITUALS OF ELEPHANTS
They also participate in funeral rituals. Aside from humans, there are very few animals that seem to grieve in a humanesque way. Researchers have observed elephants examining the bones of other elephants with their trunks.
They approach dead elephant bodies at all stages of decay, from freshly dead to scattered sun-bleached bones. They examine the body or bones carefully with their highly sensitive trunks and acute small. Their behavior towards these remains looks like some of their interactions with living herd-mates.
African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) have long been observed reacting emotionally when a herd member dies. They might approach the body and touch it with their trunks, kick at the corpse or stand nearby as if on guard.
Elephants do grieve, and they are one of the few animals who are similar to humans in mourning patterns. Believe it or not, elephants cry. They bury their dead and pay tribute to the bodies and to the bones.
According to Poulsen, the mother's grieving reaction is likely due to a combination of the fact that elephants have a very long gestation, making them very invested in their young, as well as their large brain and intelligence enabling some degree of understanding of death.
Elephants mourn the dead:
They have also been known to cover the remains of another elephant with branches or other debris. They remember and mourn loved ones even many years after their death. This behaviour means that elephants are able to feel and show sympathy to each other.
There is, however, a second, less-demanding sense in which, say, a monkey might have an awareness of its own mortality. This is the notion, not that it will die, but that it can die. That is, the idea that this is something that could happen to it, but not inevitably so.
And WiseGeek writes that "most scientists agree... that humans are the only animals who produce emotional tears." But they also point out that there are many examples of animals exhibiting apparent grief, including baby elephants, who produce a sad, keening sound when they are separated from their mothers.
Elephants can sleep both lying down and standing up. Research has shown that elephants in the wild are more likely to sleep standing up, saving them the energy and time it would take to pick themselves up off the ground.
In June, India's PTI News Service reported that a 70-year-old woman in the central east Indian state of Odisha was killed by an elephant, only to have the same elephant reportedly return to her funeral to pull her body from a pyre and trample her again before fleeing, police said.
When an Elephant encounters the remains of a deceased member of their pack, they stop and touch the bones of the remains – seemingly a display of grief. They've also been observed to cover the remains of another Elephant with branches, bushes and other debris to cover them up.
Even if long-lived creatures as intelligent as elephants and chimpanzees do recognize that the dead are gone for good, they may not recognize that death eventually will come for all, a knowledge that may be solely human.
Although it seems as if Angele was trying to kick the newborn, this behavior is natural for elephants: this is how they help the little one get out of the placenta. Shortly after his birth, the little one got to his feet well and began to nurse.
Another frequent response to death was making noise. Elephants in the videos trumpeted, roared or rumbled. Often, elephants kept a kind of vigil over a carcass: They stayed close, occasionally sleeping nearby and sometimes trying to chase away humans who tried to investigate.
They say that elephants never forget: they never forget a friendly face, or an injury, or the scent of an abuser. And, as a pack, says new research, elephants never forget the effects of mass killings carried out in the name of conservation.
Animals that live in the present don't understand death; for them, it is just absence. However, intelligent animals with complex social structures and long-term memory, like elephants, realize that death is permanent and thus mourn their loss.
While this may look superficially like emotional "crying", it occurs simply because elephants have lost the normal mammalian structures that drain excess moisture away from their eyes; without a true lacrimal structure, elephants are physically unable to produce emotional tears.
Interestingly, some elephants have been found to carefully cover the bodies with soil, leaves and branches, almost as if performing burial rituals. Studies have also suggested that certain elephants specifically visit the bones of their deceased relatives.
1, 2018, the zoo reported. “Some elephants are able to lie down and get back up with no problem, but some, like Malaika, don't ever lie down and instead just lean on objects for rest,” the release says.
Elephants are believed to rank equal with dolphins in terms of problem-solving abilities, and many scientists tend to rank elephant intelligence at the same level as cetaceans; a 2011 article published by ABC Science suggests that, "elephants [are as] smart as chimps, [and] dolphins".