The way the animals react to death is said to be
more emotional, perhaps even more human,
than scientists ever realised (AP)Joyce Poole, who contributed observations reviewed in the new paper, doesn’t shy away from attributing
emotion to what she has witnessed. In an interview, she recalls watching a female named Polly die before
her eyes in Kenya. “She just sort of tipped over, spun around on a tusk, and fell. Her legs kind of went up in
the air, and boom, that was it,” says Poole, scientific director for the conservation and education nonprofit
ElephantVoices.
The first elephants to find her body were a trio of young, unrelated males. They spent upward of an hour
trying to lift Polly and pulling on her tail and tusks before eventually mounting her, says Poole. That night,
rangers removed Polly’s tusks. Poole says she returned the next day to check on the body and was amazed
to again find three elephants loitering around Polly, including one that had been there the day before. “They
were just standing over her body where her face had been hacked out, where her tusks had been. And they
were touching her bloody face,” Poole says. “It was pretty unsettling, in the sense that it was clear to me
that they knew that people had hacked her face off.”
Baby elephant bulls can be seen bathing in Sri
Lanka’s Yala National Park (Getty)Another time, also in Kenya, Poole watched as a female named Tonie tried again and again to get her
stillborn calf to stand. “She stood over that calf and protected it from hyenas and from jackals for a couple of
days,” she says. The list of examples goes on. But the question of what to make of those responses is still
very much up for debate.
“As this paper shows, where there are elephants being intensively observed, there is clear recognition of
behavioural responses to loss,” says Phyllis Lee, an evolutionary behaviourist at the University of Stirling