guard.
One obstacle to understanding elephants’ experience – and their reaction to death – is that the animals’
world is inhabited by an array of smells we can scarcely imagine.
“This puts a big barrier between how we interpret what they’re perceiving and interacting with,” says co-
author George Wittemyer, a conservation biologist at Colorado State University who has studied the
elephants of Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve for more than 20 years. “We’re unable to see the olfactory
landscape in which they’re functioning.”
Elephants use their tusks and strength to help
other elephants when they die (Adwait Aphale)One study found that elephants have more genes dedicated to their olfactory system than any other animal
on record – more than twice as many as keen-nosed dogs. Another study found that elephants, using a
combination of smell and sight, can differentiate between local human ethnic groups. Asian elephants can
even rely on smell to count, sniffing out which locked bucket contains more sunflower seeds between 59
and 82 percent of the time.
This may explain why a bull named Omtata spent eight minutes sniffing Victoria’s body and the dirt around
it. Or why the elephants continued to interact with her body even after rangers had removed the tusks to
secure them from poachers, or after scavengers had reduced the carcass to skin and bones. Or why studies
have found that elephants show extreme interest in skulls, jaws and other bones from their own species
while paying little mind to bones from cape buffaloes or giraffes.
Other animals are also known to interact with their dead. The special issue of Primates explores the
behaviour of several species, from infanticide in chimpanzees to avoidance and vigilance in horses.
Occasionally, animals make headlines for what look like displays of mourning: In 2018, Tahlequah, a Pacific
Northwest orca, swam carrying the corpse of her dead calf for 17 days. But elephants are different, because
they are much bigger than most animals, which means their bodies take a very long time to decompose. A
dead capuchin monkey might be eaten overnight, and a whale’s body will eventually float away or sink. But
an elephant skull could sit in roughly the same place for years.
The same is true of elephant tusks, which are important focal points for elephants. Goldenberg and
Wittemyer documented an elephant carrying a disarticulated tusk for more than three miles. “They are
touching each other’s tusks all the time,” Goldenberg says. “And they tend to show disproportionate
interest in tusks relative to other bones.”