How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  On this same day, Grace returned to Eleanor. This time, she made no move to lift the fallen elephant; she only stood quietly by the body. Maya and other members of Eleanor’s family came near. They didn’t, as far as I can tell from the reports, touch their matriarch’s body—with one exception. Eleanor’s young daughter, the new calf, nuzzled her mother. She seemed disoriented, trying to suck from other young calves, then returning to the body of her mother.

  Ultimately, this calf was not to survive. Though she was seen in subsequent weeks attempting to suckle from other breeding females in her mother’s group, none of those elephants obliged her—and she was too young and vulnerable to survive without milk. But on day three, the calf seemed only to want to be near her lifeless mother. When an unrelated family named Biblical Towns approached, its members pushed away the First Ladies—that is, Eleanor’s kin—in what appeared to be a combination of dominance bid and desire to explore the dead body. Only Eleanor’s calf was not pushed aside. A photograph shows her standing next to her mother, alone, near to a group of large and imposing elephants who were not her kin. The baby’s stiff posture, and slightly extended trunk, makes a poignant image.

  Over the next four days, Maya and other members of the First Ladies family spent some time near Eleanor’s body and some time away. By the fourth day, the carcass had become a scavengers’ feast: jackals, hyenas, vultures, and lions all ate from it. On the sixth day, a female called Sage, from the family Spice Girls, approached the body. Even at this point—with her tusks missing and her carcass partially consumed—Eleanor evoked a response. Sage spent three minutes sniffing and touching the body with her trunk.

  At no time during the week following Eleanor’s death did a bull visit the carcass. The responses came from females, but not only from Eleanor’s female kin. Five elephant families demonstrated a distinct interest in the body, including Eleanor’s own family. In their report, Douglas-Hamilton and his coauthors find it significant that elephants’ keen interest in dying and dead individuals is not limited by genetic relationship. “Elephants have a generalized response to suffering and death,” they conclude.

  The study of elephants’ responses to Eleanor’s death lasted one week, but elephants almost surely remember their dead for much longer than that. If at Samburu, radio-tracking data supplement what we learn from observational work, at Amboseli, experimental trials that measure elephants’ responses offer a fresh perspective on how elephants respond to the dead.

  I admit to a special fondness for the Amboseli elephant research. For one thing, there are twenty-two hundred elephants individually known at Amboseli—if I found the nine hundred at Samburu impressive, let’s just say I’m knocked out by this higher figure and the intensive labor by elephant scientists that it represents. Also, Amboseli is where I spent fourteen months baboon-watching, and where I had the incomparable experience of observing elephants who lumbered right into my backyard. Moss’s elephants (as I think of them) ventured surprisingly close to the Amboseli Baboon Project’s thatched adobe house, where I lived. At night, through my bedroom’s open-mesh window, I heard the push of their great bodies moving slowly through the vegetation. During the day, I viewed them silhouetted against snow-laden Mount Kilimanjaro, which loomed large across the Tanzanian border. Though my beat is primates and I have never formally studied the Amboseli elephants, my casual encounters with them at my house and in the field were unforgettable.

  The idea that Amboseli elephants seek out the bones of their deceased loved ones to caress seemed marvelous to me; it wrapped up elephant smartness and elephant emotion into one package. I reported to others that elephants distinguish the bones of their dead relatives from those of other elephants in their habitat, and behave differently toward the bones of their kin. It’s not that this information is downright false or mythical. It’s not on a par with the popular but apocryphal idea of an elephant graveyard. (Elephants do not travel purposefully to a single place to die. They may travel toward water and end up dying in clusters near water with more than random regularity, or they may, sadly, be shot by humans in such numbers that their strewn carcasses resemble a graveyard.) In fact, I got the idea that elephants seek out the bones of dead relatives from Cynthia Moss herself.

  In her book Elephant Memories, Moss tells a story of bringing back to camp the jaw of an elephant matriarch who had died a few weeks earlier. Three days later, the elephant’s family passed near the camp. When they smelled the jaw, they diverted their course to approach it. When the family finished its inspection and moved on, one elephant stayed behind. The dead female’s seven-year-old son continued to stroke the jaw and turn it with his foot and trunk. Moss felt certain that the young male somehow recognized his mother.

  Other Amboseli elephants’ response to the bones of a relative—their matriarch—was captured on film. A small group of elephants encircles the bones on the ground. Some elephants begin to turn the bones over and pick them up in their trunks, feeling their nooks, crannies, and crevices. It’s the detailed exploration of the bones that is so striking—all while the elephants, at least some of them, vocalize. Then, with the bones on the ground again, the elephants touch them with their back feet.

  It’s common enough for Amboseli elephants to caress bleached bones that they come across in their travels. But does the exploration of the bones recorded in this film (and that described by other elephant researchers) equate to grief, as the narrator suggests? Might the strength of an elephant’s response to bleached-white bones somehow correlate with her degree of kinship with the dead elephant? It sounds plausible, since we know that elephant relatives bond deeply with each other, that elephants have enduring memories, and that elephants grieve. Is it so strange to think that elephants are able to identify the bones of loved ones who have died some time before and visit them in order to pay homage?

  Karen McComb, Lucy Baker, and Cynthia Moss have attacked these questions experimentally at Amboseli, in a superb example of how science works. The three scientists set about rigorously following up on an impression Moss had gained from her casual observations of relatives’ responses to the bones of the dead. The research questions were these: Are elephants more attracted to skulls and ivory from elephants than to other objects? Do they show more interest in elephant skulls than in skulls of other large mammals? Do they prefer to investigate the skulls of relatives over the skulls of other elephants? Yes, yes, and no are the answers, according to the experimental data. Elephants care very much about their own species’ bones compared to other objects or the bones of other species, but show no evidence of preferring the skulls of their own kin to the skulls of other elephants.

  First, McComb and her coworkers presented a piece of ivory, a piece of wood, and an elephant skull to an array of elephant families (one family at a time). The arrangement of the objects was carefully controlled, with different objects in the rightmost, center, and leftmost positions from trial to trial. The elephants’ behavioral responses were videotaped, with particular attention given in the analysis phase to the length of time an elephant spent exploring an object with trunk or feet. Of the three objects, elephants preferred the ivory. The skull was next, and the wood came in last. Since the skull is, of course, invisible during an animal’s life, I wonder if the ivory was preferred because the elephants more readily recognized it as belonging to a particular individual, perhaps through a scar, chip, or discolored area. The researchers hint at this possibility by noting the ivory’s connection with living elephants.

  Next, three skulls, one each from an elephant, a buffalo, and a rhino, were arrayed in front of elephant families. The elephants distinctly preferred the skull of their own kind, with a lesser but equal attraction to skulls from the other two species. The third part of the research involved three elephant families, each of which had lost its matriarch in the past one to five years. The surviving elephants were presented with the skulls of the three matriarchs, only one of whom, of course, had been their own group’s matriarch. Th
e elephants showed no greater interest in the skull of their own matriarch.

  What, then, is the meaning of the anecdote Moss reported, about the seven-year-old son caressing his mother’s bones? Do the experimental results negate the emotion the son seemed to express as he lingered over the remains of his mother, or the suggestion that elephants more generally may mourn their loved ones by caressing the bones? I think the answer to that last question is no. When anecdotes are reported by scientists or others who cautiously interpret the behavior of animals they know well, they point to an animal’s capacity to carry out some action or express some emotion. Even if only some elephants grieve for a lost relative or friend, even if only some elephants caress the bones of their dead relatives, that behavior is genuine, and meaningful, for those individuals.

  When it comes to animal emotion, today’s animal-behavior science tacks back and forth between analysis of events noted by credible observers and evidence derived from controlled experiments (which, as the Amboseli researchers show us, can take place in the field as well as in captivity). These two sources are complementary. The events reported may be rare but hint at unsuspected possibilities and emotional depth in the animals’ behavior; the controlled evidence requires us to put the brakes on reckless speculation about those alluring possibilities. The experiment by McComb, Baker, and Moss constrains wild statements to the effect that elephants (implying all elephants) recognize and prefer the bones of their dead relatives, and this in turn constrains speculation about the way elephants (implying all elephants) mourn.

  The McComb study tells us that elephants are keenly intrigued by the bones of their own kind. In day-to-day life, this tendency surely means that they are attracted to, and that they interact with, bones of their kin (as well as bones of non-kin). How readily elephants recognize their own kins’ bones and mourn the individuals represented by those bones remains a mystery.

  Once, the Echo family of elephants in Amboseli came upon a carcass of a young female who had been sick for a number of weeks. That the elephants explored the carcass comes as no surprise, but they went on to do something remarkable. As Moss watched, the elephants

  began to kick at the ground around the carcass, digging up the dirt and putting it on the body. A few others broke off branches and palm fronds and brought them back and placed them on the carcass. At that point the warden circled overhead and dived down in his plane to guide the rangers on the ground to the dead elephant so that they could recover the tusks. The [elephants] were frightened by the plane and ran off. I think if they had not been disturbed they would have nearly buried the body.

  A near-burial by elephants must have been remarkable to witness. Was this interrupted act an attempt to protect the deceased elephant’s body from harm? Why have other long-term elephant researchers not reported (at least to my knowledge) such behavior? Elephant burial of a body cannot be a common act; too many field hours by scientists have accumulated for such a behavior to have been missed were it routine. But it’s impossible to dismiss Moss’s account, given her intimate knowledge of these elephants.

  At the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, elephants are also known intimately, in this case by their caretakers. Elephants’ past histories (mostly in the entertainment or zoo world), how they are adjusting to their new life, with whom they make friends, and how they express their personalities are all noted. Knowledgeable and caring eyes witness subtleties of elephant behavior, then share these with the larger elephant-loving community by posting them on the sanctuary’s website, which has a section devoted to each elephant resident. I have developed a special fondness for the elephant Tina’s story.

  Tina was born in 1970 at a zoo in Portland, Oregon. At two years of age, she was sold to a game farm in British Columbia. For fourteen years, she lived alone in a barn, accompanied only by a Saint Bernard dog named Susie. Once in a while, she enjoyed the overnight visits of the owner’s children to the barn. How long must those fourteen years have felt to Tina, who endured so much solitude day by day and hour by hour? Finally, Tina was joined by another elephant, Tumpe. These two females were allowed to remain together even after the farm was sold and turned into the Greater Vancouver Zoo. Again a zoo resident, Tina at least had another elephant for company—until 2002, when Tumpe was sold to yet another zoo, this one in the United States. Tina was alone again.

  At this point, Tina wasn’t in the best of health. She weighed too much, and her feet gave her problems, conditions that often beset captive elephants. The Canadian zoo staff not only cared for Tina, they cared about her, enough that they chose to release her from the severe physical and emotional constraints of life in the zoo. In August 2003, Tina was transported three thousand miles to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. There she discovered what she had so long been forced to live without: the sustaining company of others of her own kind.

  This happy outcome didn’t come easily. It required patient coaxing from emotional coaches of two species: human and elephant. After all, Tina had not been around more than one elephant at a time; suddenly she had to contend with a host of incoming social signals and to negotiate a web of elephant relationships. By early 2004, Tina still was hesitant in some of her social interactions. When more than one elephant would enter the group stall, out she would go.

  One night in mid-January, first the elephant Tarra and then another named Jenny came into the stall and began to rub up against Tina. Though Tina moved into the next stall, she elected to remain near both females. When Jenny barged right on in to Tina’s stall, Tina acted possessive toward her ball and her hay, but she eventually relaxed. This was a step forward. That same month, a bond bloomed between Tina and Winkie. The caretakers noticed that Winkie seemed to want a secretive social tie with Tina. It had taken Winkie over two years to integrate into the sanctuary’s herd. Now, she seemed to crave affection from Tina, yet at the same time hid evidence of it from human eyes.

  This behavior is understandable in light of Winkie’s own history. Wild-born in Burma, she was captured at the age of one and transported to a US zoo, where the staff managed her behavior with harsh displays of dominance. It took Winkie years to unlearn the toughness she assumed at the zoo, but it did happen; when she began to stand close to and touch Tina, her gentleness was encouraged by the sanctuary caretakers.

  By March, even as Tina’s and Winkie’s pleasurable interactions continued, Tina was developing a special bond with Sissy. Like Winkie, Sissy had been wild-caught at the age of one, in her case in Thailand. Separated from her family and confined to zoos, Sissy experienced a complicated and sad series of events. Swept away in a flood at one Texas zoo, she was beaten by keepers at another. Nonetheless, at the Elephant Sanctuary, Sissy acted in a gentle manner. For emotional security, she carried a tire with her most everywhere she went. But she loved the company of elephants too.

  At first Tina made some missteps, pushing, pulling, and poking Sissy in a less than affectionate way. But Sissy’s patience was notable, and by April the two elephants were mutually affectionate. During this period, the condition of Tina’s feet began to improve markedly. The coincidence of Tina’s physical and emotional recoveries makes a lot of sense; as with people, the body and the spirit sometimes heal together. Sanctuary staff thought creatively about how to help Tina, in June even going so far as to take molds of her front feet so that custom-made shoes could be constructed for them. If her tender feet were protected, the staff thought, maybe Tina would begin to explore the richness of the sanctuary grounds. The acres of streams and mud and other mini-habitats belonged to Tina as much as to the other elephants.

  These hopes for Tina’s future did not come to pass. In July, she died unexpectedly. Under treatment for some minor issues involving loss of motor skills and reduced appetite, Tina had seemed basically fine, and at no time was her situation considered to be life-threatening. She simply collapsed, and she lacked the muscular control to stand even when hoisted to her feet. Lying on a mattress of hay, she stopped breath
ing.

  Tina’s human caretakers were in shock and mourned for Tina that day and for a considerable time afterward. It is Tarra’s, Winkie’s, and Sissy’s responses that I want to focus on, though. Tarra was the first elephant to visit Tina’s body. Years later, Tarra would become a media star because of her tight bond with a dog named Bella. The “Tarra and Bella” story went viral, spurred by television coverage on CBS Sunday Morning and the book Unlikely Friendships (see chapter 10). But now, in 2004, Tarra had just lost her elephant friend Tina. So had Winkie and Sissy, and it was those two elephants who stood over Tina’s body that entire first night and part of the next day. They refused any chance to leave to take food or water, or a walk. Sissy stood quietly, but Winkie did not; her emotion was apparent in her distraught and repeated prodding of Tina’s body.

  The next day, sanctuary caretakers gathered to bury Tina. Tarra and Winkie stood at the edge of the grave, where they remained, joined by Sissy, throughout that evening and the next day. Once again, distinct individual differences in mourning were apparent: Tarra was vocal and asked for attention from her human caretakers, Sissy stood vigil, and Winkie paced stiffly around.

  On the following day, before moving on to another part of the Elephant Sanctuary, Sissy made a choice that surprised the people who witnessed it. She placed her beloved tire, her security blanket, on her friend’s grave. There she left it, an elephant memorial offering, for several days.

  6

  DO MONKEYS MOURN?

  Toque macaques on the island of Sri Lanka live in a visual paradise. The green tree canopy stretches far, and in it the monkeys use their grasping hands to reel in tasty caterpillars suspended from the trees on long, thin threads. The forest boasts lush fruits and a small lake dotted with another favorite monkey delicacy, lily flowers.

  Even in the midst of this bounty, the toque monkeys confront dangers, some external to their group and some within it. In a documentary called Clever Monkeys, naturalist David Attenborough explains one specific cost of low rank. Only high-status monkeys may hang from tree branches over the water, reaching down to pluck lilies from the surface; their lower-ranking groupmates must enter the water directly and dive for roots and bulbs. The problem isn’t only that it takes time and technique to learn how to do this sort of thing, it’s also the presence of concrete danger: a large monitor lizard who makes his home in the lake.