Why elephants chance their arm

ARISTOTLE, who was born in 384BC, considered elephants superior to all other animals in ‘wit and mind’. Many wildlife rangers, zookeepers, and mahouts living with working elephants, would agree.

These highly social animals communicate with each other vocally and physically. They can remember where water or salt were found decades earlier. They even have funeral rituals. The herd gathers round, making low rumbling sounds, trying to get the victim to stand. Coming on the bones of a dead elephant, the troop will pause, as if in memoriam.

However, projecting human emotions onto animals, as Aristotle did, is no longer acceptable. We must resist the temptation to ‘anthropomorphise’; interpretations of animal behaviour require hard evidence if they are to be taken seriously. This can be difficult to obtain but a paper just published in the Peer journal presents the findings of one such study.