The emotional elephant

The largest mammals that walk on land, elephants have fascinated humans for centuries. Thousands of people travel to wildlife reserves each year just to get a glimpse of these charismatic, sensitive animals in their natural surroundings.

Each elephant has a distinctive personality and is capable of complex thoughts and feelings, like aggression, offense, compassion, shyness, happiness, sadness, and many others. They communicate their feelings and intentions by using all of their senses - hearing, smell, vision and touch, including an exceptional ability to detect low-frequency vibrations. They listen and call to each other, gesture to each other, touch each other, and release chemicals that send messages to the animals that smell them.

People who have observed elephants will tell you they definitely express joy and happiness. They become joyful, for example, when they greet a friend or family member (even a human friend), after the birth of a baby elephant, or when they play games. When an elephant has been absent for a long time, its herd mates collectively express their delight upon its return. The elephants appear to have a ceremony, gathering together, spinning around, and making a great deal of noise, presumably to welcome the returning elephant.

In many species, it is only the youngsters that play, but elephants of all ages seem to play games either in groups or by themselves. They have a great time running around, making noise, and interacting with objects they find.

Another indication of elephants’ complex emotional life is that they grieve the deaths of their loved ones. Elephants have displayed a need to mourn the loss of family members, acquaintances, and even stillborn babies. They sometimes return to spots where their friends and family members have died and observe silent pauses. They also seem to go through a period of denial after deaths. People have observed elephants that spent a long time, even days, slumped over the bodies of their dead loved ones, trying to revive them before finally moving on.

Elephant family life

Elephants have a social organization that relies on a great deal of cooperation and self-sacrifice within the family. If a baby elephant cries, for example, the whole family will caress and comfort it.

An elephant family consists of a matriarch, her daughters, and their offspring. The family will occasionally include the matriarch’s sister and her children, too. The size of the family ranges from six to 20 elephants. Sometimes large herds have to split when food is scarce, but even then they keep in touch by visiting or traveling together. The females generally stay together for life, but as they grow up, the males gradually become more independent, eventually joining a herd of males, called bulls.

Male and female elephants live separate and different lives. Bulls only hang around the females when it is time to mate. Because of their different lifestyles, their social lives and methods of communication are quite different. Female elephants recognize hundreds of individuals and routinely socialize with other bands of elephants that are not part of their family group. They actively communicate to strengthen bonds between relatives, reassure young elephants, reconcile differences between family and friends, form coalitions against aggressors, and keep in contact over long distances. Males survive largely by passively interpreting sounds and signals.

The amazing trunk

• An elephant’s trunk is a highly sensitive organ with over six major muscle groups and 100,000 muscle units.
• The trunk is both the elephant’s nose and its upper lip. Two nostrils run the entire length of the trunk.
• Elephants can use their trunk as a snorkel while swimming underwater.
• The elephant drinks water by filling it’s trunk with water then pouring it into its mouth.
• An elephant can smell things by placing the tip of its trunk inside its mouth after touching an object. This transfers the smell to a small opening in the palate which leads to the Jacobson's organ (an organ that all vertebrates have to help with smelling).
• Elephants sometimes use their trunks to threaten other animals or to throw objects.
• The trunk is an elephant's most sensitive body part. As a result, it is the easiest part to hurt. This is why elephants are hit, poked and beaten on the trunk when they are being trained for inhumane entertainment, such as a circus.

Did you know?

• You can tell different elephants apart by their ears, which vary in shape and have unique patterns, notches, and tears. They use these big ears mostly to cool themselves and signal to other elephants.
• Elephants tend to be either “right- or “left-tusked,” favouring one tusk over the other for digging and other tasks. The preferred tusk gets worn, making it shorter than the other.
• Elephants have very long eyelashes that help to keep dust out of their eyes.
• An elephant can live to be 70 years old.
• A female elephant will give birth every 2½ to 4 years and can have up to 12 offspring in her lifetime.
• The elephant has the longest gestation period of any mammal – 22 months.
• At birth, elephant calves already weigh over 200 pounds!
• An elephant bull can lift as much as 270 kg with its trunk but, of course, each individual has different strengths and abilities.
• Elephants are vegetarians, eating a variety of plants like grasses, leaves, twigs, bark, fruit, seed pods, bamboo, and palms. The Asian elephant has seasonal favourites such as figs, tamarind, wood apple, and mango.
• Elephants can only digest 40% of what they eat so they need to eat tons of plants, quite literally! They spend as much as 16 hours eating every day and produce huge amounts of dung.
• The elephant’s tusks are actually very long incisor teeth that can grow up to 3.5m. The ivory that tusks are made of has been considered precious by humans for thousands of years. Though hunting the endangered elephant is now illegal, as is the ivory trade, people continue to kill elephants and sell their ivory on the black market.
• In addition to poaching, competition between elephants and humans for use of the same land has put increasing pressure on elephant populations over the years.

How are African and Asian elephants different?

• Both male and female African elephants have tusks. Only a male Asian elephant can grow tusks and somewhere between 40 and 50% of them never develop tusks at all.
• An African elephant has two finger-like protrusions on the tip of its trunk that it uses to grab objects. The Asian elephant only has one “finger” and, therefore, it can only scoop objects rather than grasp them.
• Asian elephants are smaller in size and have smaller ears than the African elephant.
• African elephants are grayish in colour, but Asian elephants range from gray to brown.
• African elephants have a concave back, but the backs of Asian elephants are convex.