Researcher Plays a Deceased Elephant’s Call on a Speaker in the Wild- Ends Up Regretting Immediately

In a bid to quench the thirst for human curiosity, a researcher once tried to study elephants' reactions to death. The intense emotional response from a particular elephant family unnerved the researcher to experiment with the endeavor again. The expert played a recording of a deceased elephant from a hidden speaker in a thicket. The reactions that followed were heartbreaking as an elephant family went wild calling out and searching for the deceased member. More so, its daughter continued calling for days before she moved on.

Elephants are highly social animals with complex family dynamics. While death is a universal aspect, with most animals and humans imparting an emotional response to it– in elephants, it is important to recognize who has died, per a report by Nova. There are times when elephants even perform burials for their late members in the exact place where they died. Grief from death has been extensively observed in elephants and their response to death has been marked as “probably the strangest thing about them.” 

Elephants react to dead remains of both, elephants as well as humans, but ignore those of other species. Some researchers perceive their response as similar to human grief where the animals spend time with the deceased or their remains for some time before leaving it all in the past. Conservationist Joyce Pool, who co-founded Elephant Voices wrote, “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Pool is an elephant behavior expert and earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, per the official site for Elephant Voices. 

Elephant groups are generally led by a matriarch and are composed of females and calves while males tend to live in isolation or small bachelor groups, per World Wildlife Fund. Their first point of contact with the deceased is through the trunks. Elephants gently extend their trunks and touch the body, as if to feel and obtain information. The analysis goes on with other remains of the body and a few more members join in. They graze their trunks through the lower jaw, tusks, and teeth– recognizing some of the distinguished features. There were myriad instances when elephant families gave explicit evidence of their grieving patterns. 

Expert Cynthia Moss, the director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, recalled the ordeal of an elephant family after a matriarch, Big Tuskless, passed away due to natural causes. Moss retrieved the jawbone of the elephant and brought it to the research camp to determine her age at death. Shockingly, Big Tuskless's family passed through the camp only a few days later. Not only did they track the location, but also followed the scent to recognize Big Tuskless’ jawbone from a pool of other elephant jaws on the ground. The family mourned with the jawbone and touched it before moving on.

However, one young elephant stayed on for a couple of hours later. Butch was Big Tuskless’ seven-year-old son and he kept stroking the jaw with his trunk even after the other members had left– seemingly, missing his mother. The reactions pose a great resemblance to that of humans at times of mourning and grief. According to experts, elephants also cover dead members with soil and vegetation, and they are the only known animals besides humans to perform burials.