Discovery suggests elephants bury their dead
Researchers claim to have found Asian elephants burying their dead for the first time, possibly transforming our ideas about how animals grieve.
Stories of elephants placing dead calves in graves had been told for years by elderly foresters and tea estate workers in the northern Indian states of West Bengal and Assam. However, the practice had not been documented until Parveen Kaswan, of the Indian Forest Service, discovered what appeared to be a burial site.
The first site was found in September 2022, and involved a one-year-old female. The calf is thought to have died of a respiratory infection, and its body appears to have been carried by its herd to an irrigation ditch on a tea plantation in the Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal.
Its body was found upside-down in the trench and covered with earth, leaving only the feet exposed.
In the next two years, four more very similarly buried calves, all less than a year old, were discovered in the same region by Kaswan and his colleague Dr Akashdeep Roy of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune.
All were left in irrigation channels at night, and covered with mud. Marks on their hides indicated that they had been carried and dragged some distance. In the months that followed, their herds avoided using the tracks that led past these resting places.
Roy speculates that the behaviour might not have been seen more widely or reported earlier, as the elephants are using irrigation ditches only found in tea plantations and not in the surrounding forests.
Burials could benefit the animals by separating them from pathogens, he added.
There have previously been reports of elephants appearing to celebrate births, as well as congregating around dead bodies and being reluctant to leave.
African elephants, a separate species, have been seen carrying out so-called “weak burials”, in which the bodies of dead animals are covered in leaves and other material.
Dr Leanne Proops of the University of Portsmouth in England, who was not involved with the Indian research, said it would be groundbreaking to discover intentional burials of the kind described in the study.
Other creatures bury their dead, including some insects that live in nests. “However, in these colony-living species it is a hard-wired behaviour evolved to prevent the spread of disease, and is triggered by chemical signals of decay,” Proops said.
She believed that elephants were far less likely to be driven by simple, innate mechanisms.
“Instead, they would be more likely to be emotionally driven mourning behaviours that might even reflect a level of contemplation and understanding of death previously unknown in non-human animals.
“The sort of considered, individualised burial practices we see in human societies has not been documented in any other species to date.”
Kaswan and Roy said they believed there was strong evidence to support intentional burial. However, the elephants were not actually seen covering up the bodies.
It was possible that the calves fell or were dropped into the irrigation ditches by accident, and that the channels caved in because of the weight of the herd standing close by, they said.
The study was published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa.
Dr Lucy Bates of the University of Portsmouth agreed that more evidence would be needed to be sure.
“If this is burial as we think of it, then it is a very loud shout-out that humans are not unique. But I am not sure we have enough evidence here yet to remove ritualised, intentional burials from the ‘human-only’ list,” she said.
“However, the broader reactions to death that we see in a range of other animal species should remind us that we are likely not the only animals who experience grief and loss in some way.” –TheTimes