PROOF ELEPHANTS MOURN N THEIR DEAD
Tears, burials & boneyard rituals
ELEPHANTS never forget — and new scientific evidence shows they take it an astonishing step further by grieving and even crying just like humans when they lose loved ones!
And the new data reveals the tearful tuskers bury their fallen friends and hold funerals and death watches at elephant graveyards!
Whether these colossal creatures experience intense emotional pain has long been the elephant in the room of animal behavior study. But researchers at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune uncovered shocking new proof the bereaved beasts go out of their way to bury their dead and perform graveside rituals.
The study looked at five dead Asian elephant calves that were found buried in a legs-upright position in West Bengal tea garden drainage ditches after they had been dragged and positioned there by older elephants in a kind of “deliberate burial strategy” — with no traces of human intervention.
The elder elephants then spent time beside the graves, trumpeting and roaring their grief to the skies.
“We further report the elephants in this region clearly avoid the paths where carcasses were buried,” say report rt authors Parveen Kaswan and d Dr. Akashdeep Roy.
It is already documented the hefty herbivores — which are the Earth’s largest land animals and can live to 70 — experience great stress after the matriarchal leader of their pack dies.
They also go to great lengths to retrieve the bones of their dead.
“We may never know exactly what goes on inside the mind of an elephant, but it would be arrogant to assume that we are the only species
capable of feeling loss and grief,” says James Hononeyborne, a veteran n wildlife filmmaker.
James produced David Attenborough’s Africa series, which included footage of a mama Jumbo bo refusing to leave the carcass of her dead calf, standing over it in prayerful respect.
Elephants are highly intelligent, to the point where no less than Clint Eastwood declared that Abu — his pachyderm co-star in the 1990 movie White Hunter Blac Black Heart — hit his m marks so well the D Dirty Harry icon called him “onetake t Abu.”
But when Abu d died in 2002, his bu buddy, a three-yearold orphan elephant, stood guard for days to keep hyenas away from the body. And one elephant that came to visit Abu’s grave was seen with liquid pouring from the temporal glands on the side of the head, as if it were crying!