He elephant graveyard myth It is deeply rooted in popular culture. A recent study of the remains of five buried Asian elephant calves gives credence to what until now was a legend. The research has been published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa. The authors of the study, Indian Forest Service, describe five cases of elephant calves buried with their legs upright inside tea plantation irrigation ditches in North Bengal, India. The surrounding terrain is compacted by the feet of several elephants and the five calves have injuries that suggest dragging after death. These are the reasons that point to intentional burial practices.
The conclusion attributes to elephants an understanding of death and grief potentially different from that of any other species, except for the human.
Bury our own
Archaeological evidence suggests that our hominid ancestors have been doing this for at least 100,000 years. burial rituals. For us, and presumably for the first to initiate this practice, burial is not just getting rid of bodies, it is a expression of painand also a tribute to the life lived.
All cultures dedicate time and effort to funeral rituals as a way to commemorate life, and burials are a clear indication of the sensitivity and empathy of our species. In fact, commonly believed that our reactions to death are the clearest sign of humanity.
To date, evidence for mental representations of death similar to ours is scarce. Except for isolated cases, no species has been found that systematically bury their dead in the ritualized way that we do.
Are elephant burials intentional?
Perhaps it is risky to eliminate burials from the list of exclusively human practices. But the reports of the five elephant calves from North Bengal are at least intriguing. The researchers did not directly observe the burials, which raises many questions. It is possible that the dead or weak calves fell into the ditches while being transported, and that the family's subsequent panic caused the ditch to collapse around the bodies. That is, there was no intentional burial.
However, the reports are consistent with what we know about elephants' reactions to death. Elephants have been observed carrying the carcasses of dead babies, and often display behavioral changes when approaching the dead body of a family member or another individual.
Elephant responses range from silence, sniffing and touching body parts with the head down, to even moving or trying to wake the carcass and, on rare occasions, place mud or large palm leaves about the bodies. It is likely that all of this amounts to what, in humans, we would recognize as mourning or mourning.
understand death
Elephants aren't the only animals that show interesting reactions to their dead companions. When a crow dies and is discovered by another, it emits an alarm signal that attracts other crows in the area, a practice that has been interpreted as a funeral. But this social gathering could also give the crows the opportunity to learn about a danger they must avoid, and it may not really be a farewell, in the traditional sense of funerals.
Some social insects, such as ants, dispose of their dead. When they detect certain chemicals released by dying or dead individuals in their colony, remove the bodies. Some species even bury them, possibly to limit the possibility of disease transmission.
However, as researchers of animal behavior and, more specifically, grief, we do not have sufficient reason to assume that this extraordinary “corpse management” behavior means that ants have any kind of understanding of life and death. In the 1950s, the biologist and entomologist EO Wilson applied a toxic substance to live ants, causing their nestmates to respond as they would to a dead animal: they attempted to drag the unfortunate individual out of the nest and threw it to a safe distance.
Similar responses to toxic substances have been observed in rats, which bury others that have been dead long enough to become putrid. Like Wilson's ants, they also try to bury anesthetized but still alive rats. The ants even try bury wooden sticks with the same smell. Some animals that live in society are programmed to remove decaying objects from their nest. These examples of rats and ants are clearly different from the human burials and mourning behavior we see in elephants and other species, including orcas.
Although it is not yet known whether elephants really decide to bury their own, it is undeniable that their emotional reactions to the death of family members or companions are extraordinary and deeply moving. These reactions remain difficult to explain without suggesting that elephants have some kind of concept about the meaning of death.
Lucy A. Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative and Developmental Psychology at the University of Portsmouth.
Leanne Proops is an Associate Professor of Animal Behavior and Welfare at the University of Portsmouth.
This article was originally published in The Conversation.
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