Elephants Give a Helping Trunk
Elephants
are known to be highly social and intelligent. Now there is evidence
that they engage in something that looks very much like a group hug when
a fellow elephant is in distress.
Joshua
Plotnik, who leads a conservation and education group called Think
Elephants, and teaches conservation at Mahidol University in Thailand,
studied elephants at a park in Chiang Rai Province in Thailand, to look
for consolation behavior.
As
defined by Frans de Waal, Dr. Plotnik’s Ph.D. adviser at Emory
University, consolation behavior involves bystanders responding in a
reassuring way to an animal that is in emotional distress because of a
conflict with another member of the group.
“We’re
pretty confident it’s relatively rare” in animals, Dr. Plotnik said in
an interview. He said there was good evidence for the behavior in apes,
wolves and some birds. And he said there had been anecdotal reports of
such behavior in dolphins and elephants.
Elephants
clearly have strong emotional connections to other elephants and are
highly intelligent, so it made sense to think that they might console
one another. To find out, Dr. Plotnik observed 26 elephants in six
groups at a managed park.
When
one elephant was disturbed, Dr. Plotnik said, other elephants —
bystanders — gathered around. They made chirping sounds and touched the
distressed elephant, trunk to mouth or trunk to genitals, which are
reassuring gestures, for elephants.
Dr.
Plotnik said that since he couldn’t always observe the original source
of the distress, he couldn’t say that the behavior met the narrow
definition of consolation, as it was not clear whether it followed
conflict. The elephants might have been scared by a person, dog, or, in
some cases, a noise that humans couldn’t hear.
But, he said, in every other way the elephant behavior showed that they were acting to reassure elephants that were upset.
He and Dr. de Waal reported the findings in an article last week in PeerJ, an online scientific journal.
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