Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
This is just SO cool and so cute!!! Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a wildlife & conservation organization, is celebrating their first “great-grand-baby” elephant! One of their many programs is raising orphan wildlife, primarily elephants. Their program has been going for over 5 decades! They discovered the right formula to sustain milk-dependent baby elephants, and I believe rhinos as well.
This year they’ve reached 52 calves born to ex-orphans in the wild, which is absolutely amazing. But now they have their first one born to one of THOSE calves, making ex-orphan Yatta a grandmother!
Some very sweet elephant behaviours I read about in Carl Safina’s Beyond Words:
a young elephant kneeling down in front of their car in a playful way
and throwing zebra bones at the researchers, trying to get them to play
with him
an 8-month-old elephant trying and failing to pick up some grass with her trunk (the author: “it reminds me of someone learning to use
chopsticks”) and whose mother then pulled a sheaf of grass and ate it
while making sure her daughter was watching the demonstration
baby elephants suck their trunk for comfort (as we all know!!) but also
like to swing and whirl it around as they try to figure out what it can
do and how to use it, and sometimes accidentally step on their trunk and
trip over it
“often, babies reach with their trunks into the mouths of family members, taking a bit of what they’re eating”
all the female elephants in a family rushing over to help when someone’s baby trips and falls, while making comforting vocalisations
an enormous adult male elephant walking up to a family group and making an exaggerated display of nonchalance, with his trunk casually draped over his tusk, to show the other elephants that he’s not scary
researchers messing with an elephant family by collecting a bit of urine when the elephant walking at the back of the group stopped to pee, then driving some distance to leave the urine ahead of them. “When they encountered fresh urine from an elephant they knew was behind them, they seemed truly baffled, as though thinking, “Wait a minute—how’d she pass us? She’s back behind us!”
mothers instructing their babies to switch to the other side of their body and walk in their shade when the day is very hot
an elephant child trying to climb all over a bigger male teenager who was lying down for a nap, receiving a kick in response, and running back to its mother in alarm—then the teenager followed and lay down flat beside them as if to apologise and invite the child to climb onto him again
elephant children throwing tantrums when they are being weaned and their mother blocks them from nursing (“He got so upset, pushing her, poking her and tusking her, […] it was like, ‘Ooh, I hate you!”)
researchers followed a family that included a baby who was born disabled, with twisted forelegs that he couldn’t straighten. The entire elephant family (from the adults to the baby’s 8-year-old sister) nurtured him, patiently helping him up every time he fell over, “slowing their pace to his disabilities, continually turning to watch his progress, waiting as he caught up from behind” until (after a few days) the little one managed to straighten his legs and learn to walk normally
a researcher once saw an elephant pluck up some grass and place it in
the mouth of another elephant whose trunk was badly injured. Also adults are sometimes seen carrying sick baby elephants on their tusks
a researcher saw a baby elephant who was wary of going into the water, wrap her trunk around her mother’s tusk as her mother patiently entered the river with her, like a child nervously grabbing her mother’s arm
“little elephants show lots of concentration while working to master
such tasks as picking up sticks. A youngster might twirl and twirl its
trunk around a single blade of grass, finally grasp it, drop it and have
a hard time getting it back, then simply place the grass blade atop its
head”
Stuff like this reminds me that not only are Elephants immensely intelligent and deeply social, they also generally consider humans to be legitimately “cute/adorable” in the same way we do for dogs or cats.
This playful elephant is likely acting accordingly.
As an animal trainer I know for a fact that many species enjoy training sessions and benefit highly both physically and mentally. So even if we assume this was a trained behavior, (one can argue that the cupped hand coming from the right at the end is holding a treat/reward), is the elephant benefiting mentally? Would they perhaps still do this with the human’s reaction being the reward?
Let’s set the scene for folk who aren’t as familiar with elephants, before getting into your questions. This is absolutely not a wild elephant, and definitely is a trained behavior.
There’s a couple ways you can tell what the situation is, but the easiest/most immediately obvious one is: it would never be safe to be this close to an wild African elephant. That’s how you get squished. So this is obviously a situation where the elephant is habituated to humans, and what’s more, is considered safe enough to be in close proximity to the public without any sort of barrier. That indicates a pretty high level of training and management. I don’t know where this is or what the exact situation is, but it looks like a tourist interaction in Africa that’s being proctored by at least one person standing out of frame.
With regard to how I know this is a proctored situation: when you’re working around elephants, the trunk is the most dangerous part of the elephant. It can reach you at a distance you wouldn’t expect, hit hard, grab, throw, and move at surprising speed. That’s why you see a lot of zoo training sessions frequently ask the elephant do a trunk target, or a “trunk up” (curling it back up on top of their head) while working on other behaviors that require staff to be in close proximity to the fence. It means, basically, that you’re safer when you know where the trunk is at all times, and asking them to do something specific with it helps ensure people around the elephant are safe. I went on that short detour to illustrate why the big thing I saw when I watched this video is that the elephant in it is reaching it’s trunk out towards the tourist’s head - and nobody is worried about it or does anything to intervene. That tells me this is something considered safe in this situation, which means’s its an expected and normal behavior, and given all things, probably cued. If it wasn’t an approved situation, and there was a safety concern, the person running it would have intervened with the elephant or the person would have been told to move (or just grabbed and pulled away, if needed).
As to the behavior itself… a friend of mine who works directly with African elephants so eloquently put it: an elephant would absolutely steal a hat, but they wouldn’t necessarily give it back! Elephants will totally do things to get a reaction from people around them. Behaviors that make people laugh or scream or do other interesting things absolutely keep happening because they’re basically self-reinforcing. But there’s more to this behavior than just stealing the hat. It’s actually a chain of three or four behaviors: grab hat, hide hat in mouth, look away/disengage, return hat. That’s a very specific routine designed to get a reaction from tourists, and is obviously trained. Hats don’t taste good! So while an elephant might grab one and put it in it’s mouth to taste out of curiosity, they’d have no reason to keep it in their mouth for that long unless it’s being reinforced. Similarly, it’s probably that giving the hat back to the tourist is also trained. There might actually be a cue for doing so that we’re not seeing because it’s being given off-screen. Most elephants would just drop something like a hat once it wasn’t interesting (or maybe give it to the person with treats to see if they’ll get a snack in trade). So it’s definitely clear that this whole behavior is trained. As noted in the tagged question, yeah, at the end it looks like the person standing off-screen is handing a reinforcer to the elephant.
All training is mentally enriching, so to that extent, yeah, this interaction is a type of beneficial mental stimulation for the elephant. We have no way to know if they’d do it without the reinforcer, or even how this came about. Maybe the elephant originally stole people’s hats for the fun of it, and someone decided it would be fun to put that on cue as part of a gimmick for tourist encounters; maybe it had to be trained from scratch. If the cue and the reinforcers were removed, the elephant might continue to do the behavior for a while (because that’s the routine): if the reaction of the person is inherently reinforcing enough for that elephant it might persist, but if the elephant is doing it because they’re being asked to and getting rewarded for doing so, I’d expect them to stop offering the behavior after a couple times without a food reinforcer. Good question!
(Also, this is your regular reminder that “[elephants] generally consider humans to be legitimately “cute/adorable” in the same way we do for dogs or cats” is an myth, and anthropomorphizing elephants to this degree is both inaccurate and dangerous. The origin of the claim is a tweet by a college student, who later clarified she based it on headlines she found on Google, and she did not actually check the content of the articles.)
Hey while you're loving elephants: Denver Zoo has two teenage boy elephants and one Old Man Elephant named Groucho, and lately they've had the lads housed with him so he can teach them Proper Elephant Manners like how bulls raise teenage boy elephants in the wild. Bull elephants are apparently very into being parents but due to the matriarichal nature of most herds, they really only get to raise calves after they've hit puberty. My point is, one of the boys was being annoying and chasing rabbits so Groucho came up and jabbed him in the ass with a tusk, the lad ran around the enclosure crying then came back and did a lot of "I'm sorry I'll be good now dad" fawning and it was adorable.
OH MAN SEE SEE SEE i wish we knew so much more about how bull elephants interact with herds and families - we’ve documented bull elephants traveling to matriarchal herds and fake wrestling with male calves, and we’ve documented bulls protecting orphaned calves, but in god’s name i want every in and out about it. everything we know about elephant social interaction is not enough. it’s a Thing that introducing old bulls to a population lowers the amount of younger bulls in musth, also known as the state in which bull elephants desire nothing but murder and possibly sex, but - i want to know the precise mechanisms. old bull elephants teaching younger bulls manners renders me VERKLEMPT. i just wanna know every secret elephants have.
this is incredible though. peak teenage boy. groucho has his hands full and i fucking love him for that. get their asses, groucho.
So from what I understand, as remembered from nature programs and the zookeeper lecture, is that Old Bulls reduce the violence i young bulls by putting them through Elephant Finishing School.
This is better documented in African Elephants than asian ones because they’re easier for elephant biologists to observe by the means of ‘sitting on top of a jeep and taking notes’ but the general scope goes like this:
Elephant herds are largely matriarichal as both a means of protection- elephants have a long childhood and it’s easier to protect calves in a group, AND as a socio-political means of sexual choice.
An African elephant is pregnant for nearly two years, then she spends at least 3-5 years with that calf completely dependent on her, so she only gets a few opportunities to have babies before she hits menopause, and it’s a lot of damn work so she is naturally EXTREMELY picky about who she mates with. And if she’s younger, her mom, sisters and grandmothers will also be real picky about who she mates with and WHEN too- can’t go around risking a teenage pregnancy, especially not with asubstandard male. Elephants also have a pretty clear idea of what they want out of a Male too: they have a marked preference for Large, Old, Socially Adept Males. Large males are HEALTHY males with all thier bones in place and functioning digestive tracts. OLD males are healthy, have good intelligence to stay alive, and have good teeth. Socally Adept Males can make friends, get along with her whole family, won’t engage in dangerous behaviors like trying to kill her calves or grandmothers. It’s a good system that produces robust, intelligent and helpful calves.
This means however, that most female elephants are into Dilfs, or even Gilfs. Which is extremely frustrating when you are a horny teenage boy elephant, so they go a bit nuts with hormones and social isolation and get involved in teenage elephant gangs and do things like murder rhinos out of sexual and social frustration.
BUT! If there are Large, Old, Socially Adept males about, they like being parents too, but are largely pushed out of the role by the matriarichal herds and their strict group politics that exist to prevent unsuitable mating. So They turn thier attention to these violent orphans and like your beloved Batman go “I’m gonna parent the shit outta that.”
They mostly do this by herding the Lads around, pointedly demonstrating Behaviors like “How to dig for roots so you don’t starve” or “How to knock over a tree” or “Greeting a Matriach Properly so she doesn’t sic her descendants on you”, and disciplinary behaviors like “Jabbing naughty Lads in the ass with a tusk” and “Hitting you in the face with a branch until you STOP THAT” . This is WILDLY beneficial for the young males under thier tutelage, who are less likely to die of accidents, and start mating earlier because they’ve had a Suitable Gentleman make introductions for them, like they are fancy men at a regency-era ball being intoduced to the debutantes.
Imagine some Fine and Respectable DILF wandering around adopting teenage delinquents and spraying them in the face with a windex bottle full of vinegar until they learn how to be proper upstanding gentlemen and you’re getting close.
