3
Mutual Accompaniment
African Elephants
The cloudless, airless sky almost swallows the land. As she raises her trunk to taste the weather, the mother’s face suddenly stills. A rolling lurch pulls her attention inward. The moment has come. Huge wrinkled gray shoulders lean in. Red dust billows and pillows as other mothers trace a circle around the laboring mother. Blood stains her legs. She sways, and the miracle begins—the slippery sliding of an infant pushing his way out from her womb into the space below, a patch of Earth amid churning feet. Like so many tentacles, trunks wind their way, touching and caressing the newborn as his trunk wriggles free from the amniotic sac and he takes his first breath of Africa. One mind, one body, is pulled into the constellation of many. A baby Elephant is born.
Thousands of miles from Brown Bear homes, far from Kamchatka’s biting cold and knife-sharp skies, African Bush and Forest Elephants are raising babies as they have done for millions of years. Despite differences in physical appearance and distance, Bears and Elephants share nesting values and principles. Species may differ on the outside, but inside, they travel similar terrain.
Wildlife nests coevolved with Earth’s diversity of landscapes and climates, as did those of Nature-based humans. Brown Bears fashion dens from saplings and snow. The Algonquin Peoples of northeastern North America used bark, branches, and wood to keep their families safe and warm.1 Caribou journey hundreds of miles between summer and winter homes. The Northern Piikani Blackfoot (Aapátohsipikáni) adapted to seasonal change by moving to warmer climates, pulling their tepees and belongings on wooden-poled travois. In the tropical geographies of the South Sea islands and the Kenyan savanna, little to no shelter is needed. Samoans build thatched fales with open walls and hang coconut blinds when storms blow through. African Elephants follow ancient migration paths leading to water and food during drought, spray water and dust over their skin to block the sun’s powerful rays, and use their bodies to shield and shade their young.2
None of these evolutionary adaptations are combative strategies; quite the opposite. They are means to stay in alignment with Nature’s rhythms. Charlie Russell spoke about Alberta’s snow and ice as he might describe a neighbor. He regarded the natural world as his family and community: “People talk about how peaceful they feel being in nature. I think what they’re feeling is the harmony which comes with mutual respect. If you play by nature’s rules, you begin to fit in and that creates a feeling of mutual belonging. This kind of respect brings a quiet peace. Bears respond to this. They are naturally respectful. . . . Natives generally lived like the bears and other animals because their reality and truth fit in with nature.”3 Fitting in was one of Charlie’s core principles for living congruently and respectfully with Nature’s ways, and it explains why Animals and humans were able to flourish together for as long as they did.
Just as species coevolve with their environments, so do their nests. Evolved nest designs are the fruit of millions of years of refinement, with the overarching goal of keeping a baby in harmony with their surroundings. From conception onward, our ancestors’ babies were nourished by the ecosystem in which they were conceived. The oneness of the ancient continuum was embodied. Their breath, mother’s milk, and bedding all smelled and drew from the Plants and land in which they were born and where they would live their Earthbound lives. Before the baby was born, he was already a child of the land; native stream waters ran through his body as it took form inside his mother. It is only recently in human history that some of our species split from Nature’s ways and kinship, which as a result has forced nearly all species to struggle to survive, including the Elephant. Despite their mild herbivory and gentle natures, they, too, have suffered.
Before European colonization, African Elephants lived in all but the northern deserts of a continent that spans seventy-two degrees of latitude, a distance greater than any other continent on Earth.4 Today, the lives and lands of Elephants are rent and wounded. Young Elephants are born into a brutal world. Millions of Elephants have died by hunters’ guns. Millions of mothers have watched their children being slaughtered, and millions of children have watched their families killed or abducted and sold to zoos.5 Nonetheless, their moral resilience continues to reach into the future, driven by the generative engine of their evolved nest.
If a mother Brown Bear is the North Star for her young, then the natal family is the constellation for infant Elephants. It is a dense network of mothers, allomothers (older females), and younger members of various ages, all of whom are guided by the wisdom of a Matriarch. As they traverse traditional migration routes, the family travels as one, almost amoeboid in their coordinated movements. Individual families are further embedded in a multilayered complex of social and ecological relationships that extend deep into space and time.6
At every moment during her pregnancy and throughout her entire life, a mother Elephant is accompanied by others. Accompaniment is more than physical presence—or rather, physical presence is more than what meets the modern human eye. Accompaniment describes the commitment of one to support and journey with another, to put oneself in the space of mutual need and vulnerability with someone else.7 The depth of this concept is found in its etymological origins. The linguistic roots of accompaniment relate to the Spanish compañero, “friend,” which is derived from the Latin ad cum panis, “to break bread.” In today’s urbanized world of fast food, the ceremony and significance of sharing sustenance in a leisurely manner with others has lost much of its meaning. “Breaking bread”—preparing and eating food together, practically and symbolically—means participating together in life and all its vicissitudes. Liberation psychologist and activist Mary Watkins reflects on this sense of wholeness, which integrates the social, ecological, and psychological: “Psychosocial well-being is not independent of ecological or environmental well-being. Ecopsychosocial accompaniment requires radical availability, steadfast witnessing, self-reflexivity, attunement to others’ needs and desires, and committed response-ability.”8 Embraced by this philosophy, when an Elephant baby is born their transition from womb to Earth is unbroken. They enter the world welcomed, soothed, and safe through accompaniment by the entire group, much like human children are in humanity’s ancestral context.9
Elephant bodies and minds have evolved to be shaped postnatally after spending twenty-two months—almost two years—in utero, more than twice as long as humans’ nine months. During the first months of life outside the womb, infant Elephants depend solely on their mothers’ milk. Even when they begin to venture out to eat other food, they continue to nurse. It is not unusual for babies to suckle until they are four or so years old. While young Elephants are capable of eating on their own at three years of age, they do so in the company of their family. Infants spend much of their proximal time with members of the family other than their mother. Often there is communal suckling amid the flowing dance of touch, play, and assurance.
The Elephants’ close social network makes certain that a baby will experience the uninterrupted security and love needed for healthy infant body-brain development. The intimate exchanges and nursing that a baby experiences ensures healthy development of internal systems such as the immunological, endocrinal, psychosocial, and nervous system.10 This is particularly important for the brain’s right hemisphere, which grows more rapidly in the early years.11
The brain’s left hemisphere is typically involved with focused, logical, and analytical thinking and is wired within itself. The brain’s right hemisphere is generally concerned with social connection, unboundedness, creativity, and emotions and is interconnected with the rest of the brain.12 An integrated brain that utilizes and optimizes the totality of neural capacities relies primarily on the wisdom of the right brain.13 In a sense, the right hemisphere provides the context in which the left hemisphere functions, particularly with respect to lifelong socioemotional intelligence.14 The right half of the brain grows more rapidly in early life likely due to its importance for the development of critical neuronal pathways and patterns of affect through an ecosocial “tuning,” and its governance of psychological and physiological regulation (e.g., breathing and heart rate). Rapid brain growth is one of evolution’s clever ways to help a baby adapt to their new environment.
The galloping growth of the postnatal brain requires nested care to keep up with time-sensitive periods in brain-body development. Greater social connection and embeddedness optimize children’s ability to grow and thrive successfully in the community where they will spend their lives. If carers are unresponsive or neglectful, neural growth factors critical for baby brain development can diminish, which with age may lead to compromised memory and cognitive deficits.15 In contrast, intimate, responsive care correlates with improved cognitive development.16 It is easy to appreciate why nested companionship care is common and crucial to Bears, Elephants, and other Animals whose children’s very survival depends on highly refined cognitive, emotional, and physiological functioning.
Similar to Elephants, our ancestral companionship care was also communal. Communal care is more than a matter of “many hands make light work.” It draws from a deep ancestral bench of values, lessons, and experiences that have accumulated across millions of years. Among many present-day nomadic foragers, communal care extends not only to the nuclear family but often beyond, to nonhumans.17 In Nature-inclusive cultures of mutual care, relationships are fluid, porous, and reflective of a gift economy, giving without expectation of reciprocation.18 At the level of the individual, the way in which ecocultures are maintained and communicated over time is through what we might call “enactivist care”: embodied sensorimotor knowledge that begins with connection between carer and child through proprioceptive, interoceptive, and alteroceptive coordination. An enactivist carer simultaneously holds the child’s perspective and that of the broader environment.
Enactivist care is anticipatory and cognizant of Nature’s dynamics and changes. Similar to Brown Bear mothers, a ready Elephant or human carer is able to detect and respond appropriately to nuanced social and ecological patterns. A baby’s developing, sensing, relational self is enveloped by those around her. In this way, children remain in a connected oneness with the rhythms of mother, family, community, and the natural world. Relational knowledge brings the inner and outer worlds into harmony and enhances a child’s intuition about how to respond well in a variety of future situations. Mothers who are naturally in tune or who have learned these rhythms from elders, for example, know not to overwhelm or confuse their babies.19 Confronted simultaneously with two novelties, such as a new routine and a new food, a human baby may become stressed and dislike the food because it becomes associated with difficult change.
A mother’s intuition can be nurtured by seasoned elders involved in maternal support and childcare. Elder mentorship was how our human ancestral context functioned. Mourning Dove (Humishuma, pen name of Christine Quintasket [Okanagan Salish and Colville]) of the northwest coast of North America20 speaks of her people’s attitude toward children and the role of elders:
Indian people loved their children above all else, for they were the hope of the future and justification for the trials and tribulations of their parents. They guaranteed the perpetuation of the family and continued the upholding of its honor. They were a special gift from the Creator and the promise of a bright and happy future. They were the focus for much of our time and attention, but they particularly spent time with their grandparents, as these had both the most free time to devote to their care and wisdom to pass on to the next generation. Their parents were in the prime of life and were often too busy working and scouting up food to give them the full attention they deserved. Our most important sense of self and continuity, therefore, came from the very old, who were so kind, gentle, considerate, and wise with us, particularly as children.21
Elders are considered the wisdom keepers of the culture—repositories of cumulative understanding, ceremonies, and practices of respect and responsibility toward the Earth. Strongly bonded to the young, elders provide perspectives and patience that teach, guide, and empower the young on their path to adulthood.22 Orphaned Elephants at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust outside Nairobi, Kenya,23 provide spectacular examples of how communal values and care ethics can be successfully conveyed, even by “replacement” elders.
Dame Daphne Sheldrick founded the sanctuary in 1977 to care for the increasing numbers of injured Wildlife, and in particular, orphaned infant Elephants. As a result of poaching, hunting, human attacks, and land appropriation, many Elephants lose their mothers and families. Orphans are rescued and brought to the Trust’s healing compound to recover and, with time, rejoin their wild community. Most arrive severely dehydrated and undernourished, but all are traumatized. Without the Sheldrick Trust’s knowledgeable, supportive care, the infants would perish. Since its inception, the sanctuary has rescued and saved hundreds of infant Elephants who have gone on to join their wild community and bear babies of their own. By emulating Elephant accompaniment, human carers not only save lives but also help replenish and revitalize Elephant civilization.
Elephants at the Sheldrick Trust live in an integrated human and Elephant natal family. Babies are never alone, even sleeping nights with a human carer (“keeper”), arms and trunks entwined. During the day, accompanied by human carers and other orphans, the young Elephants play together and take walks to explore adjacent forests. The human-Elephant natal family nurtures and mentors the growing infants much as their families of origin would.
The sanctuary’s success can be credited to Dame Daphne, who, as a fourth-generation Kenyan, spent decades watching, listening, and acquiring Elephant elder knowledge and cultural understanding. She used her insights to recreate the experience of the wild Elephant evolved nest, even inventing a coconut-based formula similar enough to an Elephant mother’s milk to meet the basic needs of orphaned infants. Daphne and seasoned carers serve as bridging, replacement elders, who act in the absence of a mother to calm infant distress and soothe away despair through accompaniment.
Nonetheless, some of the most important lessons were learned the hard way, as is often the case. For example, early in the Sheldrick Trust’s existence, a little Elephant arrived in need of care. She was so newly born that she was “still covered in the soft fuzz of elephant infancy, her tiny trunk tinged with pink, toenails of pale yellow—soft and brand new.”24 Aisha, as she was called, had been rescued after falling down a well. The fragile infant pulled through with round-the-clock care and attention. Gradually, the tiny frame filled out and the bond between Elephant baby and human mother deepened. One day while out on a walk, they encountered some German tourists. Startled, the infant Elephant stopped, and “her soft pink ears stood out like round dinner plates from her tiny face as she gave a mock-charge that ended with a squeak, an early attempt at a trumpet.”25 The tourists laughed and called out, “Schmetterling,” German for “butterfly.” From that day on, Aisha was called by the diminutive name Schmetty.
When Daphne was satisfied that the young Elephant’s health was sufficiently stable, she decided she could leave Schmetty with a babysitter in order to attend her daughter’s wedding. However, much to her distress, Daphne was informed while she was away that Schmetty was failing to thrive. The moment she returned home, Daphne ran to Schmetty’s side: “As she struggled to get up to greet me, she collapsed in my arms. Cuddling her close, I wept tears of grief, for I knew her life was ebbing away. With her head cradled in my lap, she managed one last loud cry that ended in a sigh and then her body went limp.”26
Daphne realized that Schmetty had believed that she had lost her mother—again. In that moment, she decided that no rescued orphans would be cared for by a single person. They would emulate Elephant communal care, what Elephant families do in the wild, to build in resilience and multiplicity: “During the orphans’ nursery period, the keepers, sufficient in number to represent the orphans’ lost family herd, are in physical contact with the babies twenty-four hours a day.”27
Nested care involves extensive whole-body learning within the particular ecological context in which a community lives. The orphans’ outings at the Sheldrick Trust provide opportunities to find out which Plants and roots are edible, who lives in the neighborhood, and where to find thorny bushes and Trees to brush their skin. Finally, when they are old enough, Elephant infants graduate from the nursery and join an older group whose members are eventually reintroduced into wild herds. Later, when they have joined the broader setting of wild society, the young Elephants learn how to negotiate the vagaries of weather—floods, drought, and resultant food shortages—and possible attacks from Lions. Whether the repatriated Elephants are genetically related to the wild herd or not, the community absorbs the newcomer.
Bonds grow deep in this gifting culture. When one of their members has been injured by a poisoned spear, a gunshot, or another harming agent, Elephants travel to their human family for aid. Former orphans, reintroduced and living wild, often return with their families years later to visit the Sheldrick Trust, new babies in tow. Sometimes the newborn is a grandchild of a former orphan.
It is vital to appreciate that the sanctuary’s work entails more than saving lives. The process of rescuing and resuscitating infant Elephants involves nurturing Elephant ethics and values by reconstructing the Elephant evolved nest through cross-species companionship care. Every interaction reflects companionship care, and every revitalized orphan embodies this ethos, even in infancy, as two infant Elephants at the Sheldrick Trust demonstrate.
Out on one of their daily outings accompanied by human allomothers, two-year-old Naleku and three-year-old Kindani started to argue about who would become the new Matriarch to lead the family on these excursions.28 In the middle of Naleku and Kindani’s negotiations, a third infant, delicate one-year-old Kerrio, was accidentally knocked to the ground by a two-year-old, Mukutan. Instantly, Naleku and Kindani stopped their debating and ran to help Mukutan raise Kerrio back on her feet. This simple scene, which took no more than a few minutes, shows that even though they have individual bodies, the Elephant relational sense of self eschews any ego and overrides individualism. Differences are superseded by a commitment to group well-being and a sense of at-one-ness. The Sheldrick Trust’s healing companionship care can prevent orphaned Elephants’ innate ethic of accompaniment from being quenched by trauma.
The potency of companionship care is reflected elsewhere among Elephants in captivity. An Asian Elephant named Pocha was sent from Germany to an Argentinian zoo in 1968.29 She was mated and gave birth to her daughter, Guillermina, who would spend much of her life in the depths of a concrete trench with her mother. In 2022, when Pocha was fifty-five years old and Guillermina was twenty-two, they were released to a sanctuary, where Guillermina touched soil and Grass for the first time. Despite the deprivation to which she had been subjected, Guillermina is full of joy, laughter, and a sense of infectious humor.
Psychiatrist Henry Krystal, a survivor of German concentration camps, might have noted a parallel between Guillermina and former camp prisoners. After working for many years with other survivors, Dr. Krystal noted that if an individual had been raised in a loving, caring family, then even when confronted with overwhelming trauma, they had a much greater likelihood of restoring their capacity for healing and love after release.30 Perhaps, somehow, Pocha was able to pass on to her daughter the love she had received from her mother. 31 Tragically, however, the torture and deprivation of zoos is too much for most Elephants and other Animals. Many die young, while others age and perish, decrepit and withered inside and out.32 Even companionship care cannot always counteract the magnitude of human miscare and violence.
An infant Elephant’s ethical inoculation comes from immersion in communal values. This includes acquiring competency in customs and dialects that weave through the greater Elephant society. Deep learning comes from experience and watching their elders. While the Matriarch is the main repository of ancient wisdom, other family members must amass enough of her experience to be able to take her place in case of her injury or death. Elephants must become experts in their habitat and culture, including childcare.
From firsthand observation and their own natal experience, every Elephant—male and female—is instilled with the art of childcare. Young males (commonly referred to as bulls) are also infused with their culture’s ethic of care. Unlike their female counterparts who remain with the natal family, bulls leave somewhere between nine and twelve years of age. Not infrequently, they are reluctant to leave, but eventually they do part from mother and family to continue Elephant life in the companionship of older, mature bulls. At about thirty years of age, bulls enter musth, the hormonal period marking the onset of sexual maturity, and begin to court. Meanwhile, they maintain strong emotional bonds with other males who mentor—not dominate—them. Similar patterns of maturation are found in human Nature-based societies, but thoughtful companionship care and lifelong learning from wise elders have become rare in the dominant human culture.
When fragments of humanity broke from Nature ten millennia ago, these practices atrophied. Social cohesion among families and communities began to disintegrate, eventually leading to the dissonance and alienation so widespread today. Instead of the reciprocal, egalitarian, and care-based ethics that characterize Elephants and other undamaged Nature-based cultures, the dominant human society promotes individualism over community, competition instead of cooperation, and relational detachment instead of connection—all of which are contrary to Nature’s predominant ethics and processes.33 Among humans, respect for mothering, inclusion of women in decision-making, nurturing, and gender diversity found in matriarchal, or matrilineal, societies34 were replaced with the hierarchies in patriarchal societies and the enslavement and muting of Plants, Animals, land, water, elders, women, and Nature-based human communities.35
Intensified colonization, capitalist globalization, forced migration, genocide, and industrialization-driven agendas tore traditional communities from their ancestral homelands.36 Those leading a nomadic, subsistence life were forced to abandon it, breaking generations-old circles of communion.37 Postnatal care fell further away from the nestedness of community and Nature, leaving children bereft, their vital needs unattended. Indigenous children were taken from their families and communities and sent to boarding schools across Canada and the United States as a way to deal with the “Indian problem.”38 Destruction of community relationships and social structures decimated ancestral knowledge, purposefully, through the removal of Indigenous children.39
Within settler-colonized societies, many modern mothers lack prior experience in caring for babies, and many have no connection with elder maternal wisdom concerning infant needs.40 Even though neuroscience has increasingly demonstrated the importance of nested care, cultural momentum continues to push practices and beliefs in the opposite direction.41 As a result, a baby’s essential needs are often ignored.42
The term “need” is appropriate. A baby’s cry, for instance, expresses an unmet and unfilled need, and a signal of nonconsent. Needs that repeatedly go unmet undermine a child’s sense of security in the new, unfamiliar world outside the womb. What may appear to be a minor discomfort to an adult may be devastating for a baby who is completely helpless to address her distress without the aid of a carer. Daphne and the Sheldrick Trust’s carer/keepers are fully aware of this.43
Olmeg was a baby male Elephant who was “orphaned when he was just 2 weeks old, when his family stampeded under a hail of poachers’ bullets. It is not known how many elephants were killed or wounded on the day that Olmeg was left an orphan.”44 Although Daphne designed a formula to substitute for Elephant mother’s milk, some orphans refuse to nurse from the large-nippled bottles. Olmeg was one. He was tiny, only a month old, weak and debilitated by severe diarrhea, when he arrived at the Trust.
Olmeg’s situation was extremely dire. It was imperative for him to get sustenance. Yet, despite his severe condition, he would not take the milk that was offered. Then Daphne had an idea. Seeing how he kept walking over to a small tent that had been set up in the garden, she decided to try to offer him milk there. When she did, much to her great relief and joy, Olmeg began to suckle. The tent reminded him of his mother. Later, when another infant showed a similar reluctance to nurse, the carers, inspired by Olmeg and the tent, hung a large gray wool blanket on a laundry line with clothespins. From behind the blanket, Daphne stuck a nippled milk bottle out from beneath while another carer coaxed the infant over. Within moments, the baby began to suck from the bottle. Baby Elephants instinctively push up to their mother’s gray rough-skinned body as they search for and find her nipple to nurse.45 The tent and blanket setups provided a semblance of their mothers and support for the infants’ trunks. Baby Elephants usually have their trunks supported while they nurse, especially those who are so young. The alternative support system offered an adequate substitute for what their mother’s body would have naturally provided.
We have forgotten many similar details that make up the human evolved nest. Gabor Maté describes our modern culture as traumatogenic, the product of successive, unhealed, unresolved traumas filling individuals with discord, fear, and disconnection: “The greatest damage done [to children] by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it.”46 Early toxic stress is the first step on a trauma-inducing pathway. It can lead to disconnection, ill-being, loss of heart, and destructive lifeways across generations.47 Studies of epigenetic inheritance show how children are affected by their parents’ exposure to traumas that occurred before their birth, including those that occurred prior to the children’s conception.48
The fracturing of Nature-based life and the substitution of contemporary medicalized practices for natural ways pervade almost all aspects of infant development in Westernized societies.49 In contrast to gentle birthing in community, few human births today occur in Nature or are even accompanied by supportive family. Only recently have supportive friends and family been allowed to accompany a mother during labor and witness birth, which decreases labor time and perinatal complications.50 In many hospital settings, babies emerge from the womb into a clinical world, dopey from drugs administered to the mother for her labor, blinded by the glare of artificial lights, and exposed to other noxious experiences that are harmful to growing brains and bodies.51 Women’s bodies are frequently anesthetized and subjected to induced labor, ignoring variations in gestation that naturally differ for lengths of up to fifty-five days.52 A baby’s first connection with the world outside the womb is usually plastic-gloved hands, stinging eye medication, and lung suctioning. Medical personnel typically take infants from their mothers to be weighed and examined. These practices have been associated with maternal postpartum depression.53
What happens on the outside—who and what infants experience—also happens on the inside to brain, body, and mind. Being born with a highly malleable brain means that an infant is extremely sensitive and receptive to experience, whether the encounter promotes health or ill-being. If they are met with responsive affection and attention appropriate to their needs, infants grow up with a positive sense of self, good physical health, and well-being. On the other hand, if children experience a lack of emotional and physical support and care, they are susceptible to depression, a lack of confidence, ill health, and interpersonal challenges as youngsters and later in life. An understanding of the evolved nest starkly shows how radically different the experiences of most human babies are today relative to the heritage and environment in which our species developed. These differences are found at multiple levels.
Although humans evolved to raise children together—grandmothers, fathers, kin and nonkin, and other mothers supporting mothers54—our modern, individualistic society tends to forget that mothers require community support. During pregnancy, mothers frequently experience depression that is associated with stress hormones and that can contribute to preterm labor and epigenetic changes in the baby’s capacity to control stress effects.55 For the mother, stress effects include disorganized sleep, decreased responsiveness to stimulation, and lack of bonding with the infant.56 When a mother becomes less responsive, it can directly affect development of the baby’s brain and multiple additional physiological systems.57 Children with depressed mothers, for example, often exhibit chronically high or chronically low levels of cortisol, an important steroid hormone generated in the adrenal glands that is responsible for regulating a broad range of processes, including metabolism and the immune response.58 Those raised in urban poverty, whose families typically experience deprivation, insecurity, and high levels of stress or trauma, frequently show sustained low cortisol and poor immunity.59
When stressed or traumatized, a mother or other carer can become out of step, or asynchronous, with her baby’s natural positive emotions.60 Babies interpret a routine lack of positive synchrony as a lack of love because their sense of reality and self are informed by the microenvironment they experience.61 For an infant, a lack of love and lack of accompaniment signal rejection. We understand this unconsciously as adults. If, for instance, our partner says and does loving things, like bringing us a special present or giving us a hug and kiss, we can usually sense if they are sincere—whether the overtures are made in deep attunement and positive synchrony or are simply empty gestures. Babies who never learn the intersubjective “dance” of attunement can grow up without an understanding of what love is and what it really feels like. Humberto Maturana contends that we evolved to be dependent on loving relationships throughout life as part of human neoteny (the carrying forward of characteristics associated with the young into adulthood): “Physiologically we are social love-dependent animals, so much so that we become ill and our social life at all ages is disrupted, when we are deprived of love.”62
Caring for an infant is similar to building a house. Nonresponsive or inconsistent care in early life is like having an unskilled builder who constructs crooked frames, off-kilter joists, and a poorly attached roof. All of these misalignments undermine the strength and integrity of the whole house, or, in the case of a child, the strength and integrity of their inner physiological and psychological resources that are intended to serve a lifetime. The foundations will not hold when stressors overwhelm a nonresilient system. This is where and how communal support can be so critical. As the Elephants at the Sheldrick Trust illustrate, therapeutic interventions that restore communal care and carer-child synchrony help heal a traumatic breach.63 The absence of this kind of care can lead to very different outcomes.
In the 1980s, in anticipation of the dismantling of South Africa’s repressive system of apartheid, parks and other ecotourist businesses began massive importation of “Big Five” Wildlife (Elephants, Leopards, Lions, African Buffalo, and Rhinoceroses). Most of these species had been extirpated by trophy hunting and poaching. The purpose of the importation was to refill parks and private reserves with charismatic Wildlife, which would, in turn, fill human coffers with ecotourist revenues. The enterprise, however, took an unexpected turn.64
A decade or so later, park biologists started finding the dead bodies of White and Black Rhinoceroses, both of whom are endangered. As the years progressed, the Rhinoceros fatalities exceeded more than one hundred. Ordinarily, park personnel would assume that poachers had killed the Rhinoceroses, whose horns are valued for traditional Asian medicine; but the horns were untouched and intact. After a few chance encounters, including photos taken by a passing tourist, the source of the violence was discovered.
The killers were teenaged male Elephants. Not only were young male Elephants killing Rhinoceroses; in some cases the young male Elephants were observed sexually assaulting them. Scientists were baffled. Such behavior on the part of Elephants at the parks was unprecedented; these giant gray herbivores are renowned and revered for their pacific natures and inclusive ways. It took a careful reconstruction of the young males’ biographies to solve the perplexing, disturbing puzzle.
At the time of the mass importation, there were no practical means to transport someone as large as an adult Elephant. This limitation led to the capture of small infant Elephants whose transport by truck was more feasible. Elephant families were slaughtered by gun-bearing helicopters, and any surviving infants were corralled and tethered to their mothers’ bodies. Following these terrifying experiences and witnessing the bloody deaths of their mothers and families, the one- and two-year-old Elephants sustained further severe traumas: premature weaning, shattering of the natal family, and translocation to an unknown ecology. Instead of four years of continued breastfed nursing and extended nested care beyond weaning, the infants were abandoned to survive on their own with no elder Elephants present to help heal and make sense of the senseless.
Although females suffered severe trauma and had none of the nested care and education they needed from their mothers and allomothers, males suffered their own deficit on top of the trauma. They never had relationships with older, experienced males, a process that traditionally continues companionship care through mentoring. These experiences occurred during critical periods of brain development. When the Rhinoceroses attacks began, the young bulls had prematurely entered musth. Instead of entering musth in their thirties, the traumatized young Elephants began musth at least fifteen or twenty years sooner than is normal. The abnormal onset of musth indicates trauma-induced neurobiological dysregulation underlying the young males’ pattern of aggression, confusion, and disorientation.65
The impacts of human violence on the Elephants have not stopped.66 Trauma, past and present, changes minds, bodies, and cultures. Infanticide, intraspecific violence, and killing—all signs of an epidemic of PTSD that was never observed in Elephants prior to European occupation—are now rampant. Today, female Elephants kill each other and each other’s children, and at times, even their own. In one park, 90 percent of male Elephant deaths are caused by another male—another phenomenon unprecedented prior to European colonization.67
The stories of male Elephant trauma eerily echo those of human infants and young men, who also require extensive developmental support to reach healthy maturity.68 Trauma transmits through time, across generations, and across space, through interpersonal relationships and culture, disconnecting us from our place in family and community and on Earth. But trauma is not our heritage. We evolved accompanied, like our Animal kin, by Nature’s warm embrace. It is no exaggeration to say that by returning to our practices of villaging, with wise elders guiding the young with interpersonal relationships aligned with Nature, we can revitalize human health and well-being. The evolved human way follows Nature’s way, with ongoing practices that support the wellness of all our kin, balancing and harmonizing our relationship with Earth.