Connie is a wild-caught female Asian elephant born around 1964. She has lived at the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Missouri, since 1981, when she was purchased from the Abilene Zoo in Texas. Since she was seventeen years old, Connie has undergone at least seventeen natural and artificial breeding attempts. She conceived three times as a result of mating with a bull, each experience with motherhood ending unhappily. One calf, born in June of 1985, was a stillborn female. Another female infant, Maiya, was born in 1991 and lived, but Connie rejected her. After six days, Connie took her back and all seemed well. But Maiya died at nineteen months from heart failure, the result of elephant herpes virus infection. In 2002 a third calf was born to Connie. She was named Asha. Mother and daughter were separated, though, when Asha was transferred to the Oklahoma City Zoo. Now Connie behaves aggressively toward other female elephants, and she has developed a reputation for throwing feces, hay, and stones at onlookers. At these times, she is chained, and on at least on two occasions the restraints were kept on for several days.1
We left Happy and her compatriots at the Bronx Zoo, recipients of accolades and scientific acclaim for their role in helping trample down the idea that only humans possess self-awareness. Other animals have preceded the pachyderm in this status, but somehow the elephants’ accomplishment brings an extra gravitas to the topic.
By explicitly extending recognition of species continuity to include the mind, we have the beginnings of a trans-species psychology, the study of mind and emotions that serves both humans and other animals. The elephant ethologists Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole have been doing this all along, but mostly through “the outside in” of animal behavior rather than from psychology’s “inside-out" perspective. Trans-species psychology allows us to imagine—without undue anxiety about anthropomorphism—what it might be like to walk in elephant “shoes” and experience what these awesome herbivores might be thinking and feeling, in much the same way that we think about ourselves and other people.
Does this mean elephants and people are the same? No, that would be simplistic. It makes no sense to say that any more than it does to say two people are the same. Refining a similar-but-not-the-same perspective requires delving further into neuroscience and psychology to better understand who we are, who elephants are, and what it is that confers simultaneously uniqueness and sameness. We begin from what is known to be held in common—the structures and mechanisms of brain and behavior—and then explore what is different, what are the things that make each person and elephant unique.
Scientists have long argued whether “nature” or “nurture” determines outcome. The nature school holds that inherited qualities predict psychological makeup, maintaining that much of behavior is innate, existing from birth and intrinsic in origin. Though knowledge is acquired, what is already stored in the brain and responsible for emotions, temperament, and actions is, according to this outlook, largely inherited.
In contrast, the nurture school maintains that behavior is determined not so much by inheritance but by who raises us, and how. Identities are shaped in the main by what we experience, not just by what we get from our ancestors. Adherents of the nurture school insist that each person is born largely a tabula rasa, a blank slate that becomes progressively etched by interactions with the surrounding world.
Opposing arguments dragged on over the years, favoring first one theory, then the other. Certain proof eluded both sides, and some data seemed to support each. On one hand, genes certainly emerge in similarities between relatives: familiar patterns of behavior and mannerisms ripple down successive generations, even when upbringing diverges. A woman who has never met her grandmother is surprised to find that they share the same habit of tapping the right foot when perplexed, and both are ardent eaters of peanut butter-and-onion sandwiches. But science has also shown that siblings raised in the same family may seem completely unrelated.
To help get to the bottom of the mystery, a series of studies was conducted to examine the habits and personalities of twins separated at birth and raised apart. Results showed that while in some cases, twins exhibit uncanny parallels, other pairs do not seem, except in physical appearance, to be any more related than passing strangers, and their personalities and temperaments could not be explained by either the family tree or their upbringing. Baffling, but as with many other conundrums, answers are neither black nor white, but a little of both biology and experience.
Research in the area of gene-by-environment interactions (GxE) reveals that inheritance and experience intertwine in ways that cannot be statistically separated, much less predicted. Neuroscience has also found that certain experiences can turn specific genes on or off. A child’s experiences just after birth and even in the womb can influence the expression of her genetic potential. Each experience has an effect on what we think, feel, and act, and can have long-term effects ranging from the molecular to the behavioral.2 The authors of the nearly six hundred-page tome From Neurons to Neighborhoods, commissioned by the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, conclude that “The long-standing debate about the importance of nature versus nurture, considered as independent influences, is overly simplistic and scientifically obsolete. Scientists have shifted focus to take into account the fact that genetic and environmental influences work together in dynamic ways over the course of development.” Furthermore, “Virtually every aspect of early human development, from the brain’s evolving circuitry to the child’s capacity for empathy, is affected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning early in the prenatal period and extending throughout the early childhood years.”3
Psychologists have always considered the parent a critical influence for the child, but it was John Bowlby who brought attention to the critical role of the real, experienced interpersonal bond between parent and child. Bowlby was a psychologist who worked many years with homeless, orphaned, and abused children at the Tavistock clinic in England. In psychology’s early days, students of the mind were preoccupied with exploring the dark waters of the unconscious and the ephemeral world of dreams. C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, and, later, other psychologists such as Melanie Klein, tended to explain children’s emotional problems in terms of primordial drives of instincts and archetypes and their response to their environment. Bowlby brought a deeper, nuanced perspective to early relationships forged during infancy. Attachment processes—the visible and invisible transactions in the routine of baby care that other psychologists took for granted—took on greater dimensions in his theory. He demonstrated the powerful and lasting impacts of what happens between not just two objects but interactive psyches.4
Reminiscent of the mirror test in its ability to connect inner and outer, attachment theory provides an interpersonal map to track something as subjective and intangible as mother’s love, and relate it to objective details of adult life and personality. The faces peering down as we lie in a crib and the arms that enfold us create an internal template that carries through adult life. As Bowlby himself wrote, “How a person construes the world about him and how he expects persons to whom he might become attached to behave ... are derivatives of the representational models of his parents that he has built up during his childhood.”5 Childhood social experiences serve as a lens through which all manner of future relationships—friendships, romantic involvements, and work interactions—are perceived and guide how we act. We have also learned that relationship experiences are not limited to parent-child interactions. The psychologist Judith Harris showed that social influences extend well beyond the family and that peer group interactions can have equal, if not greater, effects.6
Bowlby’s observations have since been confirmed by brain imagery: neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) make it possible to see beneath the “skull beneath the skin” and help to resolve the tangle of contradictions imposed by dichotomous Cartesian thinking. What happens on the outside—our relationships and interactions with the environment—are mirrored on the inside by neurobiological patterns and processes. Viewed through that scientific lens, the dreamy paintings of mother and child by the artists Mary Cassatt and Pierre-Auguste Renoir suggest the active sculpting of tiny neural pathways in the infant’s brain that are stimulated by the cooing and cuddling of maternal embrace. Intimate gazes, smells, and sounds initiate a dialogue between the right hemispheres of caregiver’s and child’s brains, their emotional and social centers. This brain-to-brain conversation of loving touch and soothing sounds tunes the baby’s emotional circuitry rather like the tuning of a musical instrument. By encouraging the brain’s neurochemistry to percolate and flow, minute, imperceptible shifts in tone and color of maternal communications construct the very architecture of cells in the cerebral cortex. As Allan Schore, whose seminal work in neuropsychology has earned him the epithet of “American Bowlby,” explains: “Nature’s potential can be realized only as it is facilitated by nurture.” Neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient, but their synergy leaves us the same and different from each other.7
Current research paints a very different picture from Saint Augustine’s portrait of the mind as an insular, uniquely human entity, separated from body and world like water held in an earthen vessel. Today’s science has shown that the brain does not evolve in a void; instead, it is intrinsically relational, combining inheritance and acquisition to create a unique self. We are not, after all, the sole authors of our sense of who we are.
There is more. Not only is the brain social, but it is emotional. Historically, emotion was considered inferior to cognition, even extraneous to right thinking and living. Descartes and his followers celebrated the affectless mind and left passionate pursuits to artists and aesthetes. George Santayana provided perhaps one the most scathing assessments of emotions when he wrote: “Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it remains about nothing to the end.”8 From the perspective of science, though, emotional experiences are neither “about nothing” nor less important to day-to-day living than rational thought. Indeed, in the context of development and mental processing, they are formative ties that bind the mind. Far from being separate, emotions and cognition—like nurture and nature, mind and body—are partnered processes playing equally critical roles, even in territory conventionally considered best ruled by rationality. The neuroscientist Richard Davidson notes that “complex decisions—who to marry, which job to take—cannot be made solely on the basis of a cold calculus that involves the weighting of pros and cons in a formulaic prescription, rather, such decisions are typically made by consulting our ‘feelings.’”9 An entire field, affective neuroscience, now exists as a complement to cognitive neuroscience, and is devoted to understanding the neural substrates of emotions and feelings. This suggests that Descartes’s famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) needs updating to account for current scientific knowledge: “I feel (and think), therefore I am.”
But are these recent disciplinary reunions pertinent to elephants? Do attachment and other psychobiological theories of self and emotional development apply to the likes of Happy, Echo, and the young South African bulls? The answer is a definite “yes,” which further confirms the importance of Bowlby’s work. By the early twentieth century, ethology and psychology were already diverging fields. Bowlby was one of the few to maintain a vital connection with the theories of the scholars of animal behavior—Robert Hinde, Niko Tinbergen, and Konrad Lorenz. Bowlby’s keen observations of children, along with his knowledge of evolutionary biology, brought a rare fluidity to understanding behavior across species. Using diverse examples, Bowlby illustrated that bonding is present in all mammals and constitutes a phylogenetically evolved adaptive strategy found throughout the animal kingdom. In particular, he saw attachment as central to social obligates such as elephants and humans, whose lives revolve around and are mediated by family and friends.10
From birth onward, parrots, elephants, people, dolphins, chimpanzees, and myriad others depend on relationships to survive. Even for adults, life in the herd or flock is defined by the social web. Unlike chickens and other precocial species—those who start to eat and exhibit other survival behavior on their own just out of the egg or at birth—altricial birds are those whose young, as with mammals, cannot survive without a mother or other protector until they have matured. That is not to say that chickens are asocial, or that they lack the rich emotional lives characteristic of parrots. In fact, the traditional division between precocial and altricial classification is less a dichotomy than a continuum, and researchers have come to recognize that “behavioral development in all parts of the altricial-precocial spectrum is more flexible than originally thought.”11 Chickens and ducks, who practically pop out of the egg pecking, are as sensitive to their early surroundings and interactions as are elephants and macaws.
In basing psychological theory in ethology, Bowlby’s work solidly grounded today’s species-common unitary model of brain, behavior, and mind. The relational, emotional, and trans-species model, including mirror neurons, explain at least in part why humans have such an affinity with elephants and other animals—what E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia.” Attachment theory also explains why elephants act like elephants and not completely like people, and conversely, why people grow up to be people, even when they share so much with pachyderms. We are who we are not just because we are born elephants or people but because we are schooled in distinctly different cultural ways. Hardly an earth-shattering revelation: an elephant is an elephant is an elephant. But the devil is in the details. Attachment theory, and its marriage with neuroscience, called
interpersonal neurobiology, provides an operational approach to explaining species’ differences and similarities. It also brings an appreciation for personality differences.
Elephants’ personalities are as diverse as those of humans. In a pilot study investigating elephant personalities, the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP) in Kenya found that a group of eleven female elephants “show consistent differences between individuals in standard measures of personality traits”; in fact, twenty-seven adjectives applied to describe the variety of individuals.12 Dame Daphne Sheldrick has observed a rainbow of personalities and moods. Elephants, she writes, “can be happy or sad, volatile or placid. They display envy, jealousy, throw tantrums and are fiercely competitive, and they can develop hang-ups that are reflected in behaviour.... They grieve deeply for lost loved ones, even shedding tears and suffering depression. They have a sense of compassion that projects beyond their own kind and sometimes extends to others in distress. They help one another in adversity, miss an absent loved one, and when you know them really well, you can see that they even smile when having fun and [they] are happy.”13
Dame Daphne is in a unique position to judge. She is a kind of latter-day elephant-world mix between John Bowlby and Mother Teresa. A native fourth-generation Kenyan born in 1934 and the founder of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, named after her late husband, David Leslie Williams Sheldrick, Dame Daphne began taking in orphaned elephants at about the same time John Bowlby wrote his seminal works. The Trust is an intricate and complex institution. It comprises an elephant nursery located at the edge of Nairobi National Park and two rehabilitation centers in Tsavo National Park, where young elephants graduate from their nursery and begin their transition back into the wild.14
Dame Daphne’s work started with the two-year-old orphans Samson and Fatuma. Samson lost his mother and family during a severe drought that decimated the robust Kenyan herds, whereas Fatuma’s family fell victim to poaching. But it was not until 1987, shortly after the death of her husband, that Dame Daphne achieved what would become an internationally acclaimed success: rearing infant elephants. Since then her work continues to expand with the steady increase in young elephants in dire need of care. As of 2008 the Trust had successfully rescued and hand-reared eighty-two infant African elephant calves, two from the day of birth, and all younger than a year in age and fully milk de-pendent.15 The Trust has provided an unrivaled up-front-and-personal view of infant elephant development and a window into the elephant soul.
Dame Daphne describes the baby Olmeg as “a complex character, deeply sensitive and easily wounded.” On the other hand, Ajok is a “prankster with a sense of humour, a show-off and the most adventurous.” Dika is “probably the ‘nicest’ character—very gentle, very sensitive, with an innate ‘softness’ yet with depths of hidden strength,” while Edo is “rather shy and remote” and Lesanju is a “very loving, nurturing and responsible little elephant, old for her years.”16 Each one is special, with unique features and personality, yet all are distinctly elephant. Herein lies the clue to Dame Daphne’s success.
Vital to infant elephant salvation has been her ability to raise them like elephants. This is borne not just in the lives saved but in the care she provides, which ensures that the traumatized orphans who are left in a void without others of their kind are brought back to their elephant roots and eventually reintegrated with wild society. All surviving orphans have been raised to become, or are on their way to becoming, full flourishing members of a culture as complex as it is vast.
Elephants are members of the order Proboscidea, so named in recognition of the remarkable and unique trunk that distinguishes them from all other animals. Historically, elephants roamed over immense distances. The rhino-killing youths were savannah African elephants (Loxodonta africana), whose cousins are the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis); the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus); and the Borneo pygmy elephant (Elephas maximus borneensis).17 Asian elephants evoke the same fascination as African elephants, but they hold dominion in the lands of India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and other Asian nations.
The African elephant is the largest of the three, making the species the biggest land mammal. Adult males—bulls—may weigh up to 15,000 pounds, with a shoulder height averaging between ten and thirteen feet. Females tip the scales at 8,000 pounds and average some nine feet at the shoulder. Everything is big about elephants. Their tusks, which are actually incisors, can weigh more than 135 pounds and stretch to ten feet. Elephant ears can span five feet or more, their skin is two and a half inches thick, and they can live into their sixties. It takes almost two years’ gestation before a 200- to 250-pound baby elephant comes into the world. Yet despite their formidable dimensions, elephants eschew aggression and are known for making friends with rhinoceroses rather than for killing them.18 And something else, something that perhaps provides a more telling glimpse into their minds: elephants move with remarkable deftness and grace.
Elephant stealth is legendary in the stories hunters tell around the smoky brightness of the campfire: an intelligence and keenness of mind evokes an extra measure of uncertainty in the anxious human.19 Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, husband of Karen Blixen, known more commonly as the author Isak Dinesen, wrote about elephants’ tracking abilities and the quiet with which they move. A voracious professional big-game hunter after the First World War, the baron describes a fearful moment in the Congo when he became prey to the giant bull he sought: “Not a sound was heard—perhaps he had made off. Then I heard a faint crackling behind the tree against which I was leaning. I looked cautiously over my shoulder. Yes, there was the tip of his trunk swinging only a few yards from my feet.”20
Dalene Matthee also writes about elephants. Her name is unfamiliar to most readers outside South Africa, but her books have been compared to the challenging realism of D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. Saul, the main character in Circles in a Forest, tells about his encounter with an elephant in the Knysna woods: “He heard nothing, not the snapping of a twig or even a movement. Nothing. He had just got off the footpath beyond the sled-path when he looked up and saw him. The elephant.”21
Beyond their obvious intelligence, elephants are famous for their family life. Elephant society, like that of humans, is composed of an intricate, nested, and delicate network of relationships.22 African elephants typically live in stable families comprising ten individuals on average. Sometimes families temporarily coalesce with others to form a larger group, a so-called fusion. Core social groups may persist for decades, and adult females remain with first-order relatives when any separation, or “fission,” takes place.
While the majority of elephant research has focused on the females— the lure of baby elephants milling around giant wrinkled feet portrayed in so many films—Joyce Poole made one of the earliest forays into the impressive world of bull elephants to discover that they too had an intriguing subculture and language. Male elephant rearing is divided into two major phases.23 From birth until the ages of nine to fifteen years, young male elephants live with their female siblings and cousins in the natal, family unit. Early life is rooted in female culture with female ways. But as they move from childhood to their teens, male calves gradually decrease physical closeness with their mothers, or are shooed out. At puberty, they leave their siblings and cousins and travel with other bachelors in a second phase of socialization, interrupted only by the occasional visit home.24 Young bulls are initiated into the masculine world to learn the basics of elephant etiquette and the complexities of bull life in the great expanse throughout which they roam and must survive.
Bonding between and infant and his mother occurs early on, and a young elephant may suckle from his mother until about four years of age. Yet while it is the mother with whom the infant interacts the most, a young elephant has more exchanges cumulatively with other family members: elephant life is communal.25 The elephant care village is made up of “allomothers”—other females, siblings, aunts, and cousins who tend to every aspect of calf upbringing, though on the rare occasion when a baby tries to suckle from another calf’s mother, that female usually rejects the trespasser. Social exchanges include such physical greetings as touching trunks on different parts of the body and mouth or rubbing against each other. Touching also provides comfort and assurance when a baby becomes distressed from straying too far afield.26
Elephant society includes a strong sense of belonging and family identification. This awareness, sense of connection, placement, and relatedness extend beyond the family unit. One expression of this unity is a strong value of reciprocity, and to a certain extent a kind of leveling that marks relationships. For example, the infant who has been tended by young females, will, when their allomothers bear their own babies, reciprocate by caring for these new young family members. Regardless of genetic relatedness, rank, or gender, all elephants seem to show concern about ill or dying individuals. The literature is replete with examples. Elephants have been observed gathering around and trying to rouse an ailing elephant to his or her feet, as we saw with Ely, who was born with poorly articulated carpal joints.
The matrix of herd life is also a place where ecological and social knowledge is gained. Learning and knowledge extend beyond the inner dynamics of the family. On average, a single family unit will annually encounter 25 other families (or roughly 175 adult females), so they must be able to recognize and communicate with each. Indeed, playback experiments have demonstrated that an adult female may be familiar with the contact calls of around 100 others in the population.27
Knowledge relating to geography and events—where and when specific foods can be had, for instance—are reflective of a relational geometry, in which the matriarch represents the apex of knowledge. For the young, objective knowledge is gathered by direct trial-and-error experience mediated through older, more knowledgeable family members. For example, at about three months of age, young elephants, still nursing, start to browse vegetation. The student will reach up with her trunk to the mouth of a family member to touch and taste what her older relation is eating; thus she learns what is edible and how it tastes and smells. Learning how to drink and manipulate (trunkulate?) the trunk is also a matter of observation and practice. Play forms a central activity of young, growing elephants and, beyond sheer joy, serves to establish relatedness and autonomy.
Compared with most other species, elephants are extremely well studied, and a tremendous volume of data has been collected from field observations.28 As a result, many aspects of elephant society have been made transparent. However, subjective knowledge is also a necessary ingredient in the formula for successful human rearing of an elephant orphan. All of Bowlby’s nuanced infant-parent communications must be emulated, adapted to elephant culture, and planted into the Sheldrick orphans’ heads if they are to survive outside the Trust compound. Without Dame Daphne’s thoughtful care and extraordinary knowledge of elephant culture, the majority of rescued infants probably would have perished either in the progress of their rehabilitation or after their reintroduction into the bush with their wild compatriots. Indeed, despite the sterling skills of Dame Daphne and her Elephant Keepers, some infant elephants arrive already beyond even her capabilities and tragically succumb.
The evolving mind absorbs like a cognitive and emotional sponge. During the period when a child is heavily or even completely dependent on her family to survive, the brain is considered to be at its most “plastic”—most receptive to the environment. Such receptivity permits successive generations to keep up with rapid environmental changes, but it can also create vulnerability if what a child learns meshes inadequately with the adult environment. It often happens in wildlife rehabilitation that an animal raised by humans develops a “bicultural” identity. Such a cross-fostered individual (one reared by a member of a different species) may acquire too much human culture or too little of her species of origin to make a successful transition from human midwifed care to independent living with conspecifics. The outcome can be painful, even fatal.29 A reintroduced cub or fledgling may not have learned the requisite cultural skills of a youth taught by conspecific elders. Some newcomers commit unwitting trespass because they have not learned social etiquette or have been released near a group other than their own kin: the group may reject a youth for violating rules and territory. A similar problem is encountered with individuals such as Billy Jo, a male chimpanzee who lived in sanctuary at the Fauna Foundation outside Montreal.30
Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates in captivity are either captured from the wild or captive-bred. In either case, the individual is usually reared by humans or someone other than his or her birth mother and family. Primate captivity and breeding serve to provide exotic pets, human-surrogate experimental subjects for laboratories, and performers for entertainers.31 It is not known whether Billy Jo was wild-caught or born in captivity. Clearly, though, he was forcibly taken from his mother and raised by humans and allowed little if any interaction with other chimpanzees.
Until he was a teenager, Billy grew up much like any young boy might: going fishing, hanging out, eating ice cream and junk foods when not caged.32 Suddenly, at the age of fifteen, he was sold to a biomedical laboratory, where he served the next decade and half as an experimental subject undergoing more than two hundred anesthesia “knockouts,” followed by painful medical procedures. He lived alone in a suspended cage lined up with other chimpanzees similarly confined, and instead of his former regimen of intimacy with humans, he encountered only laboratory personnel covered in white protective garb, including masks, bearing anesthesia dart guns or doling out food through the cage bars.
When Billy finally was released into sanctuary, his conditions improved dramatically. However, he was unable to mobilize one important resource in psychological recovery from trauma: social support. Although potential chimpanzee friends were available in the sanctuary, Billy did not know how to appropriately socialize with other chimpanzees, and they, for their part, could not understand him. Because of his upbringing, Billy was attuned to human habits and culture, not those of chimpanzees. He eschewed foods favored by chimpanzees—leaves, branches, hard-shelled nuts—in favor of popcorn, pizza, and other snack foods and beverages. These delights were far more interesting than the nutritious foods offered to him. Unlike other chimpanzees who usually wait and inspect this less-than-typical fare, Billy would immediately bite into these goodies without hesitation.
He used a plate and plastic utensils instead of eating with his hands, which most other chimpanzees do, and enjoyed “twirling” spaghetti on his plastic fork. Billy completed each meal by taking a napkin and carefully wiping his mouth and chin. When given the option, he chose to pour all his drinks into a paper cup and save it for future use. If he saw someone with a cup of coffee, he would ask for some for himself—gesturing for cream, sugar packets, stir stick, and napkin—then pour and stir the ingredients into the coffee, gently place the stirrer down, and take a slow sip. He showed other human proclivities.
Billy was obsessed with washing his hands and face, and after pointing to a box of tissues, he would carefully lift and use one to blow his nose. He enjoyed dressing in human clothes such as baseball caps and shirts, taking care to put them on straight. He also enjoyed flipping through magazines, especially those with photos of human women, and enjoyed painting with different colors. However, not all of Billy’s human-derived habits and ways brought pleasure, and the uneasy identity born of cross-fostering created profound difficulties.
Encounters with other chimpanzees, even though carefully orchestrated by the sanctuary director, continued to fail, and eventually Billy was severely attacked by the others. After the incident, he would lock his door at night and check it several times to confirm that it was secured. Not only did he suffer from the loss of his early family and social group, but neurobiologically, psychologically, and emotionally, he was attuned to human ways. Chimpanzee ways were foreign. This life in limbo—perhaps what might be called chimpanzee in body and human in mind, or dual identity—caused intense periods of depression and sadness that the sanctuary was able to address only in part. Cared for and loved by human sanctuary caregivers, Billy nonetheless remained suspended between cultures.
In other cases, intervention by another species can be the saving grace. Take Owen, a young hippopotamus orphaned by the tsunami in Kenya, who was taken in by Mzee, an ancient tortoise: a picture of an odd couple if ever there was one. International news carried endearing pictures of the young hippopotamus gazing lovingly up into the weathered-looking face of the tortoise, a partnership that ended only when humans took away Owen to be with others of his species.
Then there is the injured crow whom the ethologist Konrad Lorenz nursed back to health. When the crow recovered and matured, he fell in love with a Swiss woman from a nearby village, ignoring all bird companions. Eventually, his love spurned, the crow returned to Lorenz’s home, still indifferent to his fellow corvids. Recently, a couple filmed another love-struck crow from their neighborhood who saved and cared for a young stray cat. Diligently and tenderly, the crow brought food, even worms, to nourish the fragile feline. Over time, the two began to play together, enjoying a newfound companionship.
Across the ocean, Jessica the hippopotamus, a member of a species considered to be one of the most dangerous, was rescued by the Jouberts, who found her alone on the banks of the Blyde River in South Africa. Jessica probably had become separated from her mother during devastating floods and had washed downstream. Through meticulous nursing by her human rescuers, Jessica recovered from her trauma to become part of the family. A visit to the Jouberts’ often finds Jessica, after a hippo-style swim, ambling her bulky frame into the kitchen, where she is hand-fed fruit; later she is tucked into bed on the porch next to Za Za the Rottweiler. The Jouberts speak frankly about their relationship with her: “We realized that we were now her parents.” Film clips of this trans-species family attest to their mutual commitment.33
Interspecies love goes both ways. Feral children, orphaned or abandoned, have been taken in by families of other species. Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book tells of the boy Mowgli, who was nursed and mentored by wolves, snakes, and leopards, and Francois Truffaut’s film L’enfant sauvage, describes the “wild child” found roaming the woods of southern France. Some children become attached to the wolves or dogs with whom they have lived to the point of choosing their adoptive species over humans when they are forced to return to “civilization.”34
Neuroscience shows why, while looking so different on the outside, elephants and people are much alike underneath, and attachment theory shows how what we inherit interacts with what we experience. Internal and external processes of bonding may be common across species, but variations in how and by whom we are raised are responsible for the many variations on the theme of being an animal. This knowledge brings us one step closer to understanding why at times elephants may not act very pachyderm, as in the case of the rhino-killing bulls, and why their naturally gentle behavior has come to resemble aspects of humanity that we would rather not own.