We Are Family
In the late 1960s, a few years before Cynthia Moss arrived in Kenya, another towering pioneer of behavior, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, first realized that the basic unit of elephant society is a female and her children. Forty years later, Iain resonantly recalled for me the extraordinary impression this made on him at a time when everyone had assumed that males led everything in the world. “When I first realized that elephants were organized by families headed by a matriarch,” Iain told me, “I saw in them an undaunted female intelligence.” (Much more recently, a man named Dhruba Das, who trains Indian villagers to reduce human-elephant conflict, has commented, “‘Intelligence’ isn’t even the right word. It’s more like wisdom. They can sense things. They know what to do. They’ll take whatever a situation offers them and use it to their best advantage.”)
An older female, her sisters, their adult daughters, and all their children live together as a “family.” I’ve been using this word casually. This is what it means. Raising a baby elephant takes a village. The family is the foundation for shared infant care and child rearing.
Usually the oldest female serves as the “matriarch,” the prime holder of living history and knowledge. The matriarch makes decisions about where the family will go, when, and for how long. She serves as the family’s rallying point and chief protector, and her personality—whether calm, nervous, firm, indecisive, or bold—sets the whole family’s tone. The family draws on knowledge stored in the brains of the matriarch and her experienced sisters. Families can last for decades. While a matriarch is alive, her daughters are very unlikely to strike out on their own, even temporarily.
Female elephants and juveniles live their lives in social relationships within families, between familiar families, and among adolescent and adult males. Relationships radiate into a wide, layered social networks throughout the whole elephant population. Female elephants form enduring friendships. Two or more families having special friendly affinity for each other are called a “bond group.” Bond groups might be made up of relatives, a former family that has split into two, simply friends, or any combination. Adolescent males leave their families to socialize with other males, doing considerably more wandering.
“See this one, trailing behind?” Vicki points to a rather small elephant following several others at a distance, across a span of short grass. “That’s Emmett, a fourteen-year-old boy.” He has left his family—and perhaps been encouraged to leave—because of his age. “He just keeps following different families.” It’s a tough transition. He looks like he feels lonely. I wonder if he feels rejected. He’ll follow families until he learns how to be on his own among other males. Adult males live in groups or wander among and between families, searching for the thing that interests all males.
Males grow faster than females and continue growing for twice as long; they can end up twice as heavy. Females reach nearly full body size at around twenty-five years old, eight feet at the shoulder, and can continue bulking to around six thousand pounds. As males continue growing they can reach eleven to twelve feet at the shoulder; the largest can weigh twelve thousand pounds.
Growing numbers or a matriarch’s death can cause families to slowly split up. On the other hand, fragmented families sometimes merge. Their splitting and merging is called “fission-fusion.” Because elephants, like humans, live in fission-fusion groups, a striking thing about them is that what they’re doing makes sense to us. Many of the most complicated societies, including ours, elephants’, apes’, wolves’, and certain whales’, are also fission-fusion.
Whether families split or merge is really about personalities. “I can tell you,” Vicki adds, “that the most important thing for an elephant family is: ‘We’re all together.’ I can also tell you, I’ve never seen, or even heard of, an elephant family simply breaking down for no clear reason.”
Vicki has studied why forest elephants in central Africa gather in particular forest clearings. “At the start, I had all these very nice, logical theories like: finding mates, or special minerals in the soil,” Vicki says. “I found no evidence—at all—for them.” Her conclusion: elephants go to certain spots because other elephants go there. “No better reason. They do things because”—she shrugs—“they just want to.” A major rule of elephant society is that individual personalities trump rules. Things happen simply because somebody likes somebody else and they want to hang out. “They may be on their way to one area, then they hear another family they recognize and it’s like, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen so-and-so for a while, let’s go over and join them.’” Particular females can stay friends for sixty years. “The fundamental truth of elephants,” Vicki sums up, “is that elephants like being with other elephants. It gives them benefits, but they just find it satisfying.”
Elephants seem better than apes—even humans—at keeping immediate track of a large number of individuals. Their recognition ability exceeds primates’ (except perhaps a few of the elephant researchers!). Each elephant in Amboseli probably knows every other adult in the population. When researchers played the recorded call of an absent family member or bond-group member, elephants returned the call and moved toward the sound. Played a recording of an elephant outside their bond group, they didn’t react noticeably. But when played calls of total strangers, they bunched defensively, raising their trunks to smell.
“Intelligent, social, emotional, personable, imitative, respectful of ancestors, playful, self-aware, compassionate—these are qualities that would gain most of us membership to an exclusive club,” wrote Cynthia Moss along with Joyce Poole and several colleagues. “They also describe elephants.” Elephants “deserve our respect in the same way that human life deserves respect,” wrote Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founding father of elephant behavior research. Nice words—but surely elephants must get ruthless when things get rough. Dry seasons confront elephants with the need to compete for disappearing food and water. Yet—“Even in times of distress and danger,” writes Iain, elephants “behave with exceptional tolerance to their own kind, and hold fast to their family ties.”
Unlike many primates, elephants seldom try to assert a bid for increased dominance or attempt to acquire higher status. Status seeking isn’t really a big part of elephant society. In elephants, status comes with age, as though what elephants most respect is experience. Even during hard times, dominance is nuanced, asserted in subtle gestures and sounds, reinforcing expectations, acknowledged with very little squabbling within families.
Nature’s great master-peece, an Elephant,
The onely harmlesse great thing; the giant
Of beasts …
And foe to none, suspects no enemies.
—John Donne, 1612
There are exceptions to elephants’ typical peaceability. In droughts when food gets scarce, a family’s size can affect its dominance, partly determining access to food and water and how well it survives. Again individual personality matters. The matriarch Slit Ear was so aggressive toward other families on behalf of her own that Cynthia Moss remembers her as “a real bitch. But … spirited!”
“When a family is big,” Vicki is saying, “it means they have a strong matriarch that everyone likes to follow.” Elephants respect their elders with good reason: elders have accumulated knowledge essential to survival. Crucial feats of survival can depend on an individual who learned a key bit of information decades earlier. Old females also have the most extensive knowledge of the voices and calls of individuals in other family groups, the biggest social lists. In fact, the experience that comes with age matters in everything about elephant society. Elephants are famous for memory because there’s a lot to remember.
“So for instance,” Vicki relates, “an experienced leader could in effect decide, ‘We’ll be going up those slopes, because I remember there’s water there at this time of year and some grass I know about.’” Desert-living elephants visit water sources as much as forty miles (sixty-five kilometers) apart and, doing so, can cover about four hundred miles (650 kilometers) in five months. They sometimes travel hundreds of miles, along routes not used for many years, to arrive at water sources just after the onset of rains. Do they detect distant thunder rumbling through the earth and turn toward it? How much is memory? They need to know where they’re going. And a lot of it depends on making the right decisions.
“There’s better survival in families with matriarchs older than thirty-five,” Vicki explains. Elephants seem to know this. Some families follow other families having older matriarchs. So older matriarchs tend to lead larger, dominant families; success literally breeds success. The oldest Amboseli female known to have given birth was sixty-four years old. However, they generally have fewer babies after around age fifty-five, entering a sort of grandmothering wise-elder leadership role, helping younger ones survive. Elephants have six sets of teeth during their lifetime. The final set appears when they are about thirty years old and can last until they’re into their sixties. Eventually their teeth wear down to the gums; when elderly elephants cannot feed properly, they die. And by the time a matriarch dies of natural causes, she usually has mature daughters who themselves have gained sufficient knowledge to competently lead their family. In humans, wielding knowledge to survive new existential challenges is sometimes called “wisdom.”
So an elephant isn’t just flesh; it is a deep store of knowledge needed for survival. All it takes for that kind of knowledge to continue succeeding is for the world not to change too much over the decades of a life. And for many thousands of years, that worked.
However, elder matriarchs’ big tusks make them poachers’ preferred targets. Elephants are dying younger. Killing elders decades prematurely leaves their family members unprepared. Their matriarch’s death triggers, first, devastating psychological consequences. Some families disintegrate. Elephants have extraordinarily close care bonds with their young, and breaking them causes intense suffering. Babies orphaned at under two years of age die soon; orphans under ten die young. If they still need milk, they are almost always out of luck. Any family member with milk has her own nursing child, and an elephant can’t produce enough milk for two growing elephants. Rarely, a newly orphaned infant happens to meet a nursing mother who has just lost her own child and is feeling adoptive. Older orphans sometimes wander in bunched-up, leaderless groups. Survivors, carrying traumatic memories, become fearful and sometimes more aggressive toward humans—which spurs human antagonism toward elephants.
“Here’s someone feeling a little silly,” Vicki says, pointing. “See her with that loose walk and her trunk swaying?”
I do.
“One day when I was new here,” Vicki recalls, “Norah and I were watching and suddenly everyone started running around and trumpeting. I was like, ‘What the hell just happened?’ Norah said, ‘Oh they’re just being silly.’
“I thought, ‘Silly?’ And the next thing I know, a full-grown female comes along walking on her knees and throwing her head around, acting just daffy. They were just happy. They were like, ‘Yaaay!’ Everyone says how smart they are. But they can be ridiculous, too. If a young male doesn’t have a friend around, sometimes he’ll make a little mock charge at us, then back up or twirl around. I actually had one male kneel down right in front of the car and throw zebra bones at me, trying to get me to play with him.
“In wet times, they’re happy and jaunty. The rain makes them feel good. I’m just realizing that when I got here, the elephants were still feeling somber from the drought. Now they’re coming out of it. You see more nice, positive interactions, or just funny behavior. I’m also seeing how they’re being transformed by all these babies. These females seeing their babies tumbling and playing and sleeping; it stimulates a sense of well-being that everything’s okay with the family because, well—babies are great.”