Elephant Empathy

All the elephants in view are now busy drinking and feeding. Vicki points to another female nursing her baby. A few months ago, that infant fell into a well as deep as he as tall, and when Vicki went to help rescue him, this mother was there, upset. “She frantically objected to us using the vehicle to get her away from the well. But we had to; it would have been just too terrifying for her to see us roping up and pulling on her baby. I didn’t want her to think I was being indecisive with her, so I was being as obnoxious as I knew how, screaming at her. She almost sat on the fender. It was all very stressful and very extreme. She stayed nearby, and as soon as we reunited her with her baby, she just suckled him and she wasn’t upset with us. I think she understood that we’d intended to help.”

I’ve seen the video of that incident, and the thing that astonishes me is that here you have this, yes, frantic mother being chased away, and she objects by turning her back to the vehicle and attempting to stop it by sitting on it, rather than charging. She has no malice. She does not want to hurt the people who are being so rude. She is clearly not defending her vulnerable child against Vicki and the other humans; she doesn’t view them as a threat. She just wants to stay with her baby. She does eventually agree, one might say, to leave. And when the baby is tied to the bumper and dragged up out of the well, the baby knows exactly which way to run—the mother must be calling the whole time—and they run to each other and the reunion is immediate.

Elephants understand cooperation. They cooperate with one another, aiding individuals trapped in muddy riverbanks, helping to retrieve babies, or raising an injured or fallen comrade. They sometimes stand on either side of an elephant hit with a tranquilizer dart, for instance, attempting to hold her up. Once, Cynthia Moss saw a baby elephant fall into a small, steep-sided water hole. The mother elephant and the baby’s aunt could not lift the baby out, so the elephants started digging out one side of the hole, and made a ramp. With that bit of problem solving, they saved their baby.

Another time, a young mother named Cherie, wanting to rejoin the rest of her family, tried several times to cross the dangerously high-running river in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve. In one disastrous attempt, the waters swept away her three-month-old baby. Cherie pursued her through the rough and rapid water, caught up with her, then guided her to calm water on the far bank. The infant must have inhaled a lot of water, though, or perhaps gone hypothermic; it reached the shore looking very distressed, and in a little while, it died. In Burma, one J. H. Williams witnessed an elephant that was swept with her young one into a swollen river: “she pinned the calf with her head and trunk against the rocky bank. Then with a really gigantic effort she picked it up in her trunk and reared up until she was half standing on her hind legs so as to be able to place it on a narrow shelf of rock five feet above the flood level. Having accomplished this, she fell back into the raging torrent and she herself went away like a cork.” But half an hour later, as the terrified youngster still shivered in the same spot, Williams heard a mighty roar, “the grandest sounds of a mother’s love.” Running back along the bank, she retrieved her baby.

 

 

Normally, little elephants aren’t allowed to get lost. Mothers keep them in sight. No child gets left behind. The matriarch usually paces the herd’s travel to make sure the young ones get a chance to rest.

In 1990, here in Amboseli, the famed Echo gave birth to a baby who could not straighten his forelegs, could barely nurse. He shuffled painfully slowly on his wrists, frequently collapsing. Researchers were convinced that his wrists would abrade and get infected, that he could not survive; they wondered whether it would be humane to shorten his misery. True to the nature of their kind, Echo and her family remained persistent, raising him when he fell over. Echo’s eight-year-old daughter, Enid, also prodded the infant at times, in an attempt to raise him, but Echo slowly and carefully pushed Enid off, and as they stood over the baby, Enid frequently reached her trunk to Echo’s mouth, seemingly seeking reassurance. For three days, as the exhausted infant hobbled along, Echo and Enid slowed their pace to his disabilities, continually turning to watch the little one’s progress, waiting as he caught up from behind. On the third day, he leaned back until he could put his bent front soles on the ground, then “carefully and ever so slowly he transferred his weight back towards the front end of his body and simultaneously straightened all four legs.” And though he fell several times, by day four he was walking well and never looked back. His family’s persistence—which in humans facing a similar situation we might call faith—had saved him.

 

 

“A few days ago,” Vicki mentions as we amble along, “Eclipse was suddenly running around, calling, seeming frantic.” The family, at that point, was strung out over about 250 yards, with the kids well up ahead with some females. “I think her son was with his friends and just didn’t answer her,” Vicki speculates. “She was so agitated.” Then she found him—and everything was fine. Cynthia Moss tells of a one-year-old male who got so absorbed playing with several age-mates from another family that he didn’t notice that his family had moved off. Neither did they realize that they’d left him. Suddenly he panicked and screamed the deep “lost baby” cry. Several females in his family immediately came back for him, and he ran at full speed toward them.

While small babies usually get retrieved quickly, adolescents can become so busy socializing that they get truly separated from their families. “Getting lost like that is really scary for them,” Vicki tells me. On windy evenings when it’s harder for them to hear, she’s seen elephants rushing in one direction, calling and then listening, then rushing off in another direction. “Sometimes you wish you could say, ‘Go farther that way.’” As good as they are at keeping tabs, even older elephants can get separated, also usually when it’s very windy and they can’t hear each other. Then they act lost and frightened, rushing around, and calling. Reunions can be emotional. “They act like, ‘That was the worst thing everrr,’” Vicki says, poking fun at elephant melodrama.

What can one say about such lost elephants’ sensations except that—judging from how they act—they feel anxiety? Recall that zebra fish and crayfish feel anxiety, and that bees can get “pessimistic.” It would be a stretch to think that lost elephants acting frantic don’t feel anxiety. Elephants are not very expressive with their faces, but, Vicki says, “They have what we call ‘worried face,’ ‘suspicious face,’ ‘lost face’—I’m not even sure what I’m cuing in to, but they do have readable facial expressions.”

Lone animals are much more vulnerable to predators. Separation anxiety and attraction to groups is adaptive and common in many species. Because the behavior of lost elephants is so recognizable and so like our own in similar contexts, the logical conclusion is that, like us, they don’t feel comfortable being alone in the wilderness, and that being near others soothes them.

That shouldn’t surprise us; humans came of age in the same wilderness. Human and elephant minds emerged while we maneuvered through the same landscape with the same challenges, timing our days by the arc of the same sun and our nights by the roars and whoops of the same dangers. We needed to know what they know. We seem in sync because fundamentally we are compatriots. When I watch bees and ants and other social animals far different from vertebrates, their behavior is very different. Less individuality, more regimentation. It isn’t even clear to me whether they really need consciousness to do the complex things they do with one another. Maybe it is automatic; maybe, as it seems, they have some awareness. I just don’t know.

But here’s a two-year-old youngster whose mother is not present. This little guy is streaming from his temple glands, a sign of stress. His mother is definitely not here. She might be in estrus and off with a male somewhere. Younger mothers, especially, get distracted by attractive guys. We hope it’s no worse than that, because poaching for the ivory market is making a lot of orphans.

 

 

Amboseli researchers Richard Byrne and Lucy Bates state plainly, “Elephants show empathy.” That should come as no surprise. They aid the ailing. They help one another. Katito saw an elephant walking with a spear stuck in her. Katito went for help. Returning with a veterinarian who’d come to administer a dart filled with antibiotics and painkillers, they saw that another elephant was with the wounded one—and that the wounded one no longer had the spear in her. No one had ever heard of an elephant removing a spear from another elephant; it must have fallen out. But when the veterinarian’s dart hit the wounded elephant, the friend moved in and pulled out the dart. Researchers once saw an elephant pluck up some food and place it into the mouth of another whose trunk was badly injured.

More mysteriously, elephants sometimes help people. George Adamson, who helped raise the famous lion Elsa of the book Born Free, knew an elderly, half-blind Turkana woman who’d wandered off a path; nightfall caused her to lay down under a tree. She woke in the middle of the night to see an elephant towering over her, sniffing up and down with its trunk. She was paralyzed by fear. Other elephants gathered, and they soon began breaking branches and covering her. The next morning, her faint cries attracted a herder, who released her from the cage of branches. Had the elephants mistaken her for dead and attempted to bury her? That would have been strange enough. Had they sensed her helplessness and, in empathy and perhaps even compassion, enclosed her in protection from hyenas and leopards? That would have been stranger still. In Coming of Age with Elephants, Joyce Poole tells of a herder whose leg was broken in an accidental confrontation with a matriarch. Discovered under a tree along with an aggressive elephant, the herder frantically signaled the search party not to shoot. Later he explained that after striking him, the matriarch had realized that he could not walk and, using her trunk and front feet, had gently moved him a short distance and propped him under the shade of the tree. Occasionally touching him with her trunk, she’d guarded him through the night, though her family left her behind.

 

 

Empathy seems quite special. Many believe that empathy “makes us human.” Fear, on the other hand, might be the oldest, most basic and widespread emotion. So it’s surprising to learn this: fear and empathy are tightly related, empathy is old and widespread, and fear is a kind of empathy. Empathy is the ability to match the emotional state of another. When a flock of birds suddenly flies off because one of them startles, the spread of emotion is called “emotional contagion.” Infant crying works by emotional contagion, spreading distress to the parent. Picking up on another’s distress or alarm requires your brain to match their emotion. That’s empathy. When your companion’s fear gets you scared, that’s empathy. They yawn and you yawn—empathy. Empathy’s roots go all the way back to contagious fear. Yes, empathy is special; it just happens to be common. (Many people on the autism spectrum have an impaired ability for “reading” the emotions of others.)

In a recent study, one-year-old children, dogs, and cats all attempted to comfort “distressed” family members—who acted like they were sobbing, pained, or choking—by, for example, putting their head in the upset person’s lap. Humans and apes who view emotionally charged images respond with similar changes in brain and peripheral skin temperature. People’s expressions respond to differing pictures of people shown so briefly that the subjects can’t consciously perceive the image. Conclusion: empathy is automatic. No thinking needed. The brain automatically creates the mood match, then makes you aware of the emotion.

In play, animals have to know that the individual chasing and attacking them is not serious. Empathy. You have to understand the invitation to play. Empathy. You have to be skilled in the give-and-take alternation of vulnerability and harmless aggression. I see this daily in my dogs Chula and Jude, who play very vigorously with lots of bared teeth and growling but take turns “handicapping” themselves by rolling over or play-crouching, then licking. They’re best friends forever, and they know and trust each other.

Dancing, singing, or worshipping together, going with friends to plays and concerts—bodies move in synchrony as minds mimic what we see in others, each producing an approximation but never truly sharing one sensation because we feel only within our own individual mind. This gets us as close as we can to being united. We cannot see with another the color red, or experience another’s taste of bean soup, or their perception of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” But empathy lets us instantaneously compare experiences and create a facsimile. It’s an illusion that works to show to our friends and lovers, “This is how I feel.” Our brains gift us the rush of saying, “Really? Me, too!” That’s about all there is. And it’s the best there is. It’s miraculous.

 

 

We often use “empathy” interchangeably with “sympathy” or “compassion.” But I’d like to distinguish a scale of feeling for others. Empathy is a mood-matching sense of a shared feeling. I’m frightened if you’re frightened; happy when you’re happy; sad when you are sad. Sympathy is concern for another who is distressed. It’s a bit detached; your feeling might not match the other’s emotion—“I am sorry to hear of your great-grandmother’s passing.” You don’t share their sadness, but you sympathize. Compassion is sympathy plus motivation to act: “Seeing you in such pain makes me want to help.” You buy a sandwich for a homeless person or sign a petition to help save whales. Of course, the words “empathy,” “sympathy,” and “compassion” label interwoven feelings. But if compassion is a desire to act toward easing another’s suffering, an elephant who protects a lost old woman feels—and wields—the full range from empathy to sympathy to compassion in action.

Jane Goodall, noting that chimpanzees and bonobos (pronounced buh-NO-bos) cannot swim, tells us that in zoos with moats, they have sometimes made “heroic efforts” to save companions from drowning. One adult male drowned trying to rescue a small infant who’d fallen into the water. Once, after a moat was drained and cleaned, the keepers turned on the water to refill it. Suddenly the group’s senior male came to the window, screaming and frantically waving his arms to get their attention. Several young bonobos had entered the dry moat and now couldn’t get themselves out. They would have drowned. The old male himself pulled the smallest to safety.

Rats will free cagemates restrained in a container. Even if there is chocolate in an adjacent container, they will free the prisoner first, then share the treat. Thus, rat empathy moves to sympathy, compassion, and an altruistic act. Because helping others can pay off later, our brain gives itself a shot of oxytocin to reward us for being nice. That’s why, when we do good, we feel good. Altruism among friends is like buying insurance. It’s better to pay the premium even if you think you’ll never need the protection, because you might, in fact, need it. If you’re a rat, a rat you’ve freed might come in handy later. If a predator attacks, having a companion halves your chances of being eaten, and the companion doubles the chance that the predator will be noticed and its attack thwarted.

But not everything is utility. Kindness sometimes spills into the transcendent, reaching across species. In an English zoo, a bonobo captured a starling. When a keeper urged her to release it, she climbed to the top of the highest tree, wrapped her legs around the trunk so she could use both hands, carefully spread the bird’s wings, then hurled the starling skyward. She understood the situation, and knew a little about birds. I wonder whether she imagined what it might be like to fly.

 

 

The precise why and wherefore of elephants’ feelings of empathy and compassion remain in the realm of mystery. We may not know exactly what elephants are feeling, but they do. Or perhaps they don’t. Perhaps elephants, too, are searching for some deeper comprehension of life and death that eludes them, as it does us. Perhaps we are not alone in bursting the confines of reason and logic with a large enough mind to ponder imponderables. Perhaps like us, they simply wonder. If so, there must be others who wonder, too.

I wonder. Many other animals are curious, and human curiosity is a precursor to wonder, which is a precursor to spirituality, which is a precursor to science. Science seeks to find out what’s really going on. And science’s searching is everlasting.