Orozco 1

Andrea Orozco
Writing 39C
Dr. Lynda Haas
18 April 2016
A Historical Review on the Scientific Literature of Elephant Studies
Introduction
The study of animals all began with Charles Darwin. As Darwin argues, there is no doubt that
there is a great gap between the lowest man and the highest animal. Nevertheless the difference
in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of
kind (Darwin 128). He adds to say that our senses and emotions, such as love, memory,
attention, curiosity, imitation, and reason, may be found in even the lowest animals. According to
the Economists Animal Minds, most scientists can say with confidence, some animals
process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental
experience. Elephants have especially proven through research that they are one of the animals
with highly remarkable consciousness. With that being said, I will be doing a literature review on
elephant studies through mourning and intelligence of elephants to prove that they have full
consciousness and they should not be used as entertainment in any way, shape, or form.

Mourning
It is easy to say that animals have emotions, a common one being fear. Elephants, for example,
are one of the many animals that go through the process of mourning when they face traumatic
events. When it comes to animals, one usually thinks that fear is one of the few instinctual
emotions they possess. Elephants, surprisingly, demonstrate the broad emotions they hold,

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mourning, being one of the more studied emotions. In her 2004 article, Not by Bread Alone:
Symbolic Loss, Trauma, and Recovery in Elephant Communities Isabel Bradshaw, an American
psychologist and ecologist, elaborates on how, just like humans, elephants have encountered a
great amount of stress and trauma and have found ways to respond to this through processes,
rituals, and social structures. Trauma theory has brought great attention to psychological damage
that victims of violence experience and here we are able to see how elephants are affected by
systematic violence (151).

Do Elephants Show Empathy? by Richard Byrne, psychologist from the University of St.
Andrews, et al, his research article compiles over thirty-five years of reports describing the
behavior of elephants with potential to revealing signs of empathetic understanding. Et al present
some of these traits being babysitting calves, protecting and comforting others, and removing
foreign objects from one another (209). In general, the records demonstrate how elephants are
capable to empathetic understanding of others through these abilities and also discuss why
elephants show more empathy compared to other non-primates. Byrnes presents observational
reports of elephants that respond to the emotional states of others. Focusing in the Amboseli
ecosystem in southern Kenya, the elephant population has been studied over the past thirty-five
years by members of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants (ATE). Some things they found is the
characteristic of protection, for example, when a young or injured individual is in a potentially
dangerous situation, but is unable to defend itself sufficiently, it may receive protection from
another elephant (Byrne 209). The list of observations goes on including similar concepts like
comfort, babysitting, and removing foreign objects from another individual.

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Some zoos have become more sensitized to animal emotions. For example, several years ago, a
zoo got in contact with an animal communicator to consult with their elephants because of
strange behavior they had been having. The consultant learned that one of their elephant
companions had recently died and he believed that the body had been removed too soon and
therefore didnt give the elephants a chance to mourn and say their goodbyes. The elephants
skull was then brought back to the elephants and they immediately gathered around it and began
their ritual involving touching and caressing (Bradshaw 149).

Not only do elephants mourn when it comes to responding to trauma, they also show intrusive
behavior. In some cases explained by Bradshaw, reintroduction of elephants into social groups
disrupts their social bonds and they are usually denied participation in rituals which leads to a
culture of extremely violent males (149). Translocated juvenile elephants have been found in
many occasions to release their their stress by rampaging through reserve and killing rhinos,
attacking tourist vehicles, and even going as far as threatening older female elephants.

Intelligence
Elephants are one of the most studied animals when it comes to learning about animal
intelligence. Evolutionary biologist, Bernhard Rensch, explores elephant intelligence through
various experiments conducted at a German zoo and compiles his findings in his article, The
Intelligence of Elephants. He starts off his article by stating the general rule of the animal
kingdom the bigger the brain, the greater the brain power. Elephants are not only the largest
land mammals, but they also have the largest brains weighing in at almost 13 pounds. Through
his experiments on intelligence trials, Rensch hypothesized that brain size actually does

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contribute to intelligence as larger animals develop the complicated parts of the cerebral cortex
to a greater degree and also had a greater learning ability (44).

Rensch had the privilege to travel to India and study the taming and training of working
elephants. As soon as a new working elephant is captured, it is assigned to a mahout meaning
elephant boy. Of course after being in this new environment the elephant can at any moment
freak out and is soothed by grass or the signing of soothing melodies. To Renschs surprise, after
two to three weeks of daily training, the
elephants quickly learned commands such as
Go!, Stop!, Kneel down! and so forth (44).
Rensch then sought out to find out how large of a
vocabulary a trained elephant could understand.
His observations of the Indian working
elephants ability to learn vocabulary prompted
him to make a laboratory examination of
elephants acoustic discrimination.

In the experiment for discrimination between

sounds, Elephants were put into cells and given
positive and negative sounds. As shown in figure
1, when an elephant heard a positive tone, she
knocked on a box with her trunk (top). What this
did was it closed an electrical circuit which then

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moved another box containing bread towards the elephant (middle). When given a negative tone
the elephant knew to wrap her trunk around the horizontal bar of her cell (bottom).

With Renschs experiments and all the earliest studies, he was able to put together a hypothesis
about brain size. As mentioned earlier, size is
definitely a factor to the brains learning capacity
as well as the fact that larger animals, like the elephant, have more grey-matter cells which allow
more complicated associations for learning (Rensch 49). This as an important hypothesis as it
gives us a background on connecting why elephants have shown great cognitive abilities.

Some evidence of elephant intelligence is shown through the use of tools. According to
Elephant Cognition in Primate Perspective by Richard Byrne, who is mentioned earlier in this
literature review, et al, both Asian and African savannah elephants have been seen to use
multiple tool types for up to six different functions (69). Some of these include body care, like
scratching and removing ticks, as well as for unbelievable functions like fly swatting. When
Asian elephants would be presented with busy branches, they often modified them by breaking
them in half or removing leaves to their preference. Recurring events like this allow elephants to
be added to the short list of animals who are cognitively capable of using tools for their
convenience (Byrne et al 69).

Conclusion
Elephants have been one of the few animals which have shown their abilities through research
experiments. Not only have they been popularly studied on fields regarding mourning and

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intelligence, but it goes much further including communication, emotions, and social groups. In
conclusion, all these studies have definitely opened many eyes and allowed us to see animals in a
different way than before. Throughout these past years, all these studies have forced society to
become more aware and educated on animal studies which has brought forth many issues on how
animals are being treated. As proof with elephant studies, we need to put a stop to elephants
being used in entertainment as they are fully conscious and aware of their surroundings. We, as a
nation, can no longer be seen as a nation that allows any animal to be put through this cruelty. As
Gandhi believes, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its
animals are treatedI hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection
from the cruelty of humankind.

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Works Cited
"Animal Minds." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 26 Oct. 2015. Web. 24
Apr. 2016.
Bekoff, Marc. "Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures." BioScience. 2000.
Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
Bradshaw, Isabel Gay. "Not by Bread Alone: Symbolic Loss, Trauma, and Recovery in
Elephant Communities." Society & Animals 12.2 (2004): 143-58. Web. 20 Apr.
2016.
Byrne, Richard W., Lucy A. Bates, and Cynthia J. Moss. "Elephant Cognition in Primate
Perspective." Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews CCBR 4 (2009). Web.
01 May 2016.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998. Print.
Irie, Naoko, and Toshikazu Hasegawa. "Elephant Psychology: What We Know and
What We Would like to Know." Japanese Psychological Research 51.3 (2009):
177-81. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.
Rensch, B. "The Intelligence of Elephants." Sci Am Scientific American 196.2 (1957):
44-49. Web. 23 Apr. 2016.