Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what did your relationship with the elephant? Hmm? I kind
Speaker 1: of think of them as this kind of ambassador to
Speaker 1: the animal world, Like you know, especially for kids, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the gateway to wonderful creatures with what
Speaker 1: we think of is quinde a few merits. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean kids seem to be really obsessed with with elephants.
Speaker 1: I mean my son especially is crazy for them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he'll see see a picture of an elephant and he'll
Speaker 1: go elephant because he'll raise his arm like it's a
Speaker 1: trunk and go trumpeting noise and and and we'll say
Speaker 1: it multiple times. Sometimes he'll say it when there are
Speaker 1: no elephants around, just in celebration of thinking about elephants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or yeah, thinking he's an elephant, or and then if
Speaker 1: he actually gets to see one in real life, it's
Speaker 1: just all the crazier. Um, you know, we're just looking
Speaker 1: at pictures of me. It goes nuts. And indeed there
Speaker 1: they're unlike any any animal. I mean, they are that
Speaker 1: you have this this large lit the largest living land creature. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and so they're they're imposing in that respect, but
Speaker 1: they're also they have this peaceful air to them as well.
Speaker 1: Most of the time. Uh. They have this this trunk
Speaker 1: that is that that again is unlike like just about
Speaker 1: anything else you see in the in the animal world.
Speaker 1: And I think it's because that trunk is so expressive. Yes,
Speaker 1: it does has a lot of emotion to it. It's
Speaker 1: reaching around, it's grabbing things, it's uh, it's it's they're
Speaker 1: manipulating water with it and uh. And their their eyes
Speaker 1: are very peaceful as well. So there's that we can't
Speaker 1: help but empathize with the elephant on on on a
Speaker 1: very basic level. That there's something just kind of sweet
Speaker 1: and comforting about them, and and children especially seen in
Speaker 1: tune to this. Yeah. And in terms of folklore, they
Speaker 1: have long been associated with courage and wisdom. In fact,
Speaker 1: if you creativity, if you look get Hinduism, you'll see
Speaker 1: the origin of the elephant as a symbol of good
Speaker 1: luck Ganesha um, you know, the the luck god, the
Speaker 1: remover of obstacles. Yep, I have a Ganesha right here. Bam,
Speaker 1: always carry one in my pocket. You said, Oh my gosh, guys,
Speaker 1: if you could see this, he just produced Ganesha just
Speaker 1: threw it on the table proof. Okay, So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean these are really important to us, um, just as
Speaker 1: an idea of what an animal is and has is
Speaker 1: kind of a mirror to ourselves. I mean, we can't
Speaker 1: help but empathize with them. Yeah, and humans, Uh, there
Speaker 1: are many cases of humans forging strong emotional bonds with elephants,
Speaker 1: uh and uh. And there are a number of wonderful
Speaker 1: conservation efforts out there, and I mentioned some of those
Speaker 1: at the end of the show. Um, particular efforts you
Speaker 1: might be interested in reading more about and potentially supporting
Speaker 1: in some shape or another. But in mentioning the conservation
Speaker 1: and in mentioning the emotional bonds between human uh and
Speaker 1: elephant that that kind of leads to the large number
Speaker 1: of negatives here, because of course, when humans are interacting
Speaker 1: on a daily basis with an elephant, it means that
Speaker 1: that elephant is in captivity and perhaps used for labor,
Speaker 1: perhaps uh put an enclosure in a zoo. Generally that's
Speaker 1: gonna be way too small for it. When we're talking
Speaker 1: about conservation efforts. Those conservation efforts are in place due
Speaker 1: to the what we have done to the to the
Speaker 1: elephants natural habitat and what we have done to decrease
Speaker 1: their numbers in the wild. Yeah, so a couple of things. So,
Speaker 1: as you already mentioned, there's the captivity angle, and so
Speaker 1: we typically see an elephant at the zoo right and
Speaker 1: Fred Berkovitch of the Sandy Zoo rightes that in Africa,
Speaker 1: elephants can cover over fifty miles or eighty kilometers in
Speaker 1: a day if food is scarce, but rarely walk that far.
Speaker 1: More often they cover a few miles during the day,
Speaker 1: and they sometimes spend most of their time near water source.
Speaker 1: Now contrast that with twenty two hundred square feet. That
Speaker 1: is the amount of space that is recommended by the
Speaker 1: American Zoological Association. Joyce Pool, she is the research director
Speaker 1: of the Ambo Celly Elephant Research Project, rights, just a
Speaker 1: thought by a z A logic, that's the Zoological Association.
Speaker 1: We might suggest that human beings, being about two percent
Speaker 1: the body weight and of an elephant, would do just
Speaker 1: find living in forty four square feet if we were
Speaker 1: provided food, water, and a breeding partner. So we began
Speaker 1: to look at that, and then you began to look
Speaker 1: at the whole poaching situation. And consider that we have
Speaker 1: lost six of force elephants in the Congo basin due
Speaker 1: to poaching during the first decade of this century. And
Speaker 1: she says at that rate, they could go extinct in
Speaker 1: ten years. And then we of course have seen the
Speaker 1: recent violence in the Central African republic Um and that
Speaker 1: is there's a ton of poaching going on there just
Speaker 1: to fund military operations. Yeah, and then you have plenty
Speaker 1: of examples to of elephants coming into conflict with with
Speaker 1: farmers because here you have and it's a tough situation,
Speaker 1: because you have you have farmers that are trying to
Speaker 1: to to a farm the small area of land, grow
Speaker 1: crops uh to to feed their family, make money. And
Speaker 1: then the elephants come through. The elephants. Each adult elephant
Speaker 1: is gonna need some of three four hundred pounds of
Speaker 1: food per day, and they're going to make short work
Speaker 1: of a small human farm uh. And then and there
Speaker 1: they tend to be pretty destructive in their in their
Speaker 1: their style of eating. If you've ever seen a footage
Speaker 1: of elephants, you know, just pushing over trees to get
Speaker 1: to the to the greens. Uh. You know, that's that's
Speaker 1: their style, and so they can they can really care
Speaker 1: a farm apart in in very short order. So you
Speaker 1: end up with with humans and uh and and elephants
Speaker 1: coming into conflict in that situation. Yeah, and that's habit lost, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, you would probably do the same thing if
Speaker 1: you lost a good deal of your land, you would
Speaker 1: move on to another area. And then of course that's
Speaker 1: where the conflict with humans comes into play. Yeah, though,
Speaker 1: I mean, because they tend to eat grass as lee,
Speaker 1: these bamboo bark roots. But if there's a crop of bananas,
Speaker 1: if there's a crop of sugarcane or what have you,
Speaker 1: you know they're going to go for that. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: it's to put the throughout a few more numbers here
Speaker 1: to just put this in the in perspective about about
Speaker 1: where elephant populations are. According to Defenders of Wildlife, at
Speaker 1: the turn of the twentieth century, there were a few
Speaker 1: million African elephants in about a hundred thousand Asian elephants um.
Speaker 1: Today they are in estimated four hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: to seven hundred thousand African elephants in between thirty five
Speaker 1: thousand and forty thousand wild Asian elephants, with the with
Speaker 1: the Asian elephant being you know, far more on the
Speaker 1: endangered into the spectrum. Yeah, and we should keep in
Speaker 1: mind to that the average lifespan of an elephant in
Speaker 1: the wild is sixty to seventy years UM. So when
Speaker 1: we start to think about that, and we we begin
Speaker 1: to see them, um the devastating effects of poaching and
Speaker 1: habitat loss in captivity in some areas, then you can't
Speaker 1: help but anthropomorphize them and begin to think, oh, they
Speaker 1: live for seventy years on par with what humans are living.
Speaker 1: To you know, what else is similar to humans? How else, um,
Speaker 1: do they really differ from other mammals? Now I mentioned
Speaker 1: African and Asian elephants earlier. That's an important distinction. There
Speaker 1: are two major species of elephant. There's the African elephant,
Speaker 1: and we can divide those into two subspecies, the savannah
Speaker 1: and the forest. And while the the Asian elephant, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, we can divide that into four subspecies
Speaker 1: Sri Lankan, Indian, Sumatran, and borneo. Now, how can you
Speaker 1: tell one from the other, Well, it's pretty simple. Once
Speaker 1: it's been pointed out to you, Julie, Well, this is
Speaker 1: kind of neat the African elephants actually their ears are
Speaker 1: shaped like the continent of Africa. And then of course
Speaker 1: with the Asian elephants, their ears are smaller. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: the African elephants ears look like they're made for sailing
Speaker 1: on the high seas, and the Asian elephants ears are
Speaker 1: are more sort of floppy and subdued and smaller. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, it's really cool about those ears too. Is
Speaker 1: besides being able to pick up on bois and sound,
Speaker 1: they have tons of tiny veins that transact their surfaces
Speaker 1: and they carry blood to the rest of the body
Speaker 1: and they act like a cooling system. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: really amazing elephants here is is essentially there to cool
Speaker 1: the body. Uh. It's kind of like the big fins
Speaker 1: you would see in some of these prehistoric dinosaurs, you know,
Speaker 1: where they it's all about getting the blood vessels up
Speaker 1: into a surface they can be used to cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you see them flapping their ears over over
Speaker 1: again on a hot day, that's them just trying to
Speaker 1: cool themselves down. And of course they're trunks, their trunks yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: when they're when they're born, you have I mean, we're
Speaker 1: talking about how how instantly we attach emotionally to elephants,
Speaker 1: even more so if you see a baby elephant, baby
Speaker 1: elephant is among the most adorable things you could possibly
Speaker 1: look at. And uh, when they're born, though, their trunks
Speaker 1: don't really have any muscle tones, so they just kind
Speaker 1: of flop around and then they're having only nurse straight
Speaker 1: up with their mouths. Yeah, and they're just again we
Speaker 1: talked about it before, they're so adaptable. Those those trunks
Speaker 1: they're used to smell, to eve, to drink, to retrieve food,
Speaker 1: to trumpet and as we'll talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about in a second caress, but before we do so,
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about elephant intelligence. Yes, elephants are,
Speaker 1: of course extremely intelligent. They have they have memories that
Speaker 1: span years. That wold adage and elephant member it never
Speaker 1: forgets well, it's it's based in truth. They have they
Speaker 1: have long memories and they need those long memories because
Speaker 1: you know, we mentioned earlier about how about how vast
Speaker 1: there range tends to be. So you'll have a herd
Speaker 1: of elephants it's led by a matriarch, and they're having
Speaker 1: to go across vast stretches of land, and they're gonna
Speaker 1: have to remember like where's the water, Where's where's the
Speaker 1: good food? Where they where the good eats? Where should
Speaker 1: I not go? Like where's an area that might be
Speaker 1: h certain death? Uh you know to uh to venture into?
Speaker 1: And as you say, that requires quite a bit of memory. Um.
Speaker 1: It turns out the elephants can hear one another's trumpeting
Speaker 1: calls up to five miles or eight kilometers away. In
Speaker 1: according to biologists Grea Turkolo, who is part of the
Speaker 1: Elephant Listening Project, a very very cool project. The females
Speaker 1: do most of the talking. There's no syntax in their language,
Speaker 1: so there's no evidence that they form sentences, but they
Speaker 1: can recognize each other's voices. In fact, uh, they can
Speaker 1: identify at least one hundred other individual elephants by voice.
Speaker 1: And this was borne out in a sound playback experiment
Speaker 1: by Karen McComb, who is an animal psychologist at the
Speaker 1: University of Sussex in the UK. Now, one interesting thing
Speaker 1: about those trumpeting communications that the elephants use. Um, they
Speaker 1: can communicate over these long distances also by producing a
Speaker 1: sub sonic rumble. They can travel through the ground faster
Speaker 1: than through the air. You know, there's have you ever
Speaker 1: seen like an old Western where like any of American
Speaker 1: trackers putting putting his ear to the ground, you know,
Speaker 1: because because sound waves are going to move faster through
Speaker 1: the ground. Uh, it's similar situation. So other elephants then
Speaker 1: receive the messages through the sensitive skin on their feet
Speaker 1: and on their trunks, and it's a belief this is
Speaker 1: how potential mates and social groups communicate. Yeah, and just
Speaker 1: so you know how sensitive their skin is, they can
Speaker 1: detect a fly landing on it. So there's quite a
Speaker 1: level of um sensitivity there. And I want to tell
Speaker 1: us I mentioned the Elephant Listening program has been in
Speaker 1: the work since has delivered some really intriguing data on
Speaker 1: elephant communication that really helps us to better understand the
Speaker 1: social bonds the elephants have with one another. Now, in
Speaker 1: terms of numerical skills, elephants actually outperform great apes, chips
Speaker 1: and human children at the task of figuring out the
Speaker 1: quantity of something that is put in a bucket. And
Speaker 1: in fact that their understanding or their numbers sense is
Speaker 1: so nuanced that they can easily tell the difference between
Speaker 1: five and six rocks, for instance, um as opposed to
Speaker 1: something pretty easy like one and two. Now that's interesting
Speaker 1: because we've talked in the past about the algorithmic thinking
Speaker 1: in young children and their their way of understanding numbers
Speaker 1: is that they might not be able to tell the
Speaker 1: difference between five and six, they can tell the difference
Speaker 1: between six and three. I've got three, um, you know,
Speaker 1: three cheerios is definitely less than six, but five cheers
Speaker 1: as the six cheerios. I don't know. I'll just take
Speaker 1: whichever hand is you know comes out to me first.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean elephants can distinguish to that degree.
Speaker 1: It's pretty amazing. Now, that's one way to look at
Speaker 1: an elephant intelligence. But but to really get into the
Speaker 1: guts of it, you have to start looking at their society,
Speaker 1: and they're there in their communication within that society. Yeah. Really,
Speaker 1: at the core of elephant society, we're talking about matriarchs
Speaker 1: who are the oldest elephants and families with complex social relationships. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll have a herd that is it's led by the oldest,
Speaker 1: often the largest female. Uh, and it's just going to
Speaker 1: be an all female herd with some young ones in
Speaker 1: there that they're all sort of collectively looking after, though
Speaker 1: of course with the with the actual mom for that
Speaker 1: providing most of the the care and assistance. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: male elephants, they tend to be just loners out there
Speaker 1: roaming on their own. Occasionally they'll take up with another
Speaker 1: male or so, Yeah, you get some bachelor pods from
Speaker 1: time to time, but for the most part, it's just
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're doing their own thing. And it
Speaker 1: kind of comes back to what we've talked about before
Speaker 1: when it comes to the gender divide in in a species,
Speaker 1: that the female is the species and the male is
Speaker 1: just necessary for reproduction. Well, it's kind of the whole
Speaker 1: takes the village concept because the females typically remain with
Speaker 1: their families their whole lives, and they rear their calves
Speaker 1: alongside their mother's grandmother's sisters and aunts, and they all
Speaker 1: helped to take care of the calves um. And this
Speaker 1: is really cool to these elephant families are really fluid
Speaker 1: in their association patterns, meaning that not all members are
Speaker 1: together all of the time. So if a food sources scares,
Speaker 1: that means that a couple of them might pair off
Speaker 1: and then meet up later on. And you know, it
Speaker 1: works out for genetic diversity that the males are separate anyway,
Speaker 1: because you can have this, you know, a close net
Speaker 1: grew of females that are all related. Uh, you need
Speaker 1: the genes, you need some extra genes to come in
Speaker 1: from outside of that community. And thus these uh, these
Speaker 1: loaners out there on the outskirts. Yeah, and it's also
Speaker 1: interesting that the females do do a lot of the talking,
Speaker 1: and I think that ties back to the matriarch and
Speaker 1: again the raising of the calves. So of course it
Speaker 1: would make sense that among elephants chatter, you hear more
Speaker 1: female voices trying to coordinate what they're gonna do, when
Speaker 1: they're going to do it, and particularly the matriarch. If
Speaker 1: if there's uh, if food is scarce and they really
Speaker 1: have to figure out directions and where they're going to go,
Speaker 1: then the matriarch is usually a person who tries to
Speaker 1: coordinate that effort. Now, of course, one part of being
Speaker 1: um in a community of humans is that we are
Speaker 1: self aware of our our place in that community and uh,
Speaker 1: and it seems that that it's a similar situation for
Speaker 1: the elephant. Elephant is one of the very few creatures
Speaker 1: aside from humans, that can pass a self awareness test.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this in the past, I believe, with
Speaker 1: a few other animals, but the elephants can recognize themselves
Speaker 1: in a mirror. The only other animals that can really
Speaker 1: pull this off humans apes, dolphins, And if you understand,
Speaker 1: based on some arguments, you could say that an octopus
Speaker 1: can do this, but you have to have a very
Speaker 1: different type of tests for them because their brains are
Speaker 1: so different and and even among you know, humans, apes
Speaker 1: and elephants, I mean, the elephant's brain is different from
Speaker 1: an ape or a humans brain, uh in in in
Speaker 1: some respects. You know, it's as you can never do
Speaker 1: a one to one when you're comparing the human brain
Speaker 1: to another species. But when they when they look at
Speaker 1: themselves in the mirror, they quickly realize that that they
Speaker 1: are looking at themselves. They'll look behind the mirror and
Speaker 1: then it will quickly descend into them sort of goofing off.
Speaker 1: Like what happens if I put my trunk in my
Speaker 1: mouth while I'm looking in the mirror? What do I
Speaker 1: do this? What do I do that? Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: essential to note that they are self aware. They're not
Speaker 1: just uh, you know this this animal out there sort
Speaker 1: of encased in the mud of of existence. They know
Speaker 1: they exist and and that should really carry more way
Speaker 1: when we think about what elephants are and how we
Speaker 1: interact with them. All right, we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but when we get back, we are going to talk
Speaker 1: about this self awareness, this sort of society um is
Speaker 1: rich bonds the elephants have, and how they actually exhibit
Speaker 1: a very human phenomenon called emotional contagion. All right, we're back.
Speaker 1: Emotional contagion. We we see different examples of this with
Speaker 1: humans over and over again. It can be, you know,
Speaker 1: at a party and there's this emotional contagion going on,
Speaker 1: depending on you know, how someone is is acting and
Speaker 1: how people are looking to others um to respond to that.
Speaker 1: Should they join in on whatever behavior is being exhibited?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think we've all definitely been a part
Speaker 1: of the sort of social conversations where the conversation is, uh,
Speaker 1: isn't as kind of a medium zone, and then somebody
Speaker 1: kind of takes the wheel and it's increasingly going into
Speaker 1: uncomfortable territory and you feel that need to to step
Speaker 1: in and change the subject move you know, pulled up,
Speaker 1: pull the vehicle back on the road. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: what you see here is that this, this very kind
Speaker 1: of human thing is happening among elephants, this emotional contagion.
Speaker 1: Researcher Josh Plotnik of the University of Cambridge in the
Speaker 1: UK studied the behavior of twenty six elephants in captivity
Speaker 1: over the course of year, and he found that when
Speaker 1: an elephant would show distress, the other elephants would a
Speaker 1: doubt that same emotional state. An example of this distress
Speaker 1: would be in this case, like thinking they saw a
Speaker 1: snake in the grass, you know, something that's a definite,
Speaker 1: uh potential danger to the the the elephant community, and
Speaker 1: they're going to react, and then that emotional state quickly
Speaker 1: spreads to the other elephants. You're concerned, why I'm concerned
Speaker 1: to what are you concerned about? And they would act
Speaker 1: just as a human would. They they swiftly go to
Speaker 1: each other, right, and they touch each other's faces and
Speaker 1: I don't think humans do this genitals, and they put
Speaker 1: trunks in each other's mouth and they chirp their w
Speaker 1: You're trying to make some very soothing chirping noises to
Speaker 1: say it's all right. Yeah, And this is really important
Speaker 1: because you know, there are a number of cases of
Speaker 1: observed empathy in elephants. There's a two thousand three study
Speaker 1: from Catherine Paine's Elephant Listening projects we mentioned earlier observed
Speaker 1: a dying calf like numerous responses both from its own
Speaker 1: family and others in the herd. Uh. There's a two
Speaker 1: thousand six paper that looked at the behavioral reactions of
Speaker 1: elephants towards a dying and decease matriarch um. But this, uh,
Speaker 1: this this empathy study with these twenty six captive elephants. Uh,
Speaker 1: it provides us a little like more sort of hard
Speaker 1: evidence for uh empathy, for this emotional contagion and uh
Speaker 1: and and you need that because again we talked about
Speaker 1: how we talked before about how humans anthropomorphizes anything, and
Speaker 1: there's always there's already a lot that's that's that's human
Speaker 1: like in the elephant. So we have to be careful
Speaker 1: in steadying them, not to just keep on the rest
Speaker 1: of our human baggage and starting, you know, putting on
Speaker 1: little hats. Yeah, I know, I was thinking about that.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about our pensant for just trying
Speaker 1: to turn anything into a smile life face, even if
Speaker 1: it's an inanimate object. But then I thought too, in
Speaker 1: some of these cases, it's so very clear that the behavior,
Speaker 1: it seems very clear that the behavior is spelling out
Speaker 1: these sort of community bonded social phenomena that you would
Speaker 1: see and within humans, within the human tribe um. But again,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to quantify that in a scientific way. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's why, as you say, this experiment with the
Speaker 1: twenty six elephants is so important, because it does give
Speaker 1: a scientific community some sort of foothold in that arena.
Speaker 1: But it's it's hard to re enact a lot of
Speaker 1: what people anecdotally see. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about is this idea of grieving elephants, and
Speaker 1: not just elephants grieving for one another, but this case
Speaker 1: of someone named Lawrence Anthony. Now he was a conservationist
Speaker 1: and an author known as the elephant Whisperer, and in
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelve he had a heart attack. Now,
Speaker 1: he had taken a group of wild elephants and he
Speaker 1: had rescued them and rehabilitated them on the day that
Speaker 1: he died. They traveled something like twelve hours to reach
Speaker 1: his house and they had not been to his home
Speaker 1: in eighteen months. And so of course people who saw
Speaker 1: this began to construe this as the elephants keeping vigil.
Speaker 1: They actually hung out for two days at his home.
Speaker 1: And again the problem here is how do you take
Speaker 1: a scientific lens to this. You can't. You can't re
Speaker 1: enact this experiment, right, And I mean, if you were gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, to play the critic here, you could say, well,
Speaker 1: the elephants move around a lot anyway, and if they
Speaker 1: have long memories, as we as we mentioned earlier, so
Speaker 1: it's in you know, of course they would come back
Speaker 1: to a place they'd been to before, where they had
Speaker 1: presumably received you know, some comfort, maybe maybe even food,
Speaker 1: what have you. That's true. And another interesting account involving
Speaker 1: memory in place has to do with South Africa in
Speaker 1: the late twentieth century at Kruger National Park. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: where they were calling the elephant population, so that they
Speaker 1: were having some attempt to conserve the elephant. But they
Speaker 1: were afraid that if the the elephant population grew too large,
Speaker 1: then it would be increasingly difficult to look after them.
Speaker 1: So they went in there and they started calling, you know,
Speaker 1: whole groups of elephants. And they found that after this
Speaker 1: had happened, after the blood had hit the ground, uh,
Speaker 1: that the the elephant families in the park UH knew
Speaker 1: not to go back there. Like they they equated that
Speaker 1: area with death and with danger. Even if that area
Speaker 1: was ended up having some very tempting vegetation, they knew that.
Speaker 1: All right, the food looks good there, but that is
Speaker 1: a place of death. That is where the humans kill us.
Speaker 1: Yet now, immediately after the calling operation UM, and this
Speaker 1: was actually after the rangers cleaned up the area and
Speaker 1: they removed all the bodies, the elephant families did come
Speaker 1: to the scene and they inspected it. They smelled the earth,
Speaker 1: and then they say they never returned to that, as
Speaker 1: you say, And so some of the ideas here are well,
Speaker 1: perhaps the screams of terror were the tip off here,
Speaker 1: and of course the smell would have been another tip off.
Speaker 1: But yeah, again, even when it was a habitable area,
Speaker 1: they never went back to it. It was as if
Speaker 1: that earth had been stained and they knew it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the earth has been stained. That's that's the uh. That's
Speaker 1: the the what really has been driven home from me
Speaker 1: as we've researched this this podcast, because in the elephant,
Speaker 1: you have a creature that is self aware, that is
Speaker 1: capable of empathy. It has a very strong argument for personhood.
Speaker 1: Like when we're talking about um giving a level of
Speaker 1: of of of rights that we ascribed to to to
Speaker 1: a human if we were to ascribe that outside of
Speaker 1: the human community, like the elephant would, uh would be
Speaker 1: a certifiable candidate for that. And yet we have treated
Speaker 1: them so harshly throughout human history and continue to treat
Speaker 1: them harshly today, even though again we have some wonderful
Speaker 1: conservation programs, some wonderful efforts out there, and there are
Speaker 1: some people who devote their lives to caring for elephants
Speaker 1: and uh and to changing the you know, the course
Speaker 1: of their fate. But UH, it's it's rough when you
Speaker 1: when you really look at what they are and how
Speaker 1: we've treated them well. And the problem, I think is
Speaker 1: that in order for for elephants to continue to exist
Speaker 1: on Earth, humans really have to change their behavior. And
Speaker 1: it's not just humans stopping poaching it. It's all tied
Speaker 1: to politics and to socioeconomics as well, and again to
Speaker 1: our a really bad habit of taking land and converting
Speaker 1: it for for uses that really, in the long run
Speaker 1: aren't going to do us any good and aren't going
Speaker 1: to do wildlife any good. Yeah, and now they're on
Speaker 1: the farmland front, there have been some efforts who use
Speaker 1: sort of like like spice compounds to treat the area
Speaker 1: around farms to keep the to keep the elephants from
Speaker 1: coming in and eating the crops. And apparently those those
Speaker 1: efforts have proven pretty successful where they've been applied. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean there, as you said, there are conservation
Speaker 1: groups that are doing a great job, and we should
Speaker 1: definitely mention them because I think that this is going
Speaker 1: to make the difference in the long run about what
Speaker 1: we can do about the situation. Yeah, and there I
Speaker 1: did need to stress they're more elephant organizations out there
Speaker 1: than we really have have time to mention here, But
Speaker 1: I just want to highlight a few that stood out
Speaker 1: to me. The first I'm going to mention because it's uh,
Speaker 1: it exists in my home state of Tennessee. The Elephants
Speaker 1: Sanctuary in Holding Wall in Tennessee. It's a sanctuary for
Speaker 1: captive elephants, you know, elephants that have been in zoos,
Speaker 1: elephants that have been in circuses, etcetera. They have seven
Speaker 1: hundred acres and they provide three separate and protected natural
Speaker 1: habitat environments for Asian and African elephants. If you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about this, you go to www. Dot
Speaker 1: elephants dot com. They have a wonderful website. You can
Speaker 1: you can see pro whiles on the individual elephants. You
Speaker 1: can adopt an elephant, you can you know, you can
Speaker 1: contribute to monetarily to help feed the various elephants. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a wonderful project. Also check out the African
Speaker 1: Wildlife Fund at a WF dot org. Check out Save
Speaker 1: the Elephants had Saved the Elephants dot org and just
Speaker 1: one Asian elephants specific organization there is Elephant Family dot org.
Speaker 1: I wanted to share two quick personal stories. Okay, I
Speaker 1: worked at a zoo once. I think we all know that. Yes,
Speaker 1: And on April Fool's Day, without fail, you would get
Speaker 1: a million phone calls and do you know what people
Speaker 1: would say that the elephants are loose? No, it would say,
Speaker 1: may I speak with Ellie and you would say Ellie who,
Speaker 1: and they would say font over and over again. The
Speaker 1: second thing is that when a while I worked there,
Speaker 1: I had a reoccurring nightmare of elephants just stampeding the
Speaker 1: entire zoo. And I think that the guy the lead
Speaker 1: singer for Aerosmith, Steven Tyler, even Tyler even showed up
Speaker 1: like like leading it, like riding one of the elephants.
Speaker 1: And that's when I kind of knew that I might
Speaker 1: be having some sort of moral crisis when it came
Speaker 1: to captivity and animals, you know, just not to to
Speaker 1: just really pound in our crimes against elephants too much.
Speaker 1: But that of course brings up another example of something
Speaker 1: horrible we've done through the elephants over the years is
Speaker 1: used them in warfare. Liken, Like, how awful is that? Like?
Speaker 1: Here is warfare? This this this particularly human creation where
Speaker 1: we have one group trying to not only compete for resources,
Speaker 1: but to outright destroy other communities. And we've enlisted other
Speaker 1: animal species in this, not only horses, but the the
Speaker 1: self aware empathic elephant. Yeah, it is really tragic and um,
Speaker 1: and I should mention because really I still am on
Speaker 1: the fence about Zeus and we could probably do an
Speaker 1: entire episode about that. It Uh, you know that the
Speaker 1: zookeepers there are absolutely passionate about those animals, and they
Speaker 1: do take a lot of the money and they put
Speaker 1: them into um species survival programs for various animals, including elephants,
Speaker 1: elephants um and some people would say that you might
Speaker 1: not even know what an elephant was unless we had
Speaker 1: zoos or many other animals. So, um, you know again
Speaker 1: on the fence about that, Yeah, it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: weird area to find yourself in because like with my
Speaker 1: own son, again, he's crazy about elephants, so how can
Speaker 1: we not take him to the zoo to see the elephants.
Speaker 1: But at the same time we we it just feels
Speaker 1: so sad to see them in such a small enclosure.
Speaker 1: But it kind of underlines the whole situation with elephants.
Speaker 1: We find ourselves in this place where we've we've already
Speaker 1: taken so much of their habitat, we've reduced their numbers,
Speaker 1: we've we've enslaved them for our own purposes, and we
Speaker 1: have to we're slowly waking up and realizing, well, what
Speaker 1: can we do to make the best of this already
Speaker 1: crappy situation. Yeah, and really I think they come to
Speaker 1: symbolize the inherent problem that humans have with animals, that
Speaker 1: complex relationship that we've talked about, particularly when we've referenced
Speaker 1: the books Some some we eat, some we love, and
Speaker 1: some we hate, and the ways that we behave toward animals.
Speaker 1: All Right, So there you have it, uh, a little
Speaker 1: insight into the world of the elephant, of the mind
Speaker 1: of the elephant, and the empathy of the elephant, and
Speaker 1: our empathy for the elephant. If you have some information
Speaker 1: you would like to share with us, you want to
Speaker 1: share an elephant story that that you know particularly resonates
Speaker 1: with you, your own experience with elephants, or what you
Speaker 1: you personally think about the any of the information we've
Speaker 1: discussed here today. You can reach out to us in
Speaker 1: a number of different ways. As always, go to stuff
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Speaker 1: dot com and uh, I think there's another way you
Speaker 1: can reach and get in touch with us as well
Speaker 1: and does not involve trumpeting and listening to the ground,
Speaker 1: although if you want to record some sort of files
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Speaker 1: you can do so, and you can include your thoughts
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