Elephants Can Help Us To Be More Human
Elephants have always been vegetarian and seem to have evolved into a matriarchal society a very long time ago. They had a longer time to figure out that you probably should have a female in charge of the herd (a million years before humans showed up on the planet). They males are encouraged to show up once a year to mate, otherwise they wander, mostly, on their own. (BTW, a leading elephant researcher from Cornell University, who has spent over 25 years studying one herd of elephants in a clearing has learned that the females prefer older male elephants to mate with because they believe in a courtship process whereas the younger males just want to get it over with. LOL).
The most intriguing part of elephants is that the female herds are a very close and loving society, and they are mostly very supportive of each other. When a female gives birth there is literally a celebration by the herd for both the baby and the mother. They are excited to welcome the new little one and they congratulate the new mom. It’s very fun observe.
It doesn’t stop there, the females in the herd all take responsibility of raising all the calves together. And it’s not just a casual keeping their eye on the young, they take time to teach the young things each ‘auntie’ knows about socializing within the herd, how to source food and why play among the young is encouraged as a way of learning. (Something about it takes a village to raise a child comes to mind…) There is some research that shows the more females in a herd the longer the calves raised by that herd survive in adulthood because each female has unique knowledge of survival to pass on to each calf.
The normally peaceful elephants a fierce in protecting their young. Lions are a natural predator of elephants. They prefer to find a calf who is lagging behind the herd. When a herd becomes aware of lions in the vicinity they form a circle with calves in the center and the matriarchs facing outwards. The female African elephants have tusks and they make a formidable foe to the lions and the more females present makes the lions fearful of an attack because these elephants can easily kill a lion.
In the west, we’ve mostly traded our sense of community for all the things our ‘wealth’ provides…independence, distance and electronic socialization around the world instead of reaching out to the people who live next door or down the block…maybe the elephants peaceful and loving sense of close community embarrasses us which is why we continue to do so little to end the slaughter of elephants around the world….
