Elephants as Intelligent Creatures

Life of Male and Female Elephants

The more we learn about the elephant’s behavior, the more we realize the complexities of its social behavior. Females form a social structure the core of which is the family unit formed around the dominant female called the matriarch, her adult daughters, and their calves, and other related adult cows form her extended family members. Most immediate family groups range from five to fifteen adults. When a group gets too big, a few of the elder daughters may break off and form their own small group, but still remain in close proximity with the mother group.

Source

The life of the adult male is very different. Males leave the family unit between 12 and 15 years of age and join bachelor herds of similar bulls. The strongest in the group protect the front and rear of the herd. As he gets older, he sets out on his own for hours or days at a time. Young males spar with one another and the skills learned here come in handy when they reach a heightened state of sexual excitation called musth at 15-20 years of age. When this happens, they exit from the group and go in search of a receptive mate. He fights for dominance with other competing male members, and only the winner, usually one of the older males, mates with the females. The less dominant ones wait their turns. Musth period occurs annually and the elephants have to be in peak physical condition.

A ‘musth’ elephant: notice secretions from its temporal glands; Source

Elephants as Intelligent Creatures

Elephants are exquisitely complex, and self-aware individuals. They possess sophisticated brains and are highly intelligent. They have significant cognitive abilities and can construct an intelligent understanding of their world through an intricate interaction of experience, social learning and memory. Elephants have an interest in their own lives and the lives of their own kins as well as their human keepers.

They experience intense emotions and suffer intense anguish when they witness family members getting killed by people and when they are separated from familiar and familial surroundings.

Elephants communicate through their trunks, ears, tails and voice. Familiar elephants will greet each other by entwining their trunks, much like a handshake. They also use them while play-wrestling, caressing during courtship and mother-child interactions, and to display dominance ; a raised trunk can be a warning or threat, while a lowered trunk can be a sign of submission. Elephants can defend themselves very well by flailing their trunks at unwanted intruders or by grasping and flinging them.

The trunk of an elephant has developed a high sense of smell. By raising the trunk up in the air and swinging it from side to side, it can locate friends, enemies, and food sources.

Elephants greet their friends with quiet rumbling or purring. When lost, calves bellow loudly for their mothers and when in danger, they trumpet.

Elephants communicate over great distances using low-frequency infrasound that are inaudible to humans. The low-frequency calls also generate powerful vibrations in the ground – seismic signals that elephants can feel, and even interpret, via their sensitive trunks and feet. This comes in handy when locating lost herd members or issuing a distress call or alerting bulls about the availability of a female to mate with. There are chemical cues too that aid communication. Pheromones secreted by the temporal gland and urine can travel great distances and pass on message such as the health and reproductive status.

When the terrible tsunami struck coastal regions of Asia in 2004, it was reported that trained elephants in Thailand had become agitated and fled to higher grounds before the devastating wave struck. They were responding to low-frequency sound waves generated by the tsunami.

Social Structure of Elephants

The following heart-warming video shows a marvellous example of the cognitive behavior of elephants. It shows how a baby elephants slips into a muddy stream of water and is pulled out with the joint efforts of several elephants. Notice elephants trumpeting in alarm and how their tails are held high indicating that their agitated minds.

Elephants Facing Extinction?

Elephants have no natural predators. Their worst enemy is man. Experts warn that elephants may become extinct in a decade or so because of poaching. The subsequent series of articles would examine how the elephants are captured and trained and detail the man-elephant conflict that threaten elephants’ survival.

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Elephants in Indian Culture