Elephantism

I stumbled across this article on elephant society in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's fascinating and wrenching.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it.

And there's plenty of harm, from barbarism like ivory poaching to well-intentioned conservation measures like herd relocation. All in all, elephant society is being destroyed, which is in turn leading to an upsurge of violence - war, really - by elephants on each other, on rhinoceroses, and of course on humans. Only the full piece can do justice to the horrible situation, or to the slim possibility that humans can rectify it.